SAN FRANCISCO — Tesla unveiled a redesigned Roadster equipped with rocket-style thrusters on Thursday and said production would begin in 2028, more than a decade after the electric-car maker first showed a next-generation version of its sports car.

The white two-seater, developed in collaboration with SpaceX, the rocket company led by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, drove upside down along a ramp using a suction system, rotated in midair and landed on its built-in thrusters. Later in the presentation, the car used its thrusters to jump over a truck and several other vehicles, twisting in the air during the maneuver.

The reveal gives Tesla a showpiece car after years of missed Roadster deadlines, but it arrives as the company shifts its focus toward self-driving technology and robotics, and just days before third-quarter results that analysts say matter more to investors.

Some watchers saw the collaboration as Mr. Musk drumming up interest in a merger of the two large companies he controls, an idea he has explored by discussing their overlap.

“It was an engineering flex with no commercial value beyond embarrassing traditional car makers,” Gene Munster, managing partner at Tesla investor Deepwater Asset Management, said on social media platform X. “The Roadster event is the latest example of why Elon can’t wait to bring (Tesla) and (SpaceX) together.”

Mr. Musk has played down the car’s importance to Tesla’s finances, describing it in 2023 as a “small potato situation” that would not “move the needle in a major way financially.” The vehicle nonetheless carries symbolic weight.

“Tesla does not currently have a halo car, or high-performance luxury vehicle designed to showcase an automaker’s best engineering and technology. The Roadster will be Tesla’s new halo car,” Morningstar analyst Seth Goldstein said in a note last month. Halo models are a long-standing automotive playbook: low-volume flagships — think Chevrolet’s Corvette or Acura’s NSX — that carmakers use to display engineering prowess and burnish brand appeal across the rest of the lineup.

Viewers and witnesses praised the launch spectacle. “That was the most insane product demo I’ve ever seen,” Tesla fan and investor Sawyer Merritt posted on X. “I just saw this in person, and I’m still asking how this wasn’t AI.”

Pricing Left Unspecified

Mr. Musk and other executives did not name a target price at Thursday’s event, although Tesla quoted a $200,000 base price for the vehicle nearly a decade ago. The company’s Roadster reservation page after the event listed a “Performance” version requiring a $50,000 deposit and a “Thrust” version with “acceleration thrusters” requiring a $250,000 deposit. A “Rocket” variant, which Tesla says is “invite only,” is described as a single-seat model with a “full flight system.”

‘Halfway to the Speed of Sound’

Held at a SpaceX test site in McGregor, Texas, the event had all the elements of a classic Musk product reveal: dramatic music, smoke, mechanical hissing sounds and a launch countdown.

“This is the culmination of incredible work by Tesla and SpaceX engineers working closely together to make something that you haven’t seen in any movie,” Mr. Musk, wearing a silver Western-style belt buckle emblazoned with the Tesla logo, told a cheering crowd of enthusiasts and investors.

Tesla vehicle engineering chief Lars Moravy said the Roadster can accelerate from zero to 60 mph (97 kph) in less than one second and reach a top speed of more than 230 mph (370 kph).

“Definitely much faster than that,” an excited Mr. Musk said. “I think you’ve got to crack halfway to the speed of sound.”

If delivered, those figures would put the Roadster in a performance tier otherwise occupied by low-volume electric hypercars such as Rimac’s Nevera, which have set recent acceleration benchmarks among production cars.

The car can also travel more than 300 miles (480 km) on a single charge — less than half of what Mr. Musk promised in 2017, when Tesla first revealed a prototype of the second-generation Roadster and said deliveries would begin in 2020, a timeline that has now slipped by eight years to the 2028 production start.

The original Roadster, released in 2008 and on sale until 2012, was Tesla’s first-ever electric vehicle and used a Lotus Elise chassis, helping change the world’s view of what an EV could be. The company has since been known for its Model Y and Model X SUVs and Model S and Model 3 sedans.

The second-generation Roadster’s debut comes amid a sharp shift in Tesla’s focus toward artificial intelligence-led self-driving technology and robotics, away from building cars for human drivers. This year, Tesla stopped selling Model S and X vehicles to make space for production of its Optimus humanoid robots, and launched Cybercab, a two-seater robotaxi without manual controls such as a steering wheel, pedals and mirrors.

Tesla is set to report third-quarter results on October 21. Sales of the company’s aging lineup of EVs have declined over the past two years, although high gas prices helped boost deliveries in the quarter.

“The margin and cash flow numbers will carry far more weight with investors than anything they saw at the reveal,” said Josh Gilbert, lead analyst for Asia-Pacific at trading platform eToro.

— Reuters