What do you do when your electric vehicle company is flailing, your shareholders are ready to mutiny, and your self-driving car venture is the laughingstock of Austin? If you’re Elon Musk, apparently, you open a burger restaurant.
Called Tesla Eats, the fast food joint made its debut this week next to a Supercharger lot in Los Angeles, seven years after it was first announced. Situated on a corner lot in Santa Monica, the restaurant sports a curved and sterile chic which Eater LA says makes it “resemble the waiting area for Disneyland’s Star Tours or Space Mountain more than a diner.”
The whole idea is you top off your car’s battery while devouring a “Tesla Burger,” perhaps with a glob of “Electric Sauce” or a side of “Epic Bacon.” (Yes, that’s really what they’re calling it.)
Sounds cool right? Well, there’s a kicker: the prices.
After waiting hours in line, customers are apparently asked to pay as much as $24.5 for a single burger, with add-ons like the $4 “Wagyu beef chili” adding mightily to the $13.5 base-price. (A single cup of that chili a la carte will run you $8.)
If you want a side of fries, you’ll pay $4, while a “charged soda” — the diner’s non-alcoholic specialty pop — can cost anywhere from $7 to $10, depending on the flavor. Or you could grab a regular soda for $4, with a souvenir cup available for $3 upcharge. Customers can also stock up on eye-wateringly priced Tesla-themed tchotchkes. Eater notes that hoodies run at a cool $95, while a pack of “supercharged” gummies — there’s no THC to be found within them — are $35. The price of an action figure modeled after Tesla’s remote-controlled “Optimus” robot isn’t immediately clear.
There’s nothing new about gastropubs trying to offload debt-inducing burgers on affluent diners, especially in a captive environment like a charging station. But remember that this is LA, the home of In-N-Out Burger, a beloved chain that sells succulent hamburgers starting at $3.60, fries for $2.30, and an entire milkshake for $3.00.
It’s also unclear how the actual food quality stacks up against local competition, as early reviews were mixed, to say the least. Customers on social media complained of long lines and chaotic scenes inside the restaurant.
“Tesla Diner is [a] really cool spot but we waited for two hours to eat something in there,” one poster wrote on X-formerly-Twitter. “Customer service is too bad. They were not organized at all. They don’t have answers for many questions and they have no idea what’s going on in there. French fries and burger dried so much.”
“Shakes are excellent… hash browns were solid, burgers and sandwiches were pretty awful,” said tech investor Noah Aron. “The staff was flustered and it was quite chaotic in the kitchen.”
Eater opined that the cheeseburger “doesn’t quite work,” adding that “there’s a lot of room for this burger to improve.”
That said, the food review magazine praised Tesla Diner’s tuna melt, and called the biscuits and gravy — which come in a Cybertruck-themed box — a “fairly excellent preparation of the Southern morning classic.” Eater caveats that the eating experience was awkward, thanks to Tesla Diner’s bizarre Cybertruck-shaped wooden utensils.
This all comes after Musk’s political antics with DOGE had a catastrophic effect on sales of Tesla vehicles throughout the world, driving the company’s revenue into the tubes.
Then there was RoboTaxi — the self-driving rideshare concept that represented Tesla’s last-ditch effort to find an alternative revenue stream. That isn’t going well, to say the least, meaning the embattled EV company’s desiccated burgers seem to be the best thing it has going for it.
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