Tesla Roadster requires up to 6 hours to refill its nitrogen tank for just one five-second launch and this is how much that costs

Tesla has revealed a few technical points about the Roadster and those details are quite juicy.

Specifically, he talked about what’s required – both in terms of time and money – to fill up the compressed nitrogen tank that powers the cold-gas thrusters.

And yes, it takes longer than you think, and it is more expensive than you think.

But there’s a silver lining.

Six hours of work for five seconds

YouTuber RyanShawTech broke down the technical aspect of the cold-gas thrusters that power the Tesla Roadster and it’s even more complicated and expensive than we thought.

Tesla’s team told Top Gear that the system isn’t finished.

The system uses a 200-liter tank of nitrogen at up to 10,000psi.

Tesla’s engineering team said they’re working on a new system, which is the silver lining, but it’s not fully developed yet.

Lars Moravy, Tesla’s VP of Vehicle Engineering, told Top Gear: “Current fill times are like two to six hours. We’re hoping to get down to under a half hour.”

But that’s not even the worst part.

The expensive part is getting it up to that pressure.

Even top-rated systems top out at 6,000psi, which means you need a booster, and that costs up to $10,000.

This is further proof that Roadster is mostly a halo vehicle

Right after the event, several online commentators, reservation holders, and YouTubers began facing reality: this is a halo product.

Tesla probably doesn’t expect – or want – to sell this to the masses, and it doesn’t really care how well it performs commercially.

Tesla has clearly pivoted toward autonomy and robotics – Musk himself said this will be the last ‘manually-driven’ Tesla you can buy – and so production cars are no longer a priority.

And while the ‘base’ Roadster is indeed just a very expensive, high-performance vehicle, the Thrust (probably) and Rocket (definitely) variants use tech that’s not street-legal, and likely won’t be.

There are three variants, and only one is definitely road-legal

There are three variants of the Roadster: Performance, Thrust, and Rocket.

Performance is the only one that’s definitely street-legal, and it has two seats.

Thrust comes with a rear cold-gas thrusters, a sub-1 second 0-60mph time, and two seats.

It’s unclear whether this’ll be street-legal.

The Rocket variant only has one seat, rear and perimeter cold-gas thrusters, and it is capable of ‘flying’.

This one will definitely not be street-legal.

Price-wise, the MSRP hasn’t been revealed, but we do know that the Performance model requires a $50,000 deposit, the Thrust requires a $250,000 deposit, and the Rocket is invite-only.