I took my e-bike and went undercover as a food delivery rider. Here’s what I learned
In cities around the world, e-bikes, scooters, and motorcycles make up the brunt of the food delivery industry. They serve as the critical backbone, connecting hungry customers ordering app-based food with the restaurants that serve up that savory delight. At least, that’s how it works almost everywhere except North America. So I took a trip to the US and spent a day as a food delivery rider to see what the big hangup is.
If you don’t know me, then hello! I’m an electric bike journalist and YouTuber, or at least that’s my normal day job. But this summer I hung up my keyboard for a day and hopped on an e-bike in South Beach, Miami to try Doordashing during a busy afternoon.
My ride for the day was a Lectric XP 3.0 folding e-bike, outfitted with a cargo package and food delivery bags. It’s a great bike for this type of use thanks to its low entry price (just $999!), its low frame, and its small diameter fat tires that make it easy to cruise rough city streets and hop curbs or potholes when necessary.
I made an action-packed video of my day here, and you should check it out if you want the firsthand experience of food delivery by e-bike (and a little Miami culture at the same time).
My goal for the day wasn’t necessarily to make money, though that was a nice side-benefit of the experiment. This was a job, after all (albeit an “independent contractor” job that allows the food app companies to avoid paying a living wage or benefits).
Instead of money, my main goal was to earn experience and insight into what goes into trying to deliver food by e-bike in the US. [And as a quick note: yes, I’m aware e-bike riders are the main delivery method in New York City. Congrats NYC, you’re the only US city that has mainly figured it out. Some other areas like San Francisco are on their way, but for the most part, the US is a laggard in this regard.]
If my goal had been to earn good money on this adventure, I would have been disappointed. More on that in a moment. But since the experience was my aim, I definitely came out as a winner. See what I learned below.
Delivery riders don’t make much money
In total, my day consisted of four and a half hours of food delivery in the bustling South Beach area, covering the lunch rush from 11:00 to 15:30, chosen to (hopefully) maximize profit. Over that period, I delivered nearly a dozen orders from a wide range of restaurants, smoothie bars, cookie shops, liquor stores, and more.
I raked in a total of US $48.75, or roughly $10.80/hour. That included tips, which in fact were a majority of my earnings. For comparison, the minimum wage in Florida where I was riding is $12/hour.
One of the main issues limiting my income was that the app just didn’t seem to give me many offers to deliver food. There were several periods where I was sitting in a “hot spot” as designated on the map in the app, but it took 30 minutes until I received a low-paying offer, such as $3.50 to pick up a McDonald’s order and deliver it. That was the second issue, that the offers simply paid poorly.
Anecdotal evidence from the experience of other delivery workers shows that these food apps often prioritize delivery car drivers over riders, though the exact reason isn’t clear. The apps won’t admit to this practice, but the workers seem pretty confident in its veracity. After talking about my experience with other Doordash delivery workers, several told me that the low-paying orders I got probably sat around for a while on the app getting passed over by delivery drivers until they were finally offered to me.
Cars don’t make space for you
Where I live in Tel Aviv, bikes share the road. There’s also a large motorcycle and scooter culture, so car drivers are used to seeing two-wheelers on the road, and they generally move over to make space. That’s not the case in Florida, nor much of the US. The only place I’ve seen it in the US is in California, where drivers tend to move over for me when I’m lane-splitting on a motorcycle – though they’re also required to by law.
I found that South Beach in Miami had a decent amount of bike lanes, though they were usually just painted onto the road and thus don’t offer much real protection from cars. A few areas, such as the main beach road, had protected bike lanes separated by physical barriers.
Since I was riding a relatively fast e-bike (up to 28 mph or 45 km/h), I would often slide out of the painted-on bike lane and into the main road, especially when I could travel faster than cars in traffic or other pedal bikes ahead of me in the bike lane. Boy, the drivers did not like that! Forget the fact that the drivers were stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic sometimes – those drivers still seem to hate seeing cyclists blow past them on the road.
Fortunately, I didn’t experience aggressive enough driving to the point of fearing harm, though such accounts are sadly numerous among cyclists in the US. It can be dangerous riding a bike with cars in the US, partially due to the lack of proper infrastructure and partially due to drivers just seeming to be surprised at seeing a bike sharing the road with them. And while road rage against cyclists accounts for a smaller segment of the injuries and deaths than good old-fashioned distracted operating of heavy machinery, it’s still an important consideration.
