That Banana at the Tesla Roadster Reveal Was a Stopwatch

Image: Tesla

The banana seen at the Tesla Roadster reveal was a stopwatch. That’s according to Zack Pittman on X, who posted Saturday night that it was an “analog stopwatch” and that a laser dropped it the instant the car’s tires started to roll. Pittman runs CINELIVE, the Dallas production company that, by his own account, designed and broadcast the reveal show for Tesla and SpaceX. He followed the post with a thread explaining how the stunt worked.

In the replies, Pittman says the banana hung on fishing line above the left edge of the opening, with a laser sensor watching the rear tire. When the tire turned, the line released and the banana started to fall. He says the height was set to one second of fall time, which on that run happened to match the car’s 0 to 60 time, and that nothing measured the drop at the bottom. “Gravity was the timer,” he wrote.

Pittman points to the free-fall formula, h = ½gt². By our math, not his, one second of free fall works out to about 4.9 meters, or roughly 16 feet. He says the banana hit the ground at the same moment the car broke through the laser wall, in one take. He then wrote that live, “we broke that record and hit 0.81 seconds.” That’s his account, and we haven’t been able to verify the setup or the timing independently.

Tesla showed the Roadster on Oct. 15 at SpaceX’s rocket test site near McGregor, Texas. As we covered in our reveal story, Tesla posted a one-second clip of a Roadster going from 0 to 60 mph in 0.81 seconds. Tesla didn’t say which version made the run, and its stated targets for the three versions are still just that, targets.

The Roadster has stayed in the news since. Sawyer Merritt’s UI videos gave a close look at the touchscreen, and Elon Musk has teased a wild looping track at Tesla’s Texas headquarters for Roadster owners.

Did you notice the banana during the reveal?