The Tesla Diner's Real Failure

"The spiral staircase leading up to the roof-deck at Los Angeles's Tesla Diner is beautiful, or at least it is expensive-looking. It has video screens overhead and glowy lights at the base of each step and its own special soundtrack, a down-tempo, bleepy-bloopy composition that whooshes in as a notable contrast to the main dining room's dad rock. Glass display cases set into the walls hold human-size robots. Otherwise, every surface is covered in slick plastic, pure white."

"When I visited one evening last month, an employee was stationed at the top of the stairs with a request: Those interested in returning to Earth should please take the elevator down. The staircase is too narrow to accommodate two-way traffic; people were bumping into one another. The beautiful staircase could do a lot, but it could not, as it turned out, perform its basic intended function, which is to give people a safe and simple way to move between floors using their feet."

"The restaurant has been in the works since 2018, when Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, announced his intention to put an "old-school drive-in" at one of the electric-car company's existing supercharging stations in Los Angeles. The waitstaff would wear roller skates, and you could get food delivered to your car. It would be a rest stop for the electric-vehicle era, and more directly, a solution to the problem of EVs taking significantly longer to charge than a gas car takes to fill up,"

A spiral staircase to the roof-deck features video screens, glowy step lighting, a custom down-tempo soundtrack, glass cases with human-size robots, and slick white plastic surfaces. The staircase's narrowness prevents two-way traffic, prompting staff to direct some customers to the elevator and undermining its basic function of safe, simple stair movement. The diner concept originated in 2018 as an "old-school drive-in" at a supercharging station, with roller-skating waitstaff and food delivery to cars to occupy EV charging time. The diner bundles amenities into the charging ecosystem, enabling Tesla to exert control and extract profit from the charging experience.

Read at The Atlantic