These lurking dangers are something that cyclists simply have to keep in mind. The road is ours too, but we can’t afford the same disregard that drivers have been permitted. We always have to be on the lookout for those that aren’t on the lookout.
Being a bike delivery rider is harder than it looks
I was surprised at just how difficult the job was. I’m a hard worker, I’ve worked plenty of manual labor jobs, I served in the military, and I’m no stranger to getting my hands dirty. But I still have a newfound respect for the job performed by delivery riders.
It’s not just the effort – sure, I was on an electric bike, but I was often pedaling hard to make my battery last as long as possible. I had a second battery but only swapped it after nearly four hours of working. Riding a heavy bike with non-aerodynamic food bags in a city with cars trying to wipe you out isn’t easy. And I did it on a nice, sunny day. Imagine this in the rain, snow, or brutal heat.
Then there’s the mental stress. You’re constantly on your toes for orders. When you get one, you have to rush wherever it sends you, fight your way to the food, then use a crappy map with a vague dot to find your destination for delivery. The address may be there, or it may just be wrong. And you’re being timed with a delivery deadline that is nearly unachievable. If you don’t rush to make it on time, you’ll be dinged with fewer future delivery offers. But you better not break a traffic rule – car drivers love to cite that as a reason for endangering cyclists on the road. “He blew through a stop sign back there, why should I give him space when I pass?”
Then you’ve got to find a way to lock your bike so it won’t get stolen, locate your customer, not get stabbed if it’s a bad part of town, then hurry back for the next order – all for as little as three bucks. Delivery riders on e-bikes have faced an alarming increase in assaults, either for cash or to steal their e-bikes. I always carry protection, and I think it’s a good idea for e-bike delivery riders to consider it while working.
Another surprise was that I sometimes had to do people’s shopping. Doordash gave me a type of limited credit card when I signed up, and twice I had to shop for things people ordered on Doordash.
The first was at a liquor store, where I had to buy some guy’s booze and then scan his ID when I got to his apartment. The second was a CVS order where someone needed a pink hairbow immediately, so they ordered it for delivery.
CVS stores aren’t known for being easy to find things, let alone a single hairbow. And I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a liquor store in Florida, but booze is apparently the state bird, and these things are like a Costco of alcohol. Good luck finding a specific bottle of obscure champagne and getting on your way by the deadline.
A second battery definitely makes things easier
If you’re going to do delivery work on an e-bike, having a second battery is a good thing to consider. I tried to go easy on my first battery and make it last, but there were times that I throttled at full-speed comfortably knowing I had a spare battery in case I drained my first one.
The downside is there usually isn’t a good place to lock a second battery on a bike – unless you have a dual battery e-bike – and so I kept my spare battery in one of my two food bags. I was constantly worried someone would steal it while I was handing off a delivery, so I always rushed back so as not to leave my bike unattended very long.
You should always tip your delivery rider
If you’re one of those people who says “I shouldn’t tip because their company should pay workers fairly instead of me paying their wages” then you’re 50% correct and 100% a jerk.
Yes, companies should pay workers fairly. But they don’t, at least not in the US. Until then, service workers who are not getting an hourly wage (like food delivery riders) depend on those tips as real income. They’ve got families to feed and bills to pay, just like you.
Over half of my earnings for the day came from tips. Without those tips, I would have earned around $5/hr just from the base pay.
So please tip your delivery rider. I always did before, but now I tip even better. And when it’s raining outside or rockets are falling, I tip delivery riders even better than that.
These people do hard work that is not made any easier by society, road infrastructure, or pretentious jerks wondering why their burger is 2 minutes late from a delivery rider sporting a fresh dog bite.
In conclusion
I still firmly believe two-wheelers are the only correct way to deliver food in cities. I’ve never seen a car deliver food where I live, and it’s the same for every European city I’ve ever ordered food in, with the exception of car-loving Germany.
Why we need slow-moving 4,500 lb (2,000 kg) vehicles to deliver a sandwich in a city is beyond me. In a city environment, food arrives faster on a bike, it requires less energy, and it’s better for the air we breathe. Everyone wins.
But there are some serious problems here too. These riders are doing critical work for very little pay and even less respect. They sometimes risk their lives, yet if they ever get hit by a car, there’s no one offering health insurance to heal them. And on top of all that, the delivery apps seem to prioritize car drivers instead of bike riders, further limiting their ability to earn a living wage.
I’m not saying I have all the answers here. But I do know that work needs to be done to improve this system. And I also know one other thing: now I’m hungry.
