Boy, nobody saw this coming.
When we talk about the world's fastest cars, a couple of names come to mind: Bugatti, Koenigsegg and the McLaren. Now, you can throw another name into the hat: Tesla.Yep, the same Tesla that produces electric cars.
Last Friday, the company's founder and CEO Elon Musk surprised the world when he announced the brand new Tesla Roadster in a glitzy event.
What was more surprising than the shock announcement -- it was an event to unveil a fleet of electric trucks -- was the fact that Musk boasted the new Roadster would be the "fastest production car ever made".
The Roadster, which is an updated version of Tesla's first ever production vehicle, is reportedly capable of doing 0-100km/h in just 1.9 seconds - making it the first car in history to break the two-second mark.
According to Musk, the Roadster's 0-160km/h time is 4.2 seconds and it can complete a quarter mile in just 8.9 seconds.
The top speed was kept hush-hush, but Musk claimed that it would be "more than 250mp/h (400km/h). That's an insane number.
For the sake of comparison, the Henessey Venom GT (currently the world's fastest road-legal hypercar) has a 0-100km/h time of 2.7 seconds, 0-160km/h in 5.6 seconds and a quarter mile time of 9.92 seconds.
The new Roadster is powered by a 200 kilowatt hour battery pack, which, according to Tesla, has a can go a record 1,000km on a single charge.The Tesla Roadster will reportedly begin production in 2020.
Now, here comes the most important question: how much is this monster going to cost you?
Well, the base model starts at USD200,000 (RM828,700 exclusive of tax, of course) and you need to pay a downpayment of USD50,000 (RM207,150) to secure a unit.
If you have that kind of money lying around, pre-order is now open.
That's not the end of the story though: according to Musk, the Roadster has a built-in special mode that lets the hypercar go even faster!
The billionaire broke the news via his official Twitter account over the weekend:
Not saying the next gen Roadster special upgrade package *will* definitely enable it to fly short hops, but maybe …
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 19, 2017
Certainly possible. Just a question of safety. Rocket tech applied to a car opens up revolutionary possibilities.
We don't know about you, but what would you do with that much speed?
However, we know Tesla is certainly possible of doing that, because the company's Model S P90D sedan - released back in 2015 - comes with a 'Ludicrous Mode' which allows the car to accelerate from 0-100km/h in just 2.8 seconds.
Check out the view from the Roadster cockpit in this video:
BRB, gonna cancel our order of the Bugatti Chiron and dumping all our money into the Tesla Roadster instead.