Remember the original Tesla Roadster, the one built between 2008-2012? The one based on the Lotus Elise? Back then Tesla was a mere corporate spring chicken. The Roadster was kind of like a proof of concept, a pathway that enabled Tesla to advance to its current status to become the best-selling electric car brand in the world. Tesla sold around 2,450 Roadsters and when production ended in 2012 Elon Musk said that a successor was scheduled for release in 2014. Nearly 10 years later and the Roadster 2.0 is nowhere to be seen. So has Tesla beached the Roadster for good?

No is the immediate answer.

Interest surged in 2017 when Tesla revealed the second-generation Roadster to much fanfare. It will have over 600 miles of range, reach a top speed of 250mph, cover 0-62mph in 1.6 seconds and will incorporate small rockets to act as a kind of combustion turbo-charger. However, Tesla is much more focused on growing into a manufacturer of mass cars, a car built in limited quantities isn’t the main focus right now.

But that doesn’t mean to say Tesla has dumped the Roadster in a development ditch. Work still continues as revealed by the company’s Chief Designer Franz Von Holzhausen. During a recent media briefing, Von Holzhausen revealed that the Roadster will be much more than an “extrapolation” of the Model S Plaid.

“If you think about it, a Plaid Model S, it basically hits all the metrics that we said the Roadster could do, which seemed impossible for a car at that time. So imagine. Let your imagination run a little bit.”

“I think if you can just extrapolate the performance and the usability of a Plaid Model S, and you can imagine where that could go, then I think your imagination takes you where we’re headed as well, in the capability and how much better the Roadster will be and the weight will be absolutely worth it. “

“We’re developing the car. I think you know we have priorities as a company, and the priorities are mass electrification. And Roadster is not a mass product. So unfortunately, you know it takes its kind of position, but we are working on it in earnest. And I think the time that we’ve taken has enabled us to really improve on basically every metric that we set out to establish when we first debuted that car.”