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CANNES — Ten years ago, Vitalik Buterin and a small band of developers huddled in a drafty Berlin loft strung with dangling lightbulbs, laptops balanced on mismatched chairs and chipped tables. They weren’t corporate titans or venture-backed founders — just idealists working long nights to push a radical idea into reality.
From that sparse office, they launched “Frontier,” Ethereum‘s first live network. It was bare-bones — no interface, no polish, nothing user-friendly. But it could mine, execute smart contracts, and let developers test decentralized applications. It was the spark that transformed Ethereum from an abstract concept into a living, breathing system.
Bitcoin had captured headlines as “digital gold,” but what they built was something else entirely: programmable money, a financial operating system where code could move funds, enforce contracts, and create businesses without banks or brokers.
One year earlier and 520 miles away in Zurich, Paul Brody got a call from IBM security: A kid was wandering the lab unattended.
“That’s not a child,” Brody told them. “That’s Vitalik. He’s a grown-up — he just looks really young.”
Paul Brody and Vitalik Buterin with IBM and Samsung executives at CES 2015, where IBM unveiled its first blockchain prototype built on Ethereum’s early code.
Paul Brody
At the time, Buterin was building the bones of Ethereum. The blockchain was still in its alpha stage, an early version of what would become a $420 billion platform rewiring Wall Street and powering decentralized finance, NFTs, and tokenized markets across the globe.
Brody, then leading a research team at IBM, remembers how quickly the idea clicked.
“One of the guys on the research team came to me and said, ‘I’ve met this really interesting guy. He’s got a really cool idea…It’s like a version of bitcoin, but we’re going to make it much faster and programmable,'” he said. “And when he said that to me, I thought, ‘That’s it. That is what I want. That is what we need.'”
With Buterin’s help, IBM built its first blockchain prototype on Ethereum’s early code, unveiling it at CES in 2015 alongside Samsung. “That was how I ended up down this path,” Brody said. “I was done with all other technology and basically made the switch to blockchain.”
Even now, as EY’s global blockchain leader, Brody remembers feeling a pang of envy. “This is a kid, and it doesn’t matter,” he said. “I was jealous of Vitalik… to be able to do that.”
He added, “I don’t think opportunities like that could have been surfaced when I was that age.”
Now, a decade later, that experiment has quietly rewired global markets.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin delivers a keynote at ETHCC, laying out the network’s next steps — and its values test — as institutional adoption accelerates.
EthCC
“It’s very impressive, just how much the space has succeeded and grown into, beyond pretty much anyone’s expectations,” Buterin told CNBC in Cannes on the sidelines of the blockchain’s flagship event in Europe.
Buterin said the change over the past decade has been staggering. Ten years ago, he recalled, the crypto community was “just a very small space,” with only a handful of people working on bitcoin and a few other projects.
Since then, Ethereum has become “this big thing,” Buterin reflected, with major corporations now launching assets on both its base layer and layer-two networks. Parts of national economies are beginning to run on Ethereum infrastructure, a far cry from its cypherpunk origins.
But Buterin warned that mainstream adoption brings risks as well as benefits. One concern is that if too few issuers or intermediaries dominate, they could become “de facto controllers of the ecosystem.” He described a scenario where Ethereum might appear open, but, in practice, all the keys are managed by centralized providers.
“That’s the thing that we don’t want,” he said.
Prague to the Riviera
Two years earlier in Prague, CNBC met Buterin at Paralelní Polis, a sprawling industrial complex turned anarchist tech hub in the city’s Holešovice district. The building’s labyrinthine staircases and shadowed corridors felt like a physical map of the crypto world itself — part resistance movement, part experiment in reimagining power.
It was a place built on Václav Benda’s concept of a “parallel society,” where decentralized technologies offered refuge from state surveillance and control. It’s the kind of place where Buterin, a self-described nomad, found himself at home among cypherpunks and cryptographic idealists.
At the time, Buterin described crypto’s greatest utility not in speculative trading, but in helping people survive broken financial systems in emerging markets.
ETHPrague 2023 was held at Paralelní Polis in the Czech Republic.
Pavel Sinagl
“The stuff that we often find a bit basic and boring is exactly the stuff that brings lots of value,” he told CNBC at the time. “Just being able to plug into the international economy — these are things that they don’t have, and these are things that provide huge value for people there.”
Even in Prague, where coders worked to make payments fast and censorship-resistant, the technology felt like a resistance movement — privacy-preserving, anti-authoritarian, a lifeline in countries where banking collapses were common and money couldn’t be trusted.
