Elon Musk is turning another one of his fantasies into reality by constructing a Supercharger station with a 1950s-style diner and drive-in theater. The project was first mentioned in 2018, and now the construction has begun in Hollywood.
Many people mock Elon Musk because he promises a lot of things, many of which are considered impossible. Self-driving vehicles are one of them, even though Tesla demonstrated significant progress with its FSD technology. Still, Musk announced in 2016 that Tesla cars would drive themselves as early as 2018. He then made similar predictions almost every year, including recently.
Trust me, it’s not that Musk overpromises. It’s more like Musk is way ahead with his predictions. The reality may be late catching up with Musk, but Tesla’s CEO achieved pretty much everything he said he would. In 2016, after spending hours in LA’s congested traffic, he wanted to dig tunnels to dodge traffic. In 2017, he founded The Boring Company (TBC), which is now doing precisely what Musk wanted. Still slow to advance, but advancing nevertheless.
The last on the list is a Supercharger station with “an old-school drive-in, roller skates & rock restaurant” that he first mentioned in a 2018 tweet. The project was previewed two months later when Tesla applied for a building permit in Santa Monica. For various reasons, Tesla built the Supercharger station without the fancy diner and looked for another location to fulfill Musk’s dream.
Last year, Tesla filed the construction plans for a retro-styled Supercharger with a diner and drive-in theater in Hollywood. The filing mentioned a semi-circular two-story diner with 29 Supercharger stalls and two movie theater screens. If this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve already seen a rendering of this “Tesla Diner”in a slide during Investor Day in March. The image of the fancy Supercharger station was part of the “Can’t Forget To Do Cool S***” slide at the end of the presentation of Rebecca Tinucci, Tesla’s head of global charging infrastructure.
Things haven’t moved much since then, except Tesla finally got the building permit and started to clear the land in preparation for the construction. The location is 7001 W. Santa Monica Boulevard, West Hollywood, California, where existing buildings have been demolished, and the foundation of the new restaurant is now built, as shown in pictures taken recently by OttOmate (via @SERobinsonJr).
Although the construction is in its early stages, I have a feeling that it will progress much faster from now on. If Tesla has moved lightning-fast in one area, that was its Supercharger network. Maybe I’m influenced by Musk’s optimism, but the new restaurant/Supercharger station might be ready to greet customers by the end of the year. The diner has a 218-seat capacity on two floors, with the second floor mainly offering outdoor seating.
It’s unclear if this means Tesla will open a new line of business (restaurants) or if the new diners will be operated through a franchise. We know that Elon’s brother, Kimbal Musk, is a seasoned restaurateur, owning The Kitchen Restaurant Group, including names like Next Door American Eatery, Hedge Row American Bistro, and The Kitchen American Bistro.
