The original Tesla Roadster is almost certainly getting an upgrade sometime next year, and it’s probably going to be the hottest thing at the dealership. Nobody knows what the 2019 Roadster will look like, but on Saturday, one designer uploaded a concept design that shows what we might expect from Elon Musk’s future supercar.
“Musk is a visionary person, way ahead of the industry, and it fascinates me a lot to see what’s next on his agenda,” Jan Peisert, a web designer based in Düsseldorf in Germany, tells Inverse.
Piesert regularly creates car concepts for his YouTube channel based on news reports he’s read. On his Twitter page last month, Musk said that the new Roadster will be the company’s fastest vehicle. The current record holder, the Model S P100D, achieved 0-60mph at a staggering 2.28 seconds in February while running in Ludicrous Plus mode, making it the world’s fastest production car.
The original Roadster, released in 2008, was company’s first commercially available vehicle. It was a stunning sight to behold, but as the years went by, though, the Model S and Model X made the electric car’s internal systems look decidedly ancient. The Roadster lacks the semi-autonomous Autopilot system for starters, a gap that’s only going to get worse when Tesla enables fully autonomous driving on its more recent models. Musk stated in 2015 that a next-generation Roadster would debut in 2019.
Musk’s statement sparked Peisert’s imagination, so he decided to create something that looked like a future-facing Roadster: a clean design with almost no air intakes, suicide butterfly doors that pivot upward on their rear attachment, and cues taken from the upcoming entry-level Model 3 vehicle.
“Once I gathered all information I can find, I’m looking for a good base model, with dimensions and proportions that would fit the image in my head,” Peisert says. “In this case, I was quite happy with the Toyota FT-1 concept.”
All in all, the concept took around four hours to produce. Peisert improvised in parts along the way and tried to stick with what may be technically feasible, but he’s under no illusions that his concept is quite extravagant. The long hood, for example, would be great for large amounts of front trunk (known as “frunk”) storage, but if Musk is aiming for high performance, it might be impractical.
“I would love to see the doors in production, but I guess this is a step too far,” Peisert says.
Watch a timelapse of Peisert’s creative process here:
