Elon Musk Wants to Build a Retro Carhop Restaurant With Tesla Charging Stations

There’s no shortage of ideas laying around the house of Tesla founder Elon Musk, from space colonization to large-scale lithium battery manufacturing. The always broad-thinking billionaire’s latest plan? A retro carhop restaurant, complete with drive-in movies and staff on rollerskates, to be built at the site of one of his company’s Tesla Supercharger stations around LA.

In a weekend tweet that has since garnered more than 175,000 likes, Musk loosely announced plans to bring the old school idea to life at one of his company’s most forward-thinking plots of land, a Tesla Supercharger station. These are standalone stops for Tesla owners to power up their electric vehicles, either while commuting around the city or on longer drives. The problem is, apparently, that folks aren’t naturally just hanging out there while their cars get topped off, ordering burgers and fries and malts. Musk sure seems like he wants to change that.

Like only the most Muskian ideas, there is no real timetable (or, indeed, location) for when and where such a restaurant might happen. That’s not to say it won’t — Musk has been keen to throw out ideas like tunneling under the entire city of LA before, and then try to actually see it through. It’s just that, with everything else going on in the space travel/electric car world, it’s likely that a standalone restaurant catering to the Tesla-wealthy with nostalgic appeal is probably low on the list of priorities.

That hasn’t stopped Musk from musing about possibilities with fans in the Twitter comments. He tells one that the location will be “near (the) 405” freeway, which hugs the city’s western reaches. Another asks about ordering, to which Musk says: “We can just have the menu pop up as soon as you put the car into park.”

In all, the restaurant actually sounds pretty fun. But so does colonizing Mars.

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