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Tesla’s original electric car is reborn as a thruster-equipped speed demon, but it won’t go to production until 2028

After nine years, potentially millions of dollars in deposits and considerable hype, the Tesla Roadster is finally ready to launch—which it did.

The electric automaker on Thursday unveiled its second-generation sports car with a flourish of engineering prowess. Using SpaceX rocket technology, the angular sports car climbed a curved ramp and hurled itself to a controlled landing. Later, it leapt over five other Tesla vehicles while twisting in the air.

The demonstration was held before a crowd of Tesla enthusiasts—some of whom paid $250,000 to reserve the car nine years ago—at a SpaceX rocket test site facility in McGregor, Texas.

Flanked onstage by his top executives for design and engineering, Chief Executive Elon Musk claimed the Roadster would eventually be the “only manually driven car that Tesla makes” amid a pivot to autonomous driving and robotics.

But customers who put down hefty deposits nearly a decade ago will still have to wait a bit longer for the Roadster. Musk said the car enters production in 2028. “Actually, for real,” he said.

Some key details were missing, however. At the event, onlookers shouted to Musk, asking for a price tag, but their cries went unanswered.

Musk also demurred when asked how it might be street legal. “Yeah, depends on your street, but it’ll be a viable car,” he said.

Still, the Roadster’s debut had the air of an outdoor concert, complete with fog and red laser lights as content creators flanked a main stage. In the background: the towering, backward-curving ramp structure not unlike a skateboard halfpipe, which the car launched up before coming back down and going back up again.

To do so, Tesla engineering VP Lars Moravy said the Roadster uses “a fan suction system” underneath to increase grip and downforce. Not long after that, the Roadster jumped through the air—as Musk long promised—using a pair of compressed-air thrusters.

With the thrusters engaged, Tesla claims the Roadster can go from a stop to 60 miles an hour in about one second. Executives boasted a top speed of over 230 miles an hour.

Thursday’s event in Texas was actually a reboot of sorts for the Roadster.

Tesla showed off a prototype of the car in November 2017 and started taking deposits of $50,000—or $250,000 for a limited “Founders Series” model—from customers who wanted to get in line to buy one.

The Roadster was slated to start production in 2020, but the plan never materialized.

The Roadster presented on Thursday looked much different than what was unveiled in 2017. It now features sharp angles, not unlike the polarizing Cybertruck, in contrast to the sleek, curvaceous sports car that the company teased for so long.

Tesla’s moving forward with the long-planned sports car represents a slight rekindling of its core auto business. In recent years, the company has put driver-operated cars on the back burner in favor of advancing autonomous vehicles and robotics.

Moravy called the Roadster the world’s first flying car and “the last best driver’s car.”

The car is a sequel to the original Tesla Roadster, the automaker’s first vehicle, released in 2008. That Roadster—an extensively modified Lotus sports car powered by batteries—proved Tesla’s thesis that electric cars could be fun and desirable, and helped propel the company to making more mainstream vehicles.

Whatever the final price, the Roadster should compete in the upper echelon of luxury and performance cars alongside Porsche, Lamborghini and Ferrari.

In volume, it isn’t expected to be a significant contributor to the company’s overall car sales, but it could make a meaningful dent in the company’s top line revenue, according to a note Thursday from Battle Road Research, an independent firm.

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Nineteen people injured in accident on French side of Channel Tunnel

Two airlifted to hospital after bus collides with train at Coquelles

Nineteen people were injured in France on Thursday night when a bus collided with a train it was about to board to travel through the Channel Tunnel.

The prefecture of Pas-de-Calais said two of the bus passengers, who were lorry drivers whose vehicles were making the journey from France to the UK, were airlifted to hospital in Lille. Neither had life-threatening injuries, it added.

The collision occurred at 7.30pm local time along a departure platform for a Le Shuttle train. It was the first accident of its kind at the busy terminal in Coquelles, near the entry point to the Channel Tunnel, Agathe Cury, a local official, told reporters.

When lorries travel through the tunnel on Le Shuttle, their drivers go through separately in a bus. The driver of the bus involved in the accident was an employee of Getlink, operator of Le Shuttle.

Dozens of firefighters and police were sent to the scene, resulting in a roughly 90-minute service interruption, Cury said.

No information was disclosed about how or why the bus collided with the train. A police investigation has been opened, the public prosecutor of Boulogne-sur-Mer told Agence-France Presse.

