Tavarish on Tesla Roadster vs. Porsche Mission S: the Roadster is a spectacle for clicks, the Mission S is a driver's car

Tesla Roadster vs. Porsche Mission S

Tavarish, the automotive YouTuber known for exotic car rebuilds, is unimpressed by the Tesla Roadster and enthusiastic about the Porsche Mission S — and his reasoning cuts to something real about what separates a spectacle from a driver's car.

The Roadster

The Roadster launch was built for clicks, not car buyers. The barrel rolls, the kickflips, the rockets — none of it is going to production, and Tavarish doesn't pretend otherwise. His practical objection is more pointed: even if you could track the car, you'd destroy tires in a single lap and get banned from most circuits for driving like that. The lap times teased at the reveal don't matter because it's not a production car, and the event was designed for people who don't think in those terms anyway.

The design gets similar treatment — a low-res Lamborghini Murciélago at the front, a new Dodge Charger at the back, looking like a render that shipped before it finished loading.

The Cybertruck sidebar is telling. Tavarish and the other speakers agree the Cybertruck is genuinely interesting when it's driving itself — smooth, intuitive, technically impressive — but miserable to pilot manually. The steer-by-wire calibration is so foreign that getting out of a parking lot for the first time is "a time." That tension between impressive tech and poor human-driving experience runs through both vehicles.

“The Tesla Roadster, everybody's going crazy over it. I don't care, man. Like, honestly, it's a cool showcase of stuff they can do. But the reality of putting one of these cars into production where it can do a barrel roll or a kickflip over a truck — first of all, there's no practical use for it. And second of all, that's never gonna make it to production.”

The Mission S

The Porsche Mission S lands differently. Tavarish traces the engineering credibility back to the 918 Spyder, which managed to make regen braking feel like a real brake pedal — a calibration problem that took years to solve, and one that Chris Harris publicly criticized in early drives. That tuning philosophy, he argues, trickles down through Porsche's entire lineup and into Audi platforms. Whatever the Mission S turns out to be, it inherits that institutional competence.

The engine remains unconfirmed. Tavarish spots a redline around 7,000–7,500 rpm in the gauge cluster and speculates it could be related to the 4.6-liter twin-turbo V8 from the 963 LMDh racer, though he flags that the rev limit feels low for a Porsche flagship. A flat-eight has been teased but not confirmed. He's watching closely.

Positioning matters here too. This isn't a 918 successor — it's a step above the 911, making it immediately the most compelling new car in roughly the $600,000–$1,000,000 range, with GT variants and further derivatives likely to push it higher. MSRP is almost academic given Porsche's history; GT3s listed at $160,000 don't sell anywhere near that.

The deeper argument is that the Mission S is the automotive industry's first coherent response to its current crisis. Rather than chasing Tesla and Chinese manufacturers on tech, Porsche listened to customers — physical key, fewer screens, active but restrained aero — and built a driver's car. The innovation, such as it is, came from removing innovations. That reads as a deliberate strategic choice, not a retreat.

The Broader Market

Car enthusiasm is rising, not falling. Tavarish thinks the growing normalization of autonomous commuting will push more people toward track days, where driving yourself becomes the point rather than the default. Tesla building what is essentially a track toy may be going in the right direction for that reason, even if the Roadster launch obscured it.

On the Ferrari competitive response, the expectation is that Porsche's move forces Ferrari's hand — potentially a street-legal version of the 296 Challenge at $400,000–$500,000, aggressive aero, raw character. Ferrari and Porsche won't converge on the same product; the Ferrari experience is deliberately less sanitized, more manufactured Italian passion, more imperfect. Tavarish owns both a manual 992 GT3 and a converted manual 430 Scuderia and says the Ferrari feels like it was engineered a hundred years before the Porsche. That gap isn't closing.

The Mission S is the first new production road car in a while that Tavarish says he actually wants.