
Burgers in cybertruck boxes, popcorn by optimus robot: Tesla's wild new LA diner is Elon Musk's next viral obsession
Below are key features of this pioneering concept:
Charging meets cinema and dining
The Tesla Diner offers EV owners convenient access to charging while they dine and enjoy a drive‑in movie experience. With 32 Superchargers, LED screens visible from both seated and vehicle areas, and in-car ordering synced to Tesla audio systems, the site blends eating and charging seamlessly.
Musk celebrated the debut in a post on X: 'Tesla diner just opened in LA.'
Tesla's Diner has cane sugar sodas for $4 each: Cola, diet cola, lemon-lime, root beer, orange, black cherry or cream.Milkshakes are $8: Vanilla, chocolate or strawberry. You can make it a Pie Shake for an extra $4 (apple or pecan). pic.twitter.com/QVRPv2wuyT
Menu, pricing & nostalgic vibes
Menu items are priced between $4 and $15 and include burgers, fries, hot dogs, chicken wings, sandwiches, and hand‑spun milkshakes. Classic flavors like vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry milkshakes can be turned into pie shakes for an extra $4. Cane sugar sodas—cola, lemon‑lime, root beer, orange, black cherry, and cream—cost $4 each.
Inside @Tesla 's NEW Diner!! pic.twitter.com/yOPdQEEXwZ
Themed elements bring the retro-futurist concept alive: food is served in Cybertruck‑shaped paper boxes, roller‑skating servers offer ice cream samples, and vintage-style 'Jetsons' cartoons play on the drive-in's LED screens. All construction began in September 2023, with the diner officially opening at 4:20 p.m.—a subtle nod to Musk's previous on‑stage reference to marijuana.
Robots, merch & future plans
Adding to the spectacle, Tesla's humanoid robot Optimus serves popcorn to guests. The venue also offers themed merchandise, including vintage Hollywood diner T-shirts, Tesla Bot action figures, Supercharged gummy candies, and branded trucker caps.
Tesla diner just opened in LA https://t.co/ApqHJ7Qe5f
Musk flagged future rollouts in a follow‑up X post: 'If our retro‑futuristic diner turns out well … Tesla will establish these in major cities around the world, as well as at Supercharger sites on long‑distance routes. […]' He also confirmed a second diner would open at SpaceX's Starbase facility in South Texas.
Musk's reaction and global vision
On July 14, Musk visited the diner personally: 'I just had dinner at the retro‑futuristic @Tesla diner and Supercharger. Team did great work making it one of the coolest spots in LA!' If the LA location succeeds, the model could expand globally and across Supercharger networks.
Tesla's diner merges nostalgic Americana and EV innovation—it's a charging stop transformed into an entertainment hub. Expansion now hinges on its success.
To stay updated on the stories that are going viral follow Indiatimes Trending.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


The Print
an hour ago
- The Print
Elon Musk's Starlink network suffers rare global outage
Starlink, which has more than 6 million users across roughly 140 countries and territories, later acknowledged the outage on its X account and said 'we are actively implementing a solution.' Users in the U.S. and Europe began experiencing the outage at around 3 p.m. EDT (1900 GMT), according to Downdetector, a crowdsourced outage tracker that said as many as 61,000 user reports to the site were made. (Reuters) -SpaceX's Starlink suffered one of its biggest international outages on Thursday when an internal software failure knocked tens of thousands of users offline, a rare disruption for Elon Musk's powerful satellite internet system. Starlink service mostly resumed after 2.5 hours, Michael Nicolls, Starlink vice president of Starlink Engineering, wrote on X. 'The outage was due to failure of key internal software services that operate the core network,' Nicolls said, apologizing for the disruption and vowing to find its root cause. Musk had also apologized: 'Sorry for the outage. SpaceX will remedy root cause to ensure it doesn't happen again,' the SpaceX CEO wrote on X. The outage was a rare hiccup for SpaceX's most commercially sensitive business that had experts speculating whether the service, known for its resilience and rapid growth, was beset by a glitch, a botched software update or even a cyberattack. Doug Madory, an expert at the internet analysis firm Kentik, said the outage was global and that such a sweeping interruption was unusual. 'This is likely the longest outage ever for Starlink, at least while it became a major service provider,' Madory said. As Starlink gained more users, SpaceX has focused heavily in recent months on updating its network to accommodate demands for higher speed and bandwidth. The company in a partnership with T-Mobile is also expanding the constellation with larger, more powerful satellites to offer direct-to-cell text messaging services, a line of business in which mobile phone users can send emergency text messages through the network in rural areas. SpaceX has launched more than 8,000 Starlink satellites since 2020, building a uniquely distributed network in low-Earth orbit that has attracted intense demand from militaries, transportation industries and consumers in rural areas with poor access to traditional, fiber-based internet. 'I'd speculate this is a bad software update, not entirely dissimilar to the CrowdStrike mess with Windows last year, or a cyberattack,' said Gregory Falco, director of a space and cybersecurity laboratory at Cornell University. An update to CrowdStrike's widely used cybersecurity software led to worldwide flight cancellations and impacted industries around the globe in July last year. The outage disrupted internet services, affecting 8.5 million Microsoft Windows devices. It was unclear whether Thursday's outage affected SpaceX's other satellite-based services that rely on the Starlink network. Starshield, the company's military satellite business unit, has billions of dollars' worth of contracts with the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence agencies. (Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City, and Raphael Satter and Joey Roulette in Washington; Editing by Anil D'Silva and Matthew Lewis) Disclaimer: This report is auto generated from the Reuters news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.


