Is McDonald's in danger? Tesla charging station restaurant business goes live

In the past month, Tesla's stock price has fallen by about 22% due to the acquisition of Twitter and the shutdown of the Shanghai factory, but who would have thought that at this point in time, Musk is still enthusiastic about launching new businesses.

For example, entering the catering industry and "killing" McDonald's!

The thing is, Tesla submitted an application document to the city of Los Angeles, California a few days ago, which shows that Tesla is planning to build a 24-hour restaurant on Santa Monica Avenue in Hollywood.

According to the design application materials submitted by Tesla, this restaurant is quite interesting and can be entered by car. There are cinemas,charging pilesand seemingly a "bar".

△ Imaginary picture of Tesla charging station restaurant

The entire restaurant covers an area of ​​up to 9,300 square feet (about 864 square meters), including a two-story restaurant main building covering an area of ​​more than 350 square meters, and an open-air drive-in theater and outdoor seating area of ​​more than 500 square meters.

The first floor of the restaurant includes kitchen, bar, dining table and outdoor bar and other equipment. In addition to the same restaurant-related facilities as the first floor, the second floor also has two rows of theater-style seats for watching movies.

In the entire outdoor area, Tesla plans to reserve 34 parking spaces here, arranged according to 29 over-charging piles and 5 AC slow-charging piles.

The outdoor parking area also has two huge LED movie screens, which can be seen both in the car and on the second floor of the restaurant. According to the plan, the restaurant also provides drive-thru ordering and delivery similar to McDonald's drive-thru restaurants. Serve.

How to say it, this is a bit like a luxury rest station based on a Tesla supercharger.

Tesla also emphasized that each video in the outdoor theater is played for about 30 minutes, which perfectly matches the charging time of the supercharger, and will never let the car owner have the embarrassment of "the car has arrived home, and Guo Degang has not finished listening to the cross talk".

The planning and design drawings of the entire restaurant have also been picked up by foreign media, let's take a look.

The text may only be a brief description, but from the design drawings, the planning details of this Tesla supercharge station restaurant are really rich.

Although the planning of the outdoor drive-in theater is not obvious, the interior planning of the two-story restaurant is quite compact, with a lot of various functional areas.

The bar in the center of the restaurant on the first floor is quite large, and the indoor dining table seems to be a little less. In addition to the indoor facilities on the second floor, the surrounding area of ​​the outdoor terrace looks quite good.

Although the Tesla charging station restaurant is still in the drawing stage, the planned location is still a pizza restaurant from the satellite image, and it is not clear how Tesla will obtain the land rights.

But I believe that as long as the approval is approved, at the speed of Tesla, it should not be too far off for this rest station that provides "special fast food".

Speaking of which, in fact, Tesla has already had some ideas about engaging in the charging station restaurant business for a long time.

As early as 2017, Tesla added an owner’s lounge to a supercharger station in North America, where owners can watch TV and drink coffee while charging.

Then in 2018, Musk directly tweeted: To build an old-fashioned drive-thru restaurant at a supercharger in Los Angeles, with waiters on roller skates and rock music.It was later joked that Tesla restaurants could be paid in Dogecoin.

Last year, Tesla officially submitted a document to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to register the trademark brand for the T logo for various restaurant concepts, covering restaurant services, pop-up restaurants, cafeterias, takeaway restaurants and other services.

There is no doubt that the Tesla supercharger station and the restaurant are bundled together. Does the registration of a new restaurant trademark for Tesla also indicate that Tesla's supercharger station will also be called a new "charging station restaurant" in the future? Appeared.

Then the "charging station restaurant", which may also become an independent new project of Tesla in the future.

Tesla currently has more than 12,000 charging piles in the United States, accounting for more than 40% of Tesla's total global charging stations, with more than 1,500 charging stations