Struggling to sell EVs, Tesla pivots to slinging burgers Facing declining sales and a tarnished reputation, EV manufacturer Tesla is looking to a new industry to generate some revenue: Fast-casual food service. Tesla opened a 24/7 diner in West Hollywood, California, on Monday that CEO Elon Musk described as "an island of good food, good vibes and entertainment" on a lot lined with …
But there are so many other great images of Elon. Elon's late teen goth phase. Elon realising he's just woken up in a situation and is trying to process what is going on. Elon staggering around the Whitehouse. Elon wears a corset. So many happy memories. Like when urinating himself didn't used to sting so much.
Think again unless Musk stiffs all the contractors (like Trump)
The cost to build that monstrosity and to run it will make generating a profit hard at least for 2-3 years.
Mr Elongated Muskrat seems to be doing a Trump. Sell any tat he can to the faithful instead of concentrating on the prime task... Running Tesla, SpaceX, X, Starlink etc. At least, he isn't spending 2 or 3 days a week golfing (badly).
Yes he has learned well. Xai just did a 5B bond offering with spacex buying 2B of that, and I guess to pay the 2B, spacex is mulling another insider share offering. Could get interesting though, tesla could tumble with sales down, EV credits going bye bye with trump's update to cafe, and the chinese eating tesla's lunch in Asia and I guess now eu. If I were holding tesla, I'd be putting the sell order in.
If it makes a profit in just 2-3 years, then they'll be happy. Basically, this is expensive but possibly clever marketing for a branded charging station. It doesn't really make sense to drive to such a place in town to charge your car, and the "restaurant" is the least interesting aspect and the easiest to remove. However, it guarantees lots of coverage in the media and opens the door for similar ventures alongside popular highways in the future, with the idea being to capture more money from those with time to kill while their car is charging: profit margins for the owners (not necessarily the operators) of service stations can be pretty high so why would Elon want to share these with anyone else?
To be fair, Tesla wasn't a bad idea, not even with Musk involved.
The problem is that at some point you have to switch to running a business instead of an ideology and that's something that Musk is unable to do as he's not really personally suffering any impact of the problems he causes, something he shares with his former buddy in the White House. Add to that a personality and ideas that makes a pretzel look straight and the results are inevitable, especially if consequences threaten to arrive.
True, but as much as I dislike the ketamine sniffer, he did have something to do with making it bigger and well known.
The issue is that he didn't step back after that - his personality doesn't allow that, he is as much in need of adulation as Trump, just not in as garish a form (Musk appears to have at least some taste).
"The first Tesla was on the road before he got involved."
The first Tesla model (Roadster) was still in development and not yet delivered to customers. Elon bought in with $6.5mn of series A financing and promptly demanded a seat on the board and $7mn of changes to the Roadster raising the price that deposit holders would have to pay and delaying first deliveries. His participation has been a drag from day one. It would have been much better for the company to have delivered their first model on time and on cost as better is the enemy of good enough. A year or two later, v2.0 could have been released that would incorporate some of the changes Elon wanted to make and the inevitable learning that would have gone on after building the car for some time and getting feedback from drivers.
More Southern California's favorite burger chain, I suspect.
I'm one of those rare birds, an actual native Californian, and I'd never heard of them until I first had to visit LA in the late 1960s.
For years, if not decades their bumper strips were moderately famous (or infamous, depending upon your degree of uptightedness).
They read IN 'N' Out BURGER but the B and the R were often cut out to read IN 'N' OUT URGE.
In fact, I'm not sure I saw an unmodified version of the bumper sticker, ever. Any publicity is good publicity, I suppose.
As for the food, they have a limited menu, just burgers and fries. Decent vanilla shakes, too. They make an okay classic surf town cheeseburger, certainly better than the extruded library paste and cow offal served by a certain other much more well known chain.
"California's favourite burger chain In-n-Out, is now "canceled" after the religious family owners all moved to a new state"
They still have an office in Baldwin Park, CA and are moving their Irvine, CA (very expensive city) to TN along with plans to expand the company more outside of CA. The reports I've read didn't say there were any plans to close existing locations. I believe they've only ever closed one and that was due to it being in a bad neighborhood that caused safety issues for the store and the employees.
