The recent news cycle hasn’t been kind to Tesla. Sales are down. Its CEO is locked in a pissing match with the most powerful office on Earth, and its investors are starting to wonder whether its leadership can rise to the moment. And yet, somehow, in the shadow of all that, it seems Tesla actually launched something new for once. Too bad it’s not a car.
Tesla’s newest venture is billed as a “diner and drive-in,” and its location on Santa Monica Boulevard (where a Shakey’s previously stood) reveals it for the suburban eatery and retail destination it is, rather than the convenient service it could be. Under pressure to turn tables and actually make money, Tesla is using congestion fees to pressure its customers into spending less time loitering on the premises. What began as a fancy charging concept is instead a fast-casual, quick-turn restaurant in disguise.
True to its “drive-in” label, customers can send in their orders directly from their cars and be served upon arrival. The smart kitchen even queues up their tickets by driving distance, prioritizing those who will show first, and waiting to fire meals for those driving long distances to keep them fresh—and get existing customers out the door to make room for new ones.
The optimization of it is very on-brand in the casual sense of the term, but what does it actually do for Tesla? We’ve seen such things before, after all. Superchargers made sense, certainly, but then came the tunneling operation, followed by the flame throwers and the tequila. Teslas were going to be the subway, now they’re competing with Subway. The F-?
And I can’t help but ask, what does any of this have to do with selling Cybertrucks?
Sure, a marketer could put some English on the notion of offering exclusivity, but Tesla’s shilling the basics here, not high-end fare. On top of that, nothing about this concept is new. The truck stop as a concept has existed since the end of World War II. Even if we exclude America’s ubiquitous rest stop food court, smaller-scale operations such as Wawa and Sheetz have been churning out made-to-order meals while its customers fuel up for decades. Some of their locations even offer something resembling a rudimentary dining room. The only difference is that neither enjoys the vertical integration of Tesla’s approach, where they’re selling you the car, the fuel, the snacks and the company line—all in one neatly wrapped package.
But above all of that, it’s a revenue stream, and one that couldn’t have come at a better time. Revenue growth from simply selling cars is becoming a trickier proposition for Tesla, whose sales volumes have been in decline longer than company investors would like. With federal EV incentives going away later this year, Tesla stands to make even less money on each car it sells. Hamburgers it is, then. But at what scale?
As an attraction in Hollywood, the Tesla Diner may well succeed. But as a caricature of an actual service model, its need to turn tables outweighs any fealty to the community it was ostensibly built to serve. There’s no room here for R&R; it’s all about ROI. Tesla owners are already “hacking” this by showing up with their batteries as close to depleted as possible, extending their visits without risking penalties for overstaying their welcome.
So why, in a nation where entire industries have formed around making money off mandatory fuel-ups, are so many people pretending that empty parking lots full of fast chargers are the way to go? America is the land of Buc-ee’s and roadhouses. We were doing this nonsense back while Europe was still busy shooting at each other. So why have we gotten so bad at it?
When I look at Tesla’s cars, I see good ideas wrapped in questionable packages. Its Diner is no different. There’s a kernel of genius buried in there somewhere, but it lacks the proper environment in which to thrive. Here’s hoping somebody else can seed it, and finally put the “rest” back in “rest stop.”
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