“I think this is the most dangerous neighborhood in L.A.,” my 16-year-old son reported after parking along a normally pleasant stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood. Driving to meet him at the Tesla Diner on its fourth night open, I, too, thought I might die. Teslas lined up for blocks on two different streets trying to squeeze into the two filled parking lots. Meanwhile, a Tesla zoomed on the empty side of one street, weaving back and forth for fun. Over the blare of Tesla honks, Tesla owners screamed out their Tesla windows at each other and especially at the people trying to manage the parking lot entrances. Many women were way over-dressed for a diner. The lot was packed with a racially diverse crowd full of people recording everything on their phones as if they were war reporters. I expected Vin Diesel to stand on top of a Cybertruck and make a speech about the importance of family. At 9:30 p.m., I found my friend Igor Hiller, who lives just a few blocks away, standing in a very long line. An Elon Musk fan who has kept that fact quiet the last few years, he was very excited to be among his people. He’d been excited since the project was announced seven years ago, and watched the diner slowly be built over the last year-and-a-half, turning his neighborhood into the world’s premiere Tesla tourist location. As Igor looked at the Mad Max chaos around us, he said, “As a local resident, I’m horrified,” in the tone of a policeman shocked that there was gambling inside the establishment. As I approached in my Tesla, the people in line were told there was a three hour-wait, at which point most of them didn’tleave. Igor learned that if you were in a Tesla, you could park in a charging station and order food from the screen in your car. But those lots were packed. I had never seen anyone actually jump up and down with excitement until Igor spotted a Tesla exiting the lot. After he convinced the guard to let me drive in, I grabbed the spot. To comply with local regulations, the two drive-in-movie sized, 45-foot screens showing 1977’s Smokey and The Bandit with impressive fidelity flicked off at exactly 10 p.m., shortly before the scene where Burt Reynolds stands on top his tractor trailer and makes a speech about the importance of family. We could not watch the movie on our Tesla dashboard screen because Starlink, Elon Musk’s satellite internet service, had gone down for the day. We plugged the car in and giddily ordered $125 worth of food from the screen that I may or may not have paid for, since apparently my Tesla has an expired credit card affixed to it. Nevertheless, in ten minutes, the car was charged. In 40, a guy approached our car with two bags of food. He was not, as promised either a woman on roller skates or a robot, which are the two main male non-Japanese fantasies of how to have food delivered.
The woman working a red carpet in front of the diner let us past the red velvet ropes keeping back the angry crowd, despite the fact that we had mistakenly hit a button during our order declaring that we wanted to eat in our car. The reason she made the exception, she explained, was that we were nice. We were not, in fact, particularly nice. We just didn’t threaten to shiv her. The inside was pretty cool. Especially for a building designed by someone who doesn’t design buildings. The chrome, circular, Jetsons structure was conceived by Franz von Holzhausen, who is the chief designer of every Tesla and has a name that Elon Musk found very exciting.
The white spiral staircase was sort-of future-y, though the robots behind glass were Hard Rock Café-y. The robot dishing out popcorn upstairs was done for the day, which was surprising since I did not know robots had off hours. But this is very much a union town. The whole upstairs, in fact, closed at 11, which seemed weak for a 24-hour diner. But the most surprising aspect, considering Musk’s rants against transgendered rights – despite the fact that one of his 128 children is trans – were the bathrooms. All of them were clearly marked “gender neutral.”
The food is all sourced from cool bakeries, dairies and farms that are within the range of a Tesla. It’s made by Eric Greenspan, a chef I know and responded to my email a few weeks before he opened by writing the most ominous piece of samizdat I’ve ever receieved:
His food, which I’ve enjoyed before in many forms, was even scarier. It all came in paper boxes that looked like Cybertrucks and may have tasted better than some of the food. The tuna melt was great, the strawberry shake fine, the smashburger okay, and the rest of it awful. The “lime rickey” soda was flat. After one bite of the egg sandwich on a buttermilk waffle, Igor said, “This should be sent straight to Mars.” Was the impossibly flavorless waffle, which consisted of thin lines in a cool looking shape, totally raw? It was something you would return if you bought it at a 7-Eleven while you were really, really stoned. An American 7-Eleven. Musk had demanded that all the dishes be “epic,” which this definitely was. The “epic bacon,” however, was more like “bacon.”
No one in the crowd inside cared. Teens were happily crayon-ing their version of the future Tesla on their placemats and doing word searches that included “Dogmode,” “sustainable,” “Optimus,” “Starman,” “Cybertruck,” and “powerwall.” The very nice couple sitting next to us, one of whom teaches special-needs kids, owns two Teslas and bought all the merch they could, including a wind-up Tesla she’s going to keep in her classroom. But the most surprising thing may have been the lack of protestors. A few had been there earlier in the day, but they were overwhelmed by the Tesla lovers. And this was in L.A. Sure, Musk is feuding with Trump, but the enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend theory falls apart when they’re both cool with Nazis. The people enjoying their non-epic burgers and fries weren’t excited about a diner. I know this because no one is excited about a diner. They were excited about optimism. For decades every sci-fi movie and TV show is dystopic. Everyone I know in L.A. is sure they’re leaving their kids a worse world. That’s not what the Tesla Diner says. It says that drive-ins, roller-skating gals, and burgers were the right direction and we should continue full throttle. Clean energy. Huge metal trucks. Local ingredients. Robots making popcorn. Gender-neutral bathrooms. As I drove home through West Hollywood, I passed a bunch of self-driving Waymos on the street, and food-delivery robots on the sidewalk. The future, for the first time in a while, felt like it might be okay. Though I suspect a lot of what I was feeling came from putting the Thunderdome in my rear view mirror. Thank you for paying to read my column. Wait: This is for the people who didn’t pay? Then I owe you nothing. You are the ones contributing to the end of my career. If you want to pay an exorbitant amount of money to get one extra post a month – which often won’t even be that good – upgrade to a paid subscription here:
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Sunday, August 3, 2025
The New Tesla Diner in L.A. Is The Future
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