This year, Buterin keynoted Ethereum’s flagship conference at the Palais des Festivals — the same red carpet venue that hosts movie stars each spring.
It was a fitting symbol of Ethereum’s journey: from underground hacker dens to a network that governments, banks, and brokerages are now racing to build upon.
Brody, who currently leads blockchain strategy at EY, says what matters most is how deeply Ethereum is integrating into traditional finance. “The global financial system is really nicely described as a whole network of pipes,” he said.
“What’s happening now is that Ethereum is getting plumbed into this infrastructure,” Brody continued, noting that until recently, crypto operated on entirely separate rails from traditional finance.
Now, he said, Ethereum is being wired directly into core transaction systems, setting the stage for massive financial flows — from investors to everyday savers — to migrate away from older mechanisms toward Ethereum-based platforms that can move money faster, at lower cost, and with more advanced functionality than legacy systems allow.
Becoming the plumbing of Wall Street
Stablecoins — digital dollars that live on Ethereum — power trillions in payments, tokenized assets and funds are moving on-chain, and Robinhood recently rolled out tokenized U.S. equities via Arbitrum, an Ethereum-based layer two.
Circle’s USDC — the second-largest stablecoin — still settles around 65% of its volume on Ethereum’s rails. According to CoinGecko’s latest “State of Stablecoins” report, Ethereum accounts for nearly 50% of all stablecoin activity.
Between Circle’s IPO and the stablecoin-focused GENIUS Act, now signed into law by President Donald Trump, regulators have new reason to engage with, rather than fight, this transformation.
Data from Deutsche Bank shows stablecoin transactions hit $28 trillion last year — more than Mastercard and Visa combined. The bank itself has announced plans to build a tokenization platform on zkSync, a fast, cost-efficient Ethereum layer two designed to help asset managers issue and manage tokenized funds, stablecoins, and other real-world assets while meeting regulatory and data protection requirements.
Digital asset exchanges like Coinbase and Kraken are racing to capture this crossover between traditional securities and crypto.
As part of its quarterly earnings release, Coinbase said this week it’s launching tokenized stocks and prediction markets for U.S. users in the coming months, a move that would diversify its revenue stream and bring it into more direct competition with brokerages like Robinhood and eToro.
Kraken announced plans to offer 24/7 trading of U.S. stock tokens in select overseas markets.
BlackRock‘s tokenized money market fund, BUIDL, launched on Ethereum last year, offering qualified investors on-chain access to yield with real-time redemptions settled in USDC.
Even as newer blockchains tout faster speeds and lower fees, Ethereum has proven its staying power as the trusted network for global finance. Buterin told CNBC in Cannes that there’s a misconception about what institutions actually want.
“A lot of institutions basically tell us to our faces that they value Ethereum because it’s stable and dependable, because it doesn’t go down,” he said.
He added that firms frequently ask about privacy and other long-term features — the kinds of concerns that institutions, he said, “really value.”
Institutions are choosing various layer twos to meet specific needs — Robinhood uses Arbitrum, Deutsche Bank zkSync, Coinbase and Kraken Optimism — but they all ultimately settle on Ethereum’s base layer.
“The value proposition of Ethereum is its global reach, its huge capital flows, its incredible programmability,” Brody said.
He added that the fact it isn’t the fastest blockchain or the one with the quickest settlement times “is secondary to the fact that it’s overall the most widely adopted and flexible system.”
Brody also believes history points toward consolidation. He said that in most technology standards wars, one platform ultimately dominates. In his view, Ethereum is likely to become that dominant programmability layer, while Bitcoin plays a complementary role as a risk-off, scarcity-driven asset.
Engineers, he said, “love to work on a standard… to scale on a standard,” and Ethereum has become precisely that.
Tomasz Stańczak, the newly appointed co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, in Cannes for Europe’s largest annual gathering for the blockchain.
MacKenzie Sigalos
Tomasz Stańczak, the newly appointed co-executive director of the Ethereum Foundation, sees the same pattern from inside the ecosystem.
“Institutions choose Ethereum over and over again for its values,” Stańczak said. “Ten years without stopping for a moment. Ten years of upgrades with a huge dedication to security and censorship resistance.”
When institutions send an order to the market, they want to be sure that it’s treated fairly, that nobody has preference, and that the transaction is executed at the time when it’s delivered. “That’s what Ethereum guarantees,” added Stańczak.
Those assurances have become more valuable as traditional finance moves on-chain.
Scaling without losing its soul
Ethereum’s path hasn’t been smooth. The network has weathered spectacular booms and busts, rivals promising faster speeds, and criticism that it’s too slow or expensive for mass adoption. Yet it has outlasted nearly all early competitors.
