Elon Musk Promises to Add Roller Skating, Diner and More to Tesla Supercharging Station
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Elon Musk: Tesla CEO, billionaire innovator, restauranteur? Over the weekend, Musk sent out oddly vague (yet somehow specific) tweets regarding how he wants to transform Tesla's Supercharging stations.
The first Supercharging location to expand out will have way more than a traditional 7-Eleven Big Gulp or slushie. Musk's suggestion sounded more like a full-scale Sonic drive thru.
"Gonna put an old school drive-in, roller skates & rock restaurant at one of the new Tesla Supercharger locations in LA," he tweeted.
Gonna put an old school drive-in, roller skates & rock restaurant at one of the new Tesla Supercharger locations in LA
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 7, 2018
And, well, Twitter fans definitely added their own spins on what else they'd like to see at a Supercharging station:
I'll admit that that's a tourist attraction I would actually consider traveling to a holiday in LA to see...
— ArtOfSimplification (@Art0fSimplicity) January 7, 2018
(Apparently there's a need for skating throughout California?)
If you build it, they will come! So many of us skaters here in the Silicon Valley/Bay Area need decent places to skate.
— SiliconValleyRollerGirls (@svrollergirls) January 8, 2018
With as many good ideas as Musk listed in his original tweet, some Twitter users expressed that he migh've missed some clever opportunities:
Can you also add a comedy club? You can call it The Gigglefactory™.
— Tony Ruth (@lunchbreath) January 7, 2018
And we certainly agree with this Twitter user. When this writer saw the tweet on her feed, she thought it was a list of things he wanted to send in the next SpaceX payload. (Along with the Roadster, of course.)
Not gonna lie— after just seeing the tweet preview, "Gonna put an old school drive-in, roller skates & rock restaurant...", I fully expected this tweet to end "on Mars". pic.twitter.com/RLNDSQcpVs
— David Tran (@dtran320) January 7, 2018
But is this idea really as far-fetched as it would initially seem? Possibly not. In September of last year, Tesla's chief technology officer J.B. Straubel spoke at the FSTEC conference, one of the world's biggest conferences for restaurants and dining.
"People are coming and spending 20 to 30 minutes at these stops," Straubel noted in his presentation. "They want to eat, they want to have a cup of coffee, and they want to use the bathroom."
He noted how quickly things were "evolving." Did this mean that Tesla would hop into the food industry? No, Straubel told attendees of the conference. However, he did note that Tesla was already considering drumming up several partnerships with various restaurants.
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"We already have been working with restaurants," Straubel said. "That can only start scaling up."
Currently, most of Tesla's Supercharger stations seem a bit bare compared to their gas-filled counterparts. However, this would completely change the game for Tesla and for electric vehicle charging stations in general. If anything, fans of Elon Musk know that sometimes he jests -- but normally, he means what he says. Case in point: the Boring Company's entire existence. (We would include sending the Tesla Roadster into space, but we'll wait for that to happen before adding it to the list.)