Of course, there's lots of headlines that say Lyndsi is pulling out of California, but that's just click-bait. It got me. I always eat at In-N-Out when I go to California/Las Vegas. From opening to closing, there's usually a line and the company pays above average wages with store managers making very good money so they attract the best people and can be choosy about whom they keep.
I did find a better article that says Lyndsi IS moving to Tennessee personally with her family and they will be doing more expansion from there than the west coast anymore. I suppose that will mean the main business HQ will be there and the Baldwin Park, CA office will handle business in the western US.
Type your comment here - advanced HTML and hotlinks allowed.
Seriously though, if this doesn't indicate how much trouble the company is in then I don't know what does. "We want an updated car design" say the punters. "Eat this burger" says Musk.
You don't see Toyota peddling hotdogs.
Suzuki Curry
Bizarrely, there is a parallel, kinda.
According to the Japanese press, Suzuki now sells curry. The circumstances are that Suzuki has an assembly line in India. This has worked well. So the company has brought Indian workers over to Japan to work there too. Being a good Japanese company, anxious to keep their workers happy in a strange country, they set up a team to do everything possible to make it work for them. Apparently, this has included deep research into appropriate and quality cuisine for the factory canteen, including curry. Of course, Japan has "curry", but it's a Japanese copy of a British copy of an Indian idea, so much has "changed" in translation. Suzuki have gone back to the source.
This has been unexpectedly highly successful. So successful that Suzuki is now marketing their freshly developed range of curry, and apparently their staff originated from India can't get enough of it. "Come over, quick, the food's brilliant (nom nom nom)" seems to be the message.
I'm going to put in an order at my local Suzuki dealership.
Well I never. That's brilliant.
The difference of course is that a Suzuki curry and VW sausage are both high quality products. I just can't see a Tesla burger being any good.
Probably the panel gaps aren't consistent, and it has a tendency to drive off in strange directions all by itself.
"(The 'D' in the usual 'RUD' is 'Disassembly', not 'Destruction', to heighten the understatement.)
That is all."
RUD is an abbreviated form of a long standing term "RUDE" which stands for Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly Event. It's not a "SpaceX" original saying.
For SpaceX, I use BUG (Blowed Up Gud) or BURG (Blowed Up Real Gud).
That reminds me of the Powergen Italia issue a few years back.
Some bright spark, most likely in Marketing, decided to register Powergen domains in all countries where they operate, in the local lingo. In itself not a bad idea.
Some guy in IT got the order, started preparing this and ran pretty much immediately into the issue in Italy. We all know what would have happened next: a very carefully worded email asking for confirmation with examples, explicitly avoiding the Italian issue, and confirmation was haughtily sent. Back thus covered, aforementioned tech then joyfully set about registering this specific domain, duly leaking it to his mates and thus the entire planet.
When this story broke, I immediately did a WHOIS of the domain (basically because I believed it was a prank myself) and it was indeed registered to Powergen. But, a brief while later Powergen put out a statement it was some other joker, it wasn't them and indeed the WHOIS had changed, making me wish I preserved a screenshot.
The lesson is that if you're asked to confirm what you thought to be a routine instruction, back up and check again - you missed something and someone is about to drop you in it :)
Seriously though, if this doesn't indicate how much trouble the company is in then I don't know what does.
McDonalds earns more money from real estate than it does from selling burgers. I may be misremembering, but I think Dominos (or is it Little Caesars) has a similar model. Franchising, financing, and supplying independent store owners. A company's highest profile activity isn't necessarily the one that generates the income.
Tesla earns a lot of it's revenue from carbon credits rather than strictly selling cars. (you have to sell the cars to have the carbon credits to sell) With the attack on climate change initiatives and Tesla cars sales cratering, super chargers are the next best revenue stream.
Overall, it's an interesting idea. It makes sense to offer different amenities at charging locations. Buc ees, Travel America, Pilot, Flying J.
And every body likes a good themed business. But unfortunately, I think Elon is too toxic for it to succeed beyond a restaurant or two.
"McDonalds earns more money from real estate than it does from selling burgers."
That's the case for pretty much any franchise, isn't it? I remember reading that the IKEA mothership makes money by licensing the brand name to the franchise stores. The license fees are so high that the furniture stores struggle to make a profit, while the licensing fees accumulate in a double dutch tax haven before the profits are passed on to the shareholders, tax free. It's a role model that all franchises -- those big enough to afford a global army of lawyers -- like to copy.
