[cyberferret]

I hope that other members more in the know can clarify, but I thought that the launch into deeper space was done as a 2 stage thing - first, they got the car up into earth orbit, THEN they did a second burn to break orbit. i.e. the second burn was done while the vehicle was moving tangential to the Earth, and not radially away from it?

[kijin]

That just means that when the Tesla returns to the same point in its orbit, it will pass a few hundred miles above Earth's orbit (where the final burn was performed) instead of directly intersecting Earth's orbit.

The difference is virtually meaningless compared to orbital perturbations from other sources. Either way, it's close enough for Earth to affect the Tesla's orbit if it were at the right place at the right time.