Marques Brownlee shares his honest reaction to the new Tesla Roadster after he canceled his $50K deposit due to 8-year wait

Tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee recently canceled one of his Tesla Roadster reservations, and now that the car is finally here he had a few things to say.

In Brownlee’s view, we are probably misinterpreting what this new vehicle actually represents.

He does have a point.

Especially because he was one of the first people to spot something quite interesting in the fine print.

Brownlee actually had two Tesla Roadster reservations

At one point, Marques Brownlee actually had two Tesla Roadster reservations in his account.

The first reservation was easy to explain: he made it.

He forked out the required $50,000 and signed up to buy a Roadster.

The second one was a byproduct of being a popular YouTuber who’s owned Teslas before.

He apparently accrued enough referrals to convert those points into a Roadster reservation.

After a long time, like many others, Brownlee gave up and decided to cancel his initial reservation – the one he paid for without referrals – while keeping the second one.

“To their credit, the referral reward free Roadster is still in my account and with the updated picture. So, I guess maybe that is still happening. Maybe I’m still getting it. I don’t know,” he explained in the video.

By the way, Brownlee was also one of the first people to point out that the fine print clearly states that the reservation agreement does not guarantee a final vehicle delivery date, exact features, or a locked-in purchase price.

But then he also explained why he thinks the new Roadster is not what we think it might be.

He believes this may mostly be a marketing opportunity

In Brownlee’s view, as Tesla pivots to AI and robotics, low-volume cars are simply not that important.

Let’s leave the Semi truck and Cybercab out of the conversation for a second, if we look at the lineup, there are only two production models: Model Y and Model 3.

Even the Model S and Model X were phased out, and yes, there is the Cybertruck, but that’s only available in North America.

This, in Brownlee’s opinion, leads us to a conclusion.

“[The Roadster] doesn’t make a difference to the company if it comes out or not. It makes no difference to their bottom line. It’s so low-volume. They have priorities, like Model Y and Model 3, and humanoid robots,” he said.

He also added that this was mostly a marketing opportunity to showcase some pretty serious engineering.

“But this event was clearly a successful engineering exercise and marketing stunt. A few months of incredible engineering, a demo that no one has ever seen before. That’s enough material to talk about Tesla for another few years,” Marques Brownlee concluded.

This is indeed a totally different vehicle

Just like the Roadster, the Cybertruck also came out a lot later than expected.

However, when the final production model was introduced, it looked just like the original concept, and it more or less did what they said it would do.

That’s not the case with the new Roadster.

Back in 2017, we knew about the blistering 0–60 time, but there was no mention yet of cold-gas thrusters or active suction ground-effects.

As for the cold-gas thrusters, they were mentioned a few years later and, at first, most people thought Tesla was joking.

Clearly, they weren’t.

As for ground-effect technology, that’s completely new.

Even the styling is new.

And Brownlee is right: we are going to be talking about this for years to come.

At the very least, we’ll talk about through 2028, when the first Roadster is scheduled to be delivered.