In 2022, Ethereum replaced its old transaction validation method, proof-of-work — where armies of computers competed to solve puzzles — with proof-of-stake, where users lock up their ether as collateral to help secure the network. The shift cut Ethereum’s energy use by more than 99% and set the stage for upgrades aimed at making apps faster and cheaper to run on its base layer.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin in Prague, where he finds refuge with like-minded programmers looking to change the world through cryptography-powered technology.
CNBC
The next decade will test whether Ethereum can scale without compromise.
Buterin said the first priority is getting Ethereum to “the finish line” in terms of its technical goals. That means improving scalability and speed without sacrificing its core principles of decentralization and security — and ideally making those properties even stronger.
Zero-knowledge proofs, for example, could dramatically increase transaction capacity while making it possible to verify that the chain is following the rules of the protocol on something as small as a smartwatch.
There are also algorithmic changes the team already knows are needed to protect Ethereum against large-scale computing attacks. Implementing those, Buterin said, is part of the path to making Ethereum “a really valuable part of global infrastructure that helps make the internet and the economy a more free and open place.”
Buterin believes the real change won’t come with fireworks. He said it may already be unfolding years before most people recognize it.
“This type of disruption doesn’t feel like overturning the existing system,” he said. “It feels like building a new thing that just keeps growing and growing until eventually more and more people realize you don’t even have to look at the old thing if you didn’t want to.”
Brody can already see hints of that future. Wire transfers are moving on-chain, assets like stocks and real estate are being tokenized, and eventually, he said, businesses will run entire contracts — the money, the products, the terms and conditions — automatically on a single, shared infrastructure.
That shift, Brody added, won’t simply copy old financial systems onto new technology.
“One of the lessons from technology adoption is that it’s not that we replace like for like,” he said. “When new things come along, we tend to build on a new technology infrastructure. My key hypothesis is that as we build new financial products, it will be attractive to build them on blockchain rails — and we’ll try to do things on blockchain rails that we can’t do today.”
If Brody and Buterin are right, the real disruption won’t make headlines. It’ll simply become the way money moves, unseen and unstoppable.
WATCH: Robinhood hits record high as OpenAI, SpaceX go on-chain
Tesla opened its retro-futuristic “Tesla Diner” last Monday, July 21st. It’s a cool concept and the realization of a plan that was first talked about in 2018… but in the 12 days since it opened, it hasn’t been all roses so far.
The diner has been through a few twists and turns since it was first proposed by Tesla CEO Elon Musk on a conference call in 2018. At first, the plan was to build it alongside a Supercharger location in Santa Monica, but the restaurant portion didn’t get off the ground and Tesla just build a Supercharger location there instead.
Then Tesla moved the project to Hollywood… on Santa Monica Blvd. So, kind of still Santa Monica, right? It took the place of an old Shakey’s Pizza, and has been under construction for quite some time.
The plans were to offer a diner with a Supercharger, carhop service, large drive-in movie screens and a retro-futuristic aesthetic around it all. It opened on July 21st, at 4:20pm (420 being a reference to Musk’s reported drug addictions), delivering all that, along with a merchandise shop and one of Tesla’s Optimus robots serving popcorn.
Pretty much immediately, the Diner had quite a festive atmosphere. The line to get food has reportedly consistently been an hour or more long since it was opened, which speaks to the site’s popularity – but perhaps also a failure to provide the kind of rapid service that a fast casual diner with car service might seek to offer.
Given that the site is also a Supercharger, one would expect to have a premium on fast service, so that cars don’t end up parked in spots for too long which could otherwise be used for fast charging (Tesla charges idle fees for EVs which charge for too long and clog up chargers, but we’ve heard conflicting information over whether these idle fees apply to people waiting for food at the Diner)
One remedy for these long lines, though, is Tesla’s in-car computer, which cleverly allows drivers to order food from inside their car ahead of time while navigating to the site. Tesla then knows when the driver will show up, based on in-car navigation, and theoretically can have the order ready by then – but perhaps that will become more relevant once lines die down.
In theory, it definitely does seem like a “Supercharger done right.” We’ve covered several instances of these, charging plazas that aren’t just a place to charge, but which offer other amenities that drivers might want while charging – like ROVE’s Santa Ana “full service” charger with grocery store, lounge and car wash; or Rivian’s “Outpost” locations. And we definitely want to see more of this, giving people things to do while they’re charging, which can lead to electric roadtrips feeling even better than gas ones.
