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We’ve got three different sales to kick off this week’s Green Deals, starting with Jackery’s newly launched early Easter savings that are taking up to 50% off units, including a new low price on the Explorer 3000 Pro solar generator bundle with a 500W panel for $1,947, among others. We spotted Tenways’ Spring Sale fresh out of the gate with up to $600 in e-bike savings (as well as up to $385 in bonus free gear), the largest of which is hitting the AGO X All-Terrain e-bike for a new $1,899 low. Lastly, running as part of EcoFlow’s ongoing Easter Sale and Mega Sale, we have two short-term flash offers on the RIVER 3 Portable Power Station to its $159 low, as well as a much more massive dual DELTA Pro 3 home backup bundle. Plus, all the other hangover Green Deals from last week are in the links at the bottom of the page, collected together in our Electrified Weekly roundup.

Head below for other New Green Deals we’ve found today and, of course, Electrek’s best EV buying and leasing deals. Also, check out the new Electrek Tesla Shop for the best deals on Tesla accessories.

Jackery’s early Easter sale offers Explorer 3000 Pro solar generator with a 500W panel at new $1,947 low

Jackery is launching its Early Easter Sale through April 11, offering up to 50% off a collection of power stations for home backup, individual appliance backup, and outdoor adventures – plus, there is a limited-time bonus 5% off discount too. One noticeable price drop for RV roamers is the brand’s Explorer 3000 Pro Portable Power Station bundled with a 500W solar panel for $1,946.55 shipped, after using the code EXTRA5 at checkout for an additional 5% off. Coming down from its $3,449 price tag here, with a higher $3,699 rate elsewhere, this is only the third discount we have seen on this newer bundle after first appearing as a short-term flash offer to $1,999 before returning to that rate for its longer sale at the end of March. It’s going lower than ever here today as the 44% markdown strikes $1,502 off the going rate at a new all-time low. It also beats out the Amazon pricing that is only bringing costs down to $2,299.

A great choice to gear up for camping trips – whether you’re planning to rough it in tents or take out the RV – Jackery’s Explorer 3000 Pro is one of the more versatile options in terms of what it can power. It boasts a 3,024Wh capacity and provides up to 3,000W of average power output, surging to 6,000W for those larger appliance needs. There are 10 port options to connect to for a juice up, one of them even being a RV-dedicated TT30 port, putting it alongside the Explorer 2000 Plus and Explorer 5000 Plus as the best support for RV travels/living (deals on them below). On that note, if you want to possibly invest to build up your system, these two alternate models come as modular setups that can expand upward in capacity and output, unlike the 3000 Pro.

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Plugging the Explorer 3000 Pro into a wall outlet will get you back to a full battery in about 2.4 hours, or you can take advantage of its maximum 1,200W of solar input that takes a little longer at three to four hours when using the sun’s rays (which will be a little over twice that timeframe for the 500W bundle here). There’s also the third option to connect it to your vehicle, which refills the battery in about 35 hours.

***Note: None of the following prices have had the bonus savings factored in, so be sure to use the code EXTRA5 where applicable to score the most savings (you’ll see it as an on-page offer).

Jackery’s early Easter sale backup deals for critical loads:

Jackery’s early Easter sale backup deals for individual appliances:

Jackery’s early Easter sale deals for outdoor adventure:

Jackery’s early Easter sale accessory deals:

You can browse the entire lineup of Jackery’s Early Easter Sale on the main landing page here.

Tenways AGO X e-bike

Tenways drops the AGO X all-terrain e-bike to new $1,899 low (Reg. $2,499) in spring savings

Tenways has launched its Spring Sale with up to $600 being taken off its e-bike lineup. Alongside the brand’s popular CGO600 Pro (both the chain-drive and belt-drive models), which is down at $1,499 once again, we spotted the more advanced AGO X e-bike scoring the biggest price cut to $1,899 shipped and coming with $307 in free gear. This sale is bringing the costs down off the e-bike’s usual $2,499 price tag, with the discounts we’ve been seeing over the last year only going as low as $1,999. While this sale continues you’ll be able to take advantage of a $600 markdown that brings the price down lower than we’ve seen before, landing it at a new all-time low price. Not only are you getting free mudguards and a rear cargo rack for free ($307 value), but you can also add on a front carrier for just $1 (normally $79). As usual, medical providers, military personnel, first responders, and teachers can also score an additional $150 in savings through verification.

