Credit: Petersen Automotive Museum
Tesla’s next-generation Roadster is heading to Los Angeles, where the Petersen Automotive Museum will show it in its main lobby from Saturday, October 24, to Tuesday, October 27, according to the museum’s listing for the car. The Petersen says it’s the same Roadster that shared the stage with Elon Musk and the Tesla team at the unveiling in McGregor, Texas, on October 14.
The museum is calling it a limited four-day appearance and says this is the first time the public will be able to see the car up close. Its listing describes a vehicle that shows how Tesla “challenged the limits of design, engineering and physics,” and files it simply as a 2026 Tesla Roadster on display in the lobby.
Anyone who watched the reveal will remember why people want a closer look. Tesla unveiled the Roadster in Performance, Thrust and Rocket configurations, with the top Rocket version using cold-gas thrusters that Tesla says let it fly. The company quotes 0 to 60 mph in under 1.6 seconds for the Performance car, under 0.9 seconds for the Thrust and under 0.59 seconds for the Rocket, along with more than 300 miles (483 km) of range.
Skeptics have mostly focused on the flying part since then. Tesla’s vehicle engineering chief Lars Moravy pushed back this week, saying the thrusters produce more than three times the force needed to lift the car, even at a deliberately heavy weight. Whether the lobby car shows off any of that hardware isn’t clear from the museum’s listing.
This won’t be the first Roadster at the Petersen on Wilshire Boulevard. The museum’s Inside Tesla exhibit, which opened in the fall of 2022, displayed the original and the earlier next-gen Roadster prototype alongside Cybertruck, Optimus and the rest of the lineup before it closed on March 31, 2024.
For fans in Southern California, a weekend trip to the museum is probably the easiest way to see the car in person before deliveries. Would you make the drive to LA to see the new Roadster up close?
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