That's the case for pretty much any franchise, isn't it?
To varying degrees, yes. Franchising extends the reach of corporate owned stores. At a minimum, you buy property, build a store, pay a franchise fee and then buy branded supplies through an approved vendor. From there you get companies that provide all the branded product directly. Determine what equipment you use in your store (those fancy Coke dispensers, or the infamous McDonalds milk shake machines). Or they provide financing to the franchisee, so in addition to paying the franchise fee they are also your mortgage holder. Then you get into corporations simply buying property, building the store, and licensing a franchisee to operate it using your branded product. At some point the 'brand' is simply niche venture capitalism.
"To varying degrees, yes. Franchising extends the reach of corporate owned stores. At a minimum, you buy property, build a store, pay a franchise fee and then buy branded supplies through an approved vendor. "
Yes, except for buying the property which the franchiser owns and leases back to you.
A person I know had several Cold Stone Creamery franchises so I learned about many of the abuses that go on along with having studied franchising in business classes. "Snow Crash" does a great job of jabbing at them and how the franchiser has taken a business formula and reduced it to a set of 3-ring binders that they sell rent to people with no business acumen to make a go of it on their own.
>You don't see Toyota peddling hotdogs.
https://www.tiktok.com/discover/its-all-corn-dog-toyota-ad
Some feature popcorn on Monday.
Charlie's had hot-dogs every day.
Near me NAPA peddled dogs/burgers every July 4th; pandemic seems to have ended that.
And of course VW's sausages (199 398 500 A). And VW ketchup.
Flame Grilled Burgers - done with a Boring Flamethrower
https://www.theregister.com/2018/01/29/musk_flamethrower_boring/
CyberBeer
https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/16/tesla_beer/
Tequilla
I give it about three weeks before complaints about light pollution from the giant screens start rolling in, just like when Elon thought it'd be a oh-so-clever idea to put a giant flashing X on top of their building a couple years back. That's presuming the novelty factor of this place even lasts that long.
Which actually looks pretty damn cool! I probably would have LIVED there as a 10 year old..
Philips used to have a tech exhibition in a building in Eindhoven called the 'Evoluon' which was also shaped like a flying saucer.
When you entered it it had giant pretend Nixie tubes (at last I think they were fake, they were *huge*) that counted the visitors and loads of interactive exhibitions, it was quite fun.
It's a shame they changed that as it was very educational but I assume that building needed to bring in quite a lot of money for its upkeep, it was possibly a bit too far ahead of its time.
Ah splendid! A bit like the Dome of Discovery at the Festival of Britain.
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For the improved model of the Tesla Toaster, the classic hot cheese meal. Pay up now to go on the waiting list and it will be delivered next year^^^^^^^^^in 2027^9^^^^sometime.
Asked if it was going to be as jaw-shattering as the current offering, Musk replied that "It's really not that hard".
With all those Swastikars and Wankenpanzer arrayed around the diner like pigs crowding the swill trough, the comparison with the Horcher in those fascist glory days is not unexceptional.
The Horcher relocated in '43 to Madrid to service a similar clientele but ultimately with a longer use by date.
I can imagine the the "Tomorrow belongs to me !" scene from Cabaret (Liza Minnelli) routinely being reenacted in these Muskafeteria.
The location is way off the highway and there's plenty of places in the same neighborhood selling much better and more interesting food. Although, I can't say that any of those places sell a "pie" shake for $12. It's also not the best place for ranks of the fastest chargers. If there's a queue to order food, your car might be charged and needing to be moved before you get to the counter. The integration with the car to listen to the movie soundtracks (movies needing to be SFW to have them out in public) only seems to be applicable to Tesla vehicles. Not a great thing to put limits on potential customers.
I see lots of room for a new way of thinking about public EV charging along major motorways. Toilets, Food (with choices), sundries and travel services need to go beyond what petrol stations usually provide. Much EV charging in the US doesn't allow for vehicles with trailers. If you are towing a caravan, you'd often need to unhook and park it somewhere while charging. Having a related retail shop be able to accept cash for charging is also something that needs to be in place. I just had another credit card get compromised so I'm waiting until they get around to sending me a new one and also having to sort out the fraudulent charges with them beforehand. If that was the payment option in place on a charging account, there's little need to guess when I'd find out on a trip. With a petrol car, I always take cash with me in case networks are down or the cards I have get compromised. I think AmEx will send a replacement card to a hotel overnight, but I don't have one and nobody else seems to offer that sort of backup. Wells Fargo certainly doesn't have any mechanisms in place to support their customers if their account gets hacked and I learned that through experience and will no longer bank with them.
