A historian of British India reads about the Tesla Roadster’s nine-year delay and compares it with the railway promises of the Victorian Raj
Friday, 23 October 2026. Hampstead. The kitchen table, a book on Indian railway history and a slice of toast with lime pickle, which is the correct breakfast for this topic, 8.30am.
A Machine That Promised To Change Everything
On the sixteenth of April 1853, the first passenger train in India ran from Bori Bunder in Bombay to Thane, about thirty-four kilometres, pulled by three locomotives with names that sound like racehorses: Sahib, Sultan and Sindh. A crowd gathered. Guns were fired. Newspapers announced the arrival of a new age. The Governor-General, Lord Dalhousie, was an enthusiastic advocate of railways, which he saw as vital to administration, trade and the movement of troops.
I was reading about that first journey this morning when I came across the London Prat report on how Elon Musk unveiled the flying Tesla Roadster nine years late. The car can lift itself over a row of other vehicles on compressed air thrusters, drive upside down and reach sixty miles an hour in about a second. Production is targeted for 2028, eleven years after it was first shown. Customers have put down deposits for a car that does not yet have a price.
The Bombay train had a price and a date, and it arrived. That puts it ahead of the Roadster, in my professional opinion, by roughly one hundred and seventy-five years.
Railway Promises And Their Fine Print
To be fair to Tesla, Victorian railway promises were not always kept either. Many Indian railways were built under a guarantee system: private British companies raised the capital, and the government of India guaranteed investors a fixed return, roughly five percent, whether the line made money or not. The arrangement has been criticised ever since by Indian nationalists and historians alike, because the guarantee was ultimately paid by Indian taxpayers, while much of the profit went to British shareholders.
The report has a lovely line about the Roadster reservation inverting traditional commerce: customers pay first, the manufacturer announces extraordinary possibilities and accountants try to work out whether the delivery date is an obligation or a philosophical concept. The Victorian guarantee system did something similar, only on a continental scale. The investors were protected. The risk was borne by people who had no say in it. As an economic arrangement, it was considerably less charming than a car that drives upside down.
A Car That Hops And A Train That Stays
The report describes the Roadster hopping over a Cybertruck, a Semi and several other Teslas, and imagines London commuters clearing the M25. I find this funny precisely because the railways did the opposite. They did not hop over anything. They went through. They cut across fields, villages, rivers and hills. They changed the geography of a subcontinent. They moved grain, cotton, soldiers, pilgrims, families and, eventually, nationalist politicians, who used the railway to travel the country organising.
That is a historical irony worth teaching. The railway was built partly to strengthen imperial control. It became one of the instruments that helped Indians think of themselves as one nation, travelling to meetings, conferences and protests across vast distances. Gandhi famously travelled third class to see the country as most people saw it. No flying car would ever have given him that view. You do not learn about a nation from thirty feet above its traffic.
The Waiting Customer
The report quotes a man who reserved his Roadster in 2017, when he was middle-aged, and now fears he might need the flying feature to get himself to a specialist hospital by the time it arrives. In India in the nineteenth century, waiting for a railway line could last decades. Towns petitioned for branch lines that never came. Merchants invested in warehouses beside proposed stations that were built somewhere else. The disappointment of a promised machine that does not arrive is very old. Tesla simply added an app.
What History Teaches About The Future
Every age has its marvellous machine. The Victorians had the locomotive. The twentieth century had the aeroplane. Ours has the flying car that does not arrive and the chatbot that is politer than the people who built it. The lesson from 1853 is not that new machines are bad. It is that the question is always the same: who pays, who profits, who waits and who gets to ride.
I should add, in fairness to the Victorian engineers, that many of them were genuinely brilliant, and that thousands of Indian workers, whose names mostly went unrecorded, built the lines through monsoon, heat and disease. The bridges over the great rivers, the ghats climbing into the Western Ghats near Bombay, the tunnels and embankments, were extraordinary achievements, at enormous human cost. When I stand at a Mumbai station today, I think about them. Nobody will ever stand anywhere and think about the people who built the Roadster’s delay. Delays have no labourers. They only have press releases.
Breakfast Over
The lime pickle has done its work. I am going to spend the morning writing a lecture for next week, titled Sahib, Sultan and Sindh: Three Engines and an Empire. I will end it with a slide of the Roadster in mid-air over a row of Teslas. My students will laugh. Then I will ask them which machine changed more lives. Then I will wait. They will get there. Unlike the Roadster, they always do.