Boasted as an all-terrain “e-bike SUV” for errands and commutes alike, Tenways’ AGO X cruises into view via the Bafang M410 250W mid-drive motor and 504Wh battery. While it’s not as lightweight as its counterparts, it only weighs in at 64 pounds, which still makes it more manageable for urban environments than many other competitors on the market. Like its sibling e-bikes, this one also does away with any throttle, but with the five PAS levels that come supported by an integrated torque sensor, you’ll be getting up to 62 miles of travel on a single charge, with it reaching top speeds of 20 MPH.

The streamlined design of its frame not only gives it a slick look, with its cable system all neatly contained out of sight, but also comes with a nice variety of features. Your riding experience is enhanced for smoother and more comfortable rides with the SR SUNTOUR Lockout Fork, Selle Royal Saddle, and riser handlebars while safety is guaranteed thanks to the hydraulic disc brakes, 29-inch puncture-resistant tires, and integrated front and rear lighting. That’s not all, you’ll also have a Shimano 10-speed derailleur and a TFT LCD color display that can pair with your smartphone to provide navigation and more.

Tenways’ other Spring Sale e-bike deals:

  • CGO600 Pro Belt-Drive e-bike: $1,499 (Reg. $1,899)
    • 20 MPH for up to 53 miles
    • comes with $118 in free gear
  • CGO600 Pro 8-speed e-bike: $1,499 (Reg. $1,899)
    • 20 MPH for up to 53 miles
    • comes with $118 in free gear
  • CGO800S Premium Step-Thru Commuter e-bike: $1,699 (Reg. $1,999)
    • 20 MPH for up to 53 miles
    • Turn-signaling and color display
    • comes with $227 in free gear + $1 front carrier offer
  • AGO T Step-Thru Premium e-bike: $2,699 (No initial price cut)
    • 20 MPH for up to 62 miles
    • Enviolo stepless shifting hub
    • comes with $178 in free gear
EcoFlow RIVER 3 Portable Power Station

EcoFlow flash sale returns RIVER 3 245Wh LiFePO4 power station to $159 low + a massive home backup bundle

As part of both its Easter Sale and Mega Sale, EcoFlow has launched the second round of flash offers running through the rest of the day. The first of these discounts is on the RIVER 3 Portable Power Station for $159 shipped. It’s being brought down from its usual $239 price tag for today only, which we’ve been frequently seeing more recently, especially in the form of Amazon Lightning deals. You can grab one today at the returning all-time low price thanks to the 33% markdown that cuts $80 off the going rate, with the matching option to grab it from Amazon too.

A compact option for personal device and appliance backup while out camping, EcoFlow’s RIVER 3 sports a 245Wh LiFePO4 capacity with X-GaNPower tech to bolster its energy efficiency by “delivering double runtime for appliances under 100W while reducing the size and controlling the volume to less than 30 dB at a distance of 1.5 ft.” This, paired with the additional X-Boost tech, allows for its 300W of power output to surge up to 600W to cover appliances like heaters and the like – with six port options available to connect to (two ACs, two USB-As, one USB-C, and one car port).

The battery can be recharged back to full in just one hour via a wall outlet while also having the option to connect up to 110W of solar input to recharge in 2.6 hours. The unit has waterproof and fireproof safeguards, as well as an IP54 protection rating and a drop-resistant design to minimalize potential damage while out in the wilds.

The second of these flash offers is a much larger home backup bundle of two DELTA Pro 3 Portable Power Stations with a 50A hub to connect them and a Smart Home Panel 2 – all for $6,179 shipped. Each of these power stations gives you a 4,096Wh LiFePO4 capacity (8,192Wh together) that can output power through its 14 ports at 4,000W (surging to 6,000W). Of course, this setup can be further expanded to a maximum 48,000Wh capacity with additional gear that also expands its power output up to 12,000W. The power station boasts the largest amount of ways to recharge too, with seven solo-source options and 18 combination options. With the Smart Home Panel 2, you’ll have the plug-and-play option to cover up to 12 circuits at home when outages occur, with it also allowing you to connect to any rigid roof panels for everyday solar charging too.