Three rail services operate through the Channel Tunnel: Eurostar passenger trains, Le Shuttle, which transports vehicles, and freight trains which move goods.

Getlink declined to comment. Eurostar said in a statement that the incident “does not involve or impact Eurostar trains running from and to London. All Eurostar trains will run as expected”.

Roughly 50km long, the Channel Tunnel has connected Coquelles near Calais to Folkestone in the UK since 1994.

Le Shuttle involves roughly 400 trains operating a drive-on, drive-off rail ferry each day for vehicles, according to Getlink.

Last year, some 6,100 passenger cars and 3,100 heavy vehicles made the crossing daily.

Even for battle-hardened CEOs, this latest crisis is a chance for some helpful new thinking

Airline bosses are used to crises. As an industry with many moving parts, aviation often involves coping with several at the same time. High fuel prices are proving themselves to be a particularly intractable problem, however. And it adds new frisson to an old industry question: to hedge or not?

Jet fuel, like its fellow oil distillate diesel, is becoming more of a problem the longer conflict in the Middle East drags on. Spot prices surged when the US began bombing Iran in late February and have remained painfully high ever since. But the steady rise in recent months of rates for future delivery — implying traders expect prices to remain elevated for longer — is what is causing airlines to re-examine their 2027 strategies.

Southwest, American Airlines, easyJet and Lufthansa are among those who have responded to tough times by making cuts to their winter schedules. Both the Europeans are also moving up plans to retire older aircraft. US giant Delta last week cut its December profit forecasts and said soaring fuel prices would add $6bn to its full-year costs.

But this cost shock doesn’t hit everyone the same way. Big US airlines don’t hedge fuel costs, accepting the swing in their profits. American Airlines said recently that a $1 dollar per gallon rise to the fuel price assumed in July had added $1bn to its fourth-quarter costs. A year ago, analysts expected American would produce $1.6bn of earnings in 2027, according to LSEG estimates; now, they are forecasting just $720mn.

Even European carriers, who mostly do hedge, have not fully offset their surging costs. And as the protection they do have comes up for renewal, they face a quandary: go without and risk paying even higher market prices, or buy hedges, with the danger of getting stuck with costly fuel if they fall.

Past examples of hedges going painfully wrong suggest leaving things to fate. Several carriers were caught out in 2014 when crude prices tumbled by two-thirds in six months. Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific lost $2.2bn on derivatives over the next two years — more than its previous four years’ earnings. The same episode cost Delta $3.5bn and ended its hedging program all together. 

Hedges haven’t separated the share performance of the haves and have-nots, either. Delta, up 11 per cent since the US began bombing Iran, has outperformed the European and US pack without protection, while British Airways owner IAG, 70 per cent hedged for the rest of 2026, is down 3 per cent and only just ahead of United and American. Ryanair’s 80 per cent hedge through March 2027 at less than half the spot fuel price hasn’t stopped its shares sliding a quarter.

There is a strong case, then, to give hedging the heave-ho. True, it would introduce new volatility for some. But it would also simplify the investment story for European airlines, allowing stockpickers to focus on their relative operational skills and ability to lure customers, rather than their knack for financial wizardry. Even for battle-hardened CEOs, this latest crisis is a chance for some helpful new thinking.

Ministers pledged the 25km-long sewer would mitigate health risks, encourage recreational river use and restore wildlife

When London’s new £5bn Thames Tideway Tunnel “super sewer” got the go-ahead more than a decade ago, the project was sold as an environmental renaissance for the capital’s main river artery.

Ministers pledged that the tunnel would encourage greater recreational use of the River Thames, mitigate public health risks and restore wildlife to its turbid brown waters.

Yet although the 25km sewer has diverted 22 million tonnes of sewage away from the central section of the river since it first started operating two years ago, there is no firm evidence that the water quality has significantly improved.

Campaigners have argued the limited official data raises questions over whether the Thames Tideway represents value for money, especially at a time when regulator Ofwat is using it as a model for billions of pounds of new water infrastructure projects.

A report this week by Thames Water, which took operational control of the tunnel in August, stated that it had reduced spills by 86 per cent, prevented 84 tonnes of sewage-derived litter from going into the river and reduced the days of “increased health risk” from combined sewage overflows from 269 in 2023 to 38 in 2025.