Time of India
2 hours ago
- Time of India
American Cisco to bolster Ambani's Jio hyperscale ambition, enable large data centres
The US digital communications technology conglomerate Cisco Systems, working with India's Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea, is well equipped to handle space broadband traffic, following device validation with Elon Musk-owned Starlink, and can now offer end-to-end visibility into the satellite network. In an interaction with ETTelecom's Muntazir Abbas, Guru Shenoy, senior vice president of provider connectivity, Cisco, talks on India's telecom landscape, agile network, agentic AI, public sector business, data centre partnership with Jio, and a recent Starlink validation. Edited excerpts: How are you looking at the opportunities, especially in the telecom space in India? The primary business that service providers have is connectivity. For example, Jio and Airtel in India, want to go big in broadband. So, it needs to be secure and resilient. The other angle is the new devices that we are building with our Cisco 8000 portfolio. These are designed to converge all different kinds of access onto the same box. Now there is a satellite coming into the picture. You need different kinds of equipment often to terminate satellites and bring that onto the router. And then you have cellular radios that are also connected to routers. Oftentimes, these used to be separate devices. What we have done with our newest generation of devices. It can also connect to satellite ground stations all in a single device. Coming to your agile network, you have a bunch of deployments. So, can you just name a few of them? So, the public references we have are Aurelien in Europe, and Colt. We also have Swisscom in Europe. We have Reliance Jio in India. That's another big public reference for us. Cisco 8000 and this agile services networking that I am talking about, the routers, have been adopted. It's the fastest adoption we have seen in the history of Cisco Service Provider Networking. So, the adoption curve has been huge. Cisco has been talking about agentic AI. Are you in discussions with service providers for this? This is very new technology, we have announced. So, the Cisco service provider version of it is called Crosswork, and again, it's part of the agile services networking infrastructure. We have three pieces there. We have routers; we have pluggable connectivity with optical and then we have the automation tool. So, Cisco Crosswork is our brand for the tool that manages service provider networks. Crosswork exists in most major service providers today already. We are bringing AI capabilities into those, and there are two that we have just released. It's a new release, and we are in the labs of most of these customers. By the end of the year, we should have some public references. In India and even globally, there is a lot of conversation happening on space broadband services. Both terrestrial and non-terrestrial networks (NTN) are complementary to each other. How is Cisco as a multinational, gearing up to enable products in the longer run? So, what Starlink does is they bring their satellite connectivity. And they can offer it to end customers. But when they connect the end customers, it goes into space and then comes back to their ground station. They need to connect their ground station to somebody for that traffic to be carried somewhere else, and that somebody is always a service provider. Service providers are connecting their equipment, handing off the traffic to Starlink on one side or taking the traffic from Starlink and then carrying it wherever it needs to be carried, that's the model. The problem has been that these are two completely different networks, so you need a lot of work to integrate that. What we have done is we have done the work of integrating with all these backend satellite providers who want to use satellite connectivity as an option. If they are using Cisco equipment, they can basically pull a document and say, this is how you do the connection and it will all work, because we have already validated the whole thing. Do you act as a bridge between these two? We act as a bridge and we do more, we also give you visibility with our tools, because we have integrated our telemetry with Starlink and vice versa into our tools. So now you can get full end-to-end visibility of what's happening in the network. It looks like just another end-point access connectivity. But what about the device ecosystem? Are the current devices capable enough to handle? Yes, that's part of the validation that we're doing. If there are features we need to do, like sometimes timing and sync, there are some of these features associated with the routers that need to be tweaked, adjusted to handle satellite traffic. We've done all of that work. So, all our routers now can support satellite connectivity. So, what are the use cases that you foresee? There is enough density of homes, and satellites are still not as good for highly dense urban areas. You go to Delhi or Mumbai; it's going to be hard to offer satellites in an effective manner. However, if you go to slightly semi-urban areas or rural areas, it becomes expensive to make fiber or microwave or any of these technologies. So, this is where satellites can be very effective including in mountainous regions because every other technology is challenged. First, you can't put towers everywhere, it's too expensive. Secondly, even if you run things like millimeter wave or some of these other technologies, they are subject to a lot of weather interference and the quality drops. Satellite is much more robust that way, so