Fast food is too far removed from vehicle manufacturing. The most Tesla should touch it is to license their name to another company that operates on or adjacent to their charging stations through a franchise agreement. Elon's first foray into BFC (Burgers, Fries, Coke) leaves me scratching my head over the location, amenities and menu. Yeah, it will do ok for a bit, but the novelty will wear off rather quickly, but the costs he's incurred will continue over time and not likely have a chance to allow for paying the initial investment.
80x250kW = 20MW (full load). That would be a very edge case, but it hints at the sort of power drop that the location required in the middle of an already densely packed neighborhood. Getting the power was likely part of the long build time for the site. I'm sure the bribes were epic as well.
Since a better charging network is needed for electric vehicles (you pointed out many deficiencies), I don't think going into BFC is a huge stretch for a forward thinking company. If it has the capital. It's not something 'traditional' auto manufacturers do, because they don't have to.
In the past, Tesla built a network using existing businesses. And while that works, they aren't necessarily ideally located and their focus is adding an amenity to their business, not expanding a network. Deals with travel centers would be better. But you have the problem that people who stop for charging have an hour or more to kill, generally. And travel centers are designed for short visits for the average consumer, longer ones for truck drivers with different needs.
There is certainly room for innovation. Example, chargers are generally put at the edge of a parking lot, not near the door. Maybe move some next to one side of the building so they are near an entrance. Truck stops have autos on one side, trucks on the other. You could put ICE cars on one side, EVs on the other. You want to match activities to the average amount of time to charge. Not 2 hour movies that are going to keep your chargers tied up after they have completed.
Now would probably be a good time to start planning to cater to EVs. Fast food, convenience store, casual dining, Internet cafe. If you're an EV manufacturer, maybe a small showroom with a kiosk to place orders. Most people have not seen a Slate in person, for example. Maybe Bezos could squeeze a Slate into an Amazon pickup location at a travel center.
"But you have the problem that people who stop for charging have an hour or more to kill, generally. "
The Kia EV6 and Hyundai Ionic 5 charge from 10-80% in under 20 minutes. BYD has demonstrated 1MW (10C) charging with CATL close behind. The trend is moving in the direction of faster charging more than larger battery packs. If you can drive 3-4 hours, that's a reasonable point for a break. For me, a short break on a road trip is 20 minutes (fill petrol, visit the loo and grab fresh snacks). A sit down meal break is 45 minutes. Yes, I keep trip logs. If the car is charged within those time frames or close enough to them, I'm in good shape. It's not like I'm making that sort of trip several times per month. The Chevy Bolt is at the top of my shopping list right now and it's one of the slower charging vehicles so an hour or more would be accurate although I'm not binning the petrol car when I get one. I do field work so an EV with 250 miles of range is more than plenty for 48 weeks each year. Paying for petrol on a long trip wouldn't kill me, it's the weekly fill up to putter around town and to job sites.
"Ah, the LA diner has been in development for 2 years?"
McD's is the gold standard when I comes to putting up stores. They have a stack of designs that are BOM'd to the mm and the time limitations come from how quickly they can get local inspectors around to sign off on key portions of the build so they can continue building. When things all go right, they can build one in less than a month from grading the site to serving whatever it is the serve (hard to call it food).
"Impressive but do the McD's have 80 superchargers and 2 giant cinema screens?"
McD's has been focusing less on things like playgrounds as advertising directed at children is more limited as time goes on. Unless 80 DCFC's are going to pay back in the next couple of quarters, it's cheaper to build a half dozen more stores. The cinema screens are a head scratcher. Rights holders aren't keen on public display without a healthy sum of money being paid. The content needs to be very SFW. As soon as somebody chucks a rock at the screen, the novelty wears off for the site owner and they get scrapped. I have audio books and other media I can load on my tablet if I know I'm going to have down time during charging on a trip if I don't just have a nap (I'm old). To pay a premium for meh food to watch a big screen with whatever content They decide to play just isn't appealing as BYO (or that nap I spoke of).
