"These go to eleven."

In the mock documentary This Is Spinal Tap (1984), about a made-up British rock band, the guitarist Nigel Tufnel, played by Christopher Guest, shows the film-maker Marty DiBergi his Marshall amplifiers. Their knobs are numbered up to eleven, not ten. Is it any louder, DiBergi asks. “Well, it’s one louder, isn’t it?” When DiBergi asks why they did not simply make ten louder, Nigel thinks about it for a long moment and answers: “These go to eleven.”

The phrase escaped the film. In 2002 “up to eleven” entered the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, meaning “up to maximum volume”. Real controls followed: the volume slider on BBC iPlayer, for one, goes up to 11.

So do the volume and the fan in Tesla cars, as a nod to the film. Jamie Lee Curtis, who is married to Christopher Guest, has told the story of collecting her new Model S with him. The man handing over the car showed her the controls, had her turn the volume all the way up, and proudly pointed out that it goes to eleven: the boss is a fan of a certain movie. He had no idea that Nigel Tufnel himself, or rather Christopher Guest, who played him, was sitting right next to him. She told it on The Graham Norton Show in 2018.

SpaceX, the rocket company Musk runs alongside Tesla, has its own version. In March 2007 the second Falcon 1 rocket failed to reach orbit when liquid oxygen began sloshing in its upper stage. The engineers had known about the problem and discussed it, but had ranked it only the eleventh biggest risk in the avionics, just outside the top ten. Eric Berger tells the story in his book Liftoff (2021): “Now,” Musk says, “I ask for the eleven top risks. Always go to eleven.”

And IMDb has its own easter egg. This Is Spinal Tap is the only film on the site whose rating is shown out of eleven stars instead of ten: 7.9/11, as of September 2026.