it's become a very viable technology, and that's why we're seeing adoption. The only challenge is often regulations. So, if the regulatory hurdles are cleared, the adoption will happen. But what about cost efficiency? Because this is something which is viewed as a little expensive. Developing markets like India may not be able to see aggressive adoption. So that remains a challenge in some scenarios, but there are certain use cases. Like if it's rural, the cost advantage shifts to satellite, because it is much cheaper to offer satellite instead of going and putting towers everywhere or laying fiber. What are the enterprise areas for use cases? Defence, mining and all of these, like wherever you need connectivity in fairly remote areas including transportation such as cruise lines and aircraft, all of those offer satellite. There's no other good option there. So those are major industries. But now we are seeing even regular enterprises like shops and grocery stores. They will give you a satellite-based link as a backup. Because oftentimes the satellite model is also a little different. It comes with battery backup. So, if you lose power, for example, you have satellite-based connectivity that keeps going for a few hours. Are you open to working or doing some sort of pilot programs with non-terrestrial network (NTN) providers? Absolutely. It's very complimentary for us because we don't build satellite technology, they don't build terrestrial networks. For us to work together with them is very complimentary. Are there any new discussions going on with service providers? Specific to the India market, we are working with all of them, offering broadband solutions. First, Jio especially has very ambitious plans about growing their broadband subscriber footprint. We are working on the solutions with them for that. Is it a part of any fresh deal, or the work is in progress? The work is in progress already. They are setting up AI infrastructure, Jio Brain and they basically want to be the hyper scaler in India where they want to create large data centers, where they will host AI training, inferencing and cloud-based AI applications. We'll provide data centers, and the connectivity for them. Any other government projects that you are working on with any of the states in India? Tanfinet (Tamil Nadu), Mahanet (Maharashtra), and then there are a few other local initiatives, so we are all part of that, and we continue to be. They are a part of BharatNet . So, we continue to be part of that. There are defence deals that we are involved in also. We have a sizable public sector, and defence engagement. What is the revenue breakup between the public and private sectors? Private sector revenue is higher in India. We have been successful with Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, and Vodafone Idea, all three networks. I would say the majority is in the private sector.


Time of India
2 hours ago
- Time of India
How SpaceX's rocket diplomacy backfired in the Bahamas
When SpaceX was negotiating a deal with the Bahamas last year to allow its Falcon 9 rocket boosters to land within the island nation's territory, Elon Musk's company offered a sweetener: complimentary Starlink internet terminals for the country's defense vessels, according to three people familiar with the matter. The rocket landing deal, unlocking a more efficient path to space for SpaceX's reusable Falcon 9, was then signed in February last year by Deputy Prime Minister Chester Cooper, who bypassed consultation with several other key government ministers, one of the sources and another person familiar with the talks said. Reuters could not determine the dollar value of the Starlink arrangement or the number of vessels outfitted with Starlink terminals. The Bahamian military, mostly a sea-faring force with a fleet of roughly a dozen vessels, did not respond to a request for comment. Reuters found no evidence that Cooper broke any laws or regulations in striking the deal with SpaceX, but the people said the quick approval created tension within the Bahamian government. By this April, two months after the first and only Falcon 9 booster landed off the nation's Exuma coast, the Bahamas announced it had put the landing agreement on hold. The government said publicly it wanted a post-launch investigation after the explosion in March of a different SpaceX rocket, Starship , whose mid-flight failure sent hundreds of pieces of debris washing ashore on Bahamian islands. But the suspension was the result of the blindsided officials' frustration as well, two of the people said. "While no toxic materials were detected and no significant environmental impact was reported, the incident prompted a reevaluation of our engagement with SpaceX," Cooper, also the country's tourism chief, told Reuters through a spokesperson. SpaceX did not respond to questions for comment. Cooper and the prime minister's office did not respond to questions about how the rocket landing deal was arranged. SpaceX's setbacks in the Bahamas - detailed in this story for the first time - offer a rare glimpse into its fragile diplomacy with foreign governments. As the company races to expand its dominant space business, it must navigate the geopolitical complexities of a high-stakes, global operation involving advanced satellites and orbital-class rockets - some prone to explosive failure - flying over or near sovereign territories. These political risks were laid bare last month when Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said her government was considering taking legal action against SpaceX over "contamination" related to Starship launches from Starbase, the