Be sure to also check out the differing lineups for EcoFlow’s ongoing Easter Sale and Mega Sale that are taking up to 65% off power stations through April 14, complete with free gear, massive EcoCredit rewards, and bonus savings.

Best New Year EV deals!

Best new Green Deals landing this week

The savings this week are also continuing to a collection of other markdowns. To the same tune as the offers above, these all help you take a more energy-conscious approach to your routine. Winter means you can lock in even better off-season price cuts on electric tools for the lawn while saving on EVs and tons of other gear.

FTC: We use income earning auto affiliate links. More.

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Ethereum turns 10: From scrappy experiment to Wall Street’s invisible backbone

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August 2, 2025

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Ethereum turns 10: From scrappy experiment to Wall Street’s invisible backbone

Ethereum succeeded beyond anyone's expectations, says network co-founder Vitalik Buterin at EthCC

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.

Ethereum Co-Founder Joe Lubin on Ethereum Treasurys as the cryptocurrency turns 10

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.

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev explains 'dual purpose' behind trading platform's new crypto offerings

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.”

Ethereum marks 10 years of development. Here's what's next for the network

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

Robinhood hits record high as OpenAI, SpaceX go on-chain

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Environment

How Florida quietly surpassed California in solar growth

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5 hours ago

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August 2, 2025

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How Florida quietly surpassed California in solar growth

Solar energy is booming across the U.S. and, for the first time, Florida is catching up to industry powerhouses Texas and California.

Despite removing climate change from its official state policy in 2024, Florida added more utility-scale solar than California last year, with over 3 gigawatts of new capacity coming online. 

“This is not a fluke,” said Sylvia Leyva Martinez, senior analyst at Wood Mackenzie. “Florida is now shaping national solar growth.”

The surge is being driven by utilities, not rooftop panels. Florida Power & Light alone built over 70% of the state’s new solar last year. A state rule lets developers skip lengthy siting reviews for projects under 75 megawatts, which speeds up construction and cuts costs.

“There’s no silver bullet,” said Syd Kitson, founder of Babcock Ranch, a town designed to be powered almost entirely by solar. “But one thing Florida got right is acceptance. Here, people want solar. And we’re proving it works.”

Babcock Ranch runs on its own microgrid and stayed online during Hurricane Ian in 2022, while much of southwest Florida went dark.

“We didn’t lose power, internet, or water,” said Don Bishop, a homeowner there. “That changes how you think about energy.”

The economics are doing the rest. With industrial demand rising and natural gas prices climbing, solar is increasingly the cheapest option, even without subsidies.

“Utilities aren’t building solar because it’s green,” Martinez said. “They’re doing it because it’s cheaper.”

But new challenges are emerging.

In July, President Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill, which accelerates the rollback of solar and wind tax credits. Homeowners lose the federal investment credit after 2025. Developers face tighter deadlines and stricter sourcing rules.

“It won’t kill the market,” said Zoë Gaston, an analyst who follows the solar industry at Wood Mackenzie. “But it makes the math harder.”

Analysts now expect a 42% drop in rooftop solar installs in Florida over the next five years. And while utility-scale growth continues, grid constraints are becoming an issue. Utilities are pouring money into storage, smart infrastructure, and grid upgrades to keep up.

Babcock Ranch is piloting new microgrid systems to add resilience. The hope is that other communities can take the playbook and adapt it, storm-proofing neighborhoods one block at a time.

“We’ve been testing this for years,” Kitson said. “Now it’s about scale. It’s about showing others they can do it too.”

The bigger question is whether Florida can keep this momentum going without policy support, and while still leaning heavily on natural gas.

“Florida has the solar resources,” said Mark Jacobson, a professor at Stanford’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. “What’s missing is political consistency.”

Watch the video to see how Florida became a solar leader and what could slow it down.

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Environment

The Tesla Diner has been open for 12 days and it’s going kinda rough so far

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8 hours ago

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August 2, 2025

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The Tesla Diner has been open for 12 days and it's going kinda rough so far

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.

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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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