How Glenn Howerton’s Faulty Tesla Inspired One of ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s Most Iconic Episodes
On a 2023 episode of The Always Sunny Podcast, Glenn Howerton shared a story about his Tesla Model X with Rob Mac, Charlie Day and Megan Ganz that would end up inspiring one of Dennis’ most notorious meltdowns.
Like many Tesla drivers, Howerton thought the corresponding app was a “good fail-safe,” explaining that he could use the app to drive his car. This “fail-safe,” however, proved to be anything but. After driving into the dead-zone depths of an L.A. parking garage, Howerton learned the hard way that mobile keys don’t work without cell service.
“There’s gotta be a solution to this, but this is wild,” Howerton remembered thinking of his bricked car and useless phone. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here.”
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He decided to call it a night, and Ubered home before approaching his electric vehicle with fresh eyes the next morning. But neither time nor distance proved to be much help. Though Howerton was able to enter the car the following day, that’s where the W’s stopped, and the Dennis of it all began. “I screamed,” the actor admitted upon discovering his car still wouldn’t start. “Just a big like, ‘Fuuuck!!!!!’”
With his neck veins bulging and his face beet red, a la his character’s reactions to questions about his human-skin furniture, Howerton tried to cool things down by calling AAA to help him get out of this jam. But more problems arose when he couldn’t get his Tesla into “tow mode.”
“The screen works; everything works. I’m doing everything right. The car’s in park, it says, ‘Your car has to be in park. You gotta have your foot on the brake for the car to go in tow mode,’ but it’s grayed out,” he explained. “No matter what I do, it’s grayed out. I can’t.”
With AAA unable to help, Howerton launched the first of several hours-long phone calls. “I was on the phone with these people from 9:30 in the morning until six at night,” he remembered, noting that he spoke to 12 associates trying to rectify the issue. By nightfall, he’d had enough: “You guys lost a customer today. I’ve been a Tesla customer for 10 years. You lost a customer today. This is fucked up.”
On the podcast, which was recorded a year before the episode aired in July 2023, Howerton discussed the potential of turning his Tesla woes into an Always Sunny episode, speculating how Dennis would handle a similar situation. “If we were writing this for Dennis, the runs would be really great,” Mac said at the time. “It would be probably insufferable.”
“The whole episode would just be me stuck in a parking garage and yelling at a key fob,” Howerton replied.
This visceral frustration was funneled into Season 16’s “Dennis Takes a Mental Health Day,” which is Always Sunny’s equivalent of Uncut Gems, and features Dennis getting locked out of his “Tsuma” rental car after losing his phone. The five-star man then loses his mind on the side of the road before storming the fictitious carmaker’s American headquarters.
Given the entire experience, Dennis’ waterlogged clunker doesn’t look so bad.