company's rocket site in Texas, 2 miles north of the Mexican border. Her comments came after a Starship rocket exploded into a giant fireball earlier this month on a test stand at Starbase. Responding to Sheinbaum on X, SpaceX said its teams have been hindered from recovering Starship debris that landed in Mexican territory. Mission to Mars SpaceX is pursuing aggressive global expansion as Musk, its CEO, has become a polarizing figure on the world stage, especially following high-profile clashes with several governments during his time advising President Donald Trump . More recently he has fallen out with Trump himself. Starlink, SpaceX's fast-growing satellite internet venture, is a central source of revenue funding Musk's vision to send human missions to Mars aboard Starship. But to scale globally, SpaceX must continue to win the trust of foreign governments with which it wishes to operate the service, as rivals from China and companies like Jeff Bezos' Amazon ramp up competing satellite networks. The company's talks with Bahamian officials show how Starlink is also seen as a key negotiating tool for SpaceX that can help advance other parts of its business. According to SpaceX's orbital calculations, the Falcon 9 rocket can carry heavier payloads and more satellites to space if its booster is allowed to land in Bahamian territory. Meanwhile, Starship's trajectory from Texas to orbit requires it to pass over Caribbean airspaces, exposing the region to potential debris if the rocket fails, as it has in all three of its test flights this year. SpaceX's deal with the Bahamas, the government said, also included a $1 million donation to the University of Bahamas , where the company pledged to conduct quarterly seminars on space and engineering topics. The company must pay a $100,000 fee per landing, pursuant to the country's space regulations it enacted in preparation for the SpaceX activities. While SpaceX made steep investments for an agreement prone to political entanglement, the Falcon 9 booster landings could resume later this summer, two Bahamian officials said. Holding things up is the government's examination of a SpaceX report on the booster landing's environmental impact, as well as talks among officials to amend the country's space reentry regulations to codify a better approval process and environmental review requirements, one of the sources said. Arana Pyfrom, assistant director at the Bahamas' Department of Environmental Planning and Protection, said SpaceX's presence in the country is "polarizing". Many Bahamians, he said, have voiced concerns to the government about their safety from Starship debris and pollution to the country's waters. "I have no strong dislike for the exploration of space, but I do have concerns about the sovereignty of my nation's airspace," Pyfrom said. "The Starship explosion just strengthened opposition to make sure we could answer all these questions." Starship failure rock islands Starship exploded about nine and a half minutes into flight on March 6 after launching from Texas, in what the company said was likely the result of an automatic self-destruct command triggered by an issue in its engine section. It was the second consecutive test failure after a similar mid-flight explosion in January rained debris on the Turks and Caicos Islands, a nearby British overseas territory. Matthew Bastian, a retired engineer from Canada, was anchored in his sailboat on vacation near Ragged Island, a remote island chain in southern Bahamas, just after sunset when he witnessed Starship's explosion. What he initially thought was a rising moon quickly became an expanding fireball that turned into a "large array of streaking comets." "My initial reaction was 'wow that is so cool,' then reality hit me - I could have a huge chunk of rocket debris crash down on me and sink my boat!" he said. "Fortunately that didn't happen, but one day it could happen to someone." Thousands of cruise ships, ferries, workboats, fishing boats, yachts and recreational sailboats ply the waters around Caribbean islands each year, maritime traffic that is crucial for the Bahamas tourism industry . Within days of the explosion, SpaceX dispatched staff and deployed helicopters and speedboats to swarm Ragged Island and nearby islands, using sonar to scan the seafloor for debris, four local residents and a government official told Reuters. On the surface, recovery crews hauled the wreckage from the water and transferred it onto a much larger SpaceX vessel, typically used to catch rocket fairings falling back from space, the people said. The SpaceX team included its vice president of launch, Kiko Dontchev, who emphasized in a news conference with local reporters that the rocket is entirely different from the Falcon 9 boosters that would land off the Exuma coast under SpaceX's agreement. Joe Darville, chairman of a local environmental organization called Save The Bays , was angered by the Starship debris, as well as what he described as a "deal done totally in secret" over the Falcon 9 agreement. As Bahamian waters become increasingly polluted and coral reefs shrink, he's unhappy with the lack of transparency in his government's dealings with SpaceX. "Something like that should have never been made without consultation of the people in the Bahamas," he said. Pyfrom, the official from the Bahamas' environmental agency, said the review of the SpaceX report and the approval process will show "where we fell short, and what we need to improve on." SpaceX, meanwhile, is forging ahead with Starship. Musk said earlier this month he expects the next Starship rocket to lift off within the next three weeks.