Then almost immediately bankrupted Tesla. Was their first near miss of going under.
Story has been retconned on their website to say Elon fixed the car. That the Roadster wasn’t even close to production ready. He did neither.
What really happened is he wanted to redo much of the looks of the car to put his stamp on it. They spent a small fortune tweaking the Elise body to make it look just slightly less like one. Ballooned their production costs and added a ton of delays. The original team was going to use the Elise chassis as it came from Lotus and people had already lined up to buy that.