But Thames Water also admitted it had not carried out any bacterial or pathogen testing since the sewer became fully operational in February 2025, and said it would be offering “no guidance” as to whether that part of the river was safe for recreational use.

Meanwhile, a long-awaited environmental impact report from Tideway, the independent consortium that built and owns the super sewer, has been postponed.

In the absence of official monitoring, the Fulham Reach Boat Club, based within the tunnel’s catchment area, is doing its own water testing.

Relying on the same equipment used to monitor the Seine ahead of the 2024 Paris Olympics, the club’s testing has found “no clear and convincing improvement in E. coli levels”, a bacteria that can cause severe illness, since the super sewer began operating.

The club’s weekly data found that 62.5 per cent of samples taken between February 2025 and October 2026 contained E. coli levels exceeding 1,000 coliform unit equivalents per 100ml, a threshold classifying the water as a human health risk.

Adam Freeman-Pask, chief executive of Fulham Reach Boat Club, called the results a “depressing read for river users, especially given the expense of the project”.

Tideway argued that assessing water quality trends required multiyear datasets, and that a single year of observation “would not provide a sufficiently robust picture”.

“The Thames is a complex tidal river, and water quality is influenced by a range of factors beyond the combined sewer overflows that Tideway was designed to address,” it added.

“Individual E. coli readings can fluctuate depending on location, rainfall, tides and other inputs. These readings cannot, in isolation, provide a complete picture of the tunnel’s impact.”

Independent experts said the persistent high bacterial levels probably stemmed from untreated sewage discharging further upstream or entering via contaminated tributaries including the Lee and Wandle.

While the super sewer is designed to capture 90 per cent of effluent from 36 combined sewage overflows in the central section, there are a further 21 that continue to discharge into that part of the river.

Furthermore, because this stretch of the Thames is tidal, pollutants wash back and forth twice daily.

Amy Fairman, head of campaigns at environmental charity River Action, called the independent pollution figures “deeply shocking” and demanded that Tideway publish its internal data in full.

“The public deserves to know, given they are paying for this tunnel through their water bills, that it is actually delivering improvements,” Fairman said. 

The findings will also concern London Mayor Lord Sadiq Khan, who launched a 10-year plan in July to restore the Thames’s wildlife habitats and improve river health.

There is a chance that results will get better over time. Leon Barron, professor of environmental science at Imperial College London, said water quality metrics could lag and needed to be taken over multiple seasons and years to get an accurate reading.

But the slow pace of improvement will resurface an old debate that questioned the suitability of Thames Tideway, initially conceived by the government and Thames Water after the UK was found in 2012 to have breached the European wastewater directive and was facing multimillion-pound fines.

Environmental experts at the time argued that improvements to the existing sewage infrastructure, including upgrades to overloaded treatment plants, would be cheaper and more effective, while Sir Ian Byatt, a former chief executive of regulator Ofwat, also opposed the project, including the decision to keep it off Thames Water’s balance sheet.

Instead, the super sewer is owned and maintained by Tideway, an independent utility set up specifically for the project, whose shareholders include Allianz, Dalmore Capital and Amber Infrastructure.

Although Thames Water has operational control, Tideway retains its own corporate board, staff and management structure alongside maintenance responsibilities, which include using drones to check for any cracks in the tunnel.

Thames Water is struggling under £20bn of debt and fighting off renationalisation, while Tideway has amassed £5bn in debt — including shareholder loans — since construction started in 2015, paid for via a surcharge on the bills of Thames Water customers — currently £33 a year. Tideway has a licence to receive payments from customers throughout the 120-year lifespan of the tunnel.

According to Tideway’s annual report, Thames Water’s 16mn customers paid £129mn towards the project in the 2025-26 financial year, bringing total customer contributions since 2015 to £746mn — outstripping total equity injections from shareholders.

Investor returns paid in lieu of dividends rose to £65mn for the year ending 31 March 2026, up from £26mn the prior year.

Ian McNuff, a water campaigner and a previous adviser to private equity firm Star Capital, said it was unacceptable that Londoners were forced to rely on community groups for information on water quality.

“Given that Thames Water’s customers have already paid such a huge amount for this sewer, it seems wholly unprofessional that we should have to rely on a local community boat club to measure the impact of the tunnel,” he added.

The Environment Agency has been approached for comment.