But so far the Diner hasn’t been without its problems, and we’ve heard a number of them in the past 12 days.
Some of the problems Tesla Diner has seen since opening
Both during construction and now that the site is open, many of the site’s neighbors aren’t particularly happy, according to a 404 media article including several interviews. An apartment block directly beside the site has seen significant turnover and vacancies as renters were fed up with years of construction, operating 14 hours a day, and loud generators that also emitted polluting exhaust.
Residents in the article were afraid to use their full names, lest they be exposed to abuse by Tesla fans as a result – something that we at Electrek can attest to, having received similar responses after writing truthful articles about the company.
Some renters have had their windows blocked by the 40-foot-tall movie screen, and while the screen doesn’t produce sound itself (that’s piped through vehicle speakers), it does have fans on the back of it which make a constant whir – thus blocking their view and adding noise pollution.
And since the diner is open 24/7, there’s no reprieve from the hustle and bustle, which has also caused traffic backups along the small nearby streets and has forced the apartment building to reinforce its entry door.
Much of this could be blamed on the planning commission, perhaps, for allowing the project to go on as-is – assuming Tesla was upfront about the site’s uses. And some of the chaos will calm down once the novelty of the site goes down, and some noise is to be expected for those living in a relatively busy part of the LA area in the first place. One resident did say they liked the hustle and bustle, but according to the article, this resident seems to be in the minority.
Beyond the planning issues and busy nature of the site, there have been several operational issues so far.
On the very first day, Tesla’s popcorn-scooping Optimus robot failed. Tesla has touted its expertise with “real-world AI,” using its Optimus robots as an example, showing the robot’s dexterity and ability to do factory tasks. But the problem is, in most public displays of the robot so far, it has been teleoperated – that is, remote controlled by a human. Reportedly, Diner employees confirmed that the popcorn-bot was teleoperated, despite doing quite a simple and repetitive task.
The robot also has multiple tenders – videos show Diner employees handing popcorn containers to it, as it can’t separate the containers itself, and having to refill the popcorn machine and clean up any dropped popcorn. Combine those employees and the reported teleoperator for the robot, and this feels like we’re seeing a decrease in labor efficiency here, rather than an increase.
One widely-shared report showed perishable items stacked outside – but given that it was just a single photo, it seems likely that these items were mid-delivery.
More concerningly, TMZ reported that a woman was struck on the head by an awning/umbrella, and her husband claimed that she appeared confused and briefly lost consciousness afterwards. The LA Fire Department responded and the woman left the scene without an ambulance.
And of course, as is the case with anything Tesla these days, the Diner has attracted controversy. In Los Angeles – a city which is currently being occupied by nazi-like goons who are demanding that residents show their papers lest they be kidnapped and potentially shipped to a death camp – the man who last year became the largest individual global funder of the fascist regime that is now causing these illegal disappearances is not very popular. And you don’t have to go far back to remember when Musk himself said that his current actions are “not good for America or the world.”
Tesla locations in the LA area (and around the globe) have been subject to routine “Tesla Takedown” protests for months, starting after Musk did two clear nazi salutes and had spent his first few weeks in an advisory role in which he recommended that the US government haphazardly and illegally cut thousands of important jobs, increasing government chaos and ballooning the US deficit.
The protests also note Musk’s recommendation to cut USAid, an incredibly effective and relatively inexpensive international soft power program for the US, cuts of which are projected to cause millions of deaths globally (USAID is credited with saving 91 million lives from 2001-2021).
On the Diner’s first day, a lone protester showed up, a harbinger of things to come. Then, on it’s first weekend, the protest became much more significant – with protesters erecting two “wacky waving inflatable arm men” designed to look like Musk and repeatedly mimic his nazi salutes.
Another protest is scheduled for later today, starting at 4PM, and Tesla Takedown plans to protest from 4-7pm every Saturday and Sunday until further notice.
Finally, one video called the whole thing, and particularly the long line for dining, a “disaster.” It pointed out the difficulty a new Ioniq 6 owner was having with operating his Tesla app to grab a Supercharge (Tesla’s network is now open to Hyundai EVs). This did not appear to be a site-specific problem, rather an issue with the Tesla app as best we can tell, but the frustration of all the traffic chaos must not have made attempts to find a solution any easier.
While Tesla does have a spotlight on everything it does, this seems like a significant collection of difficulties and unforced errors for less than two weeks of operation (hmm, where have we seen something similar before…). Let’s see if they’re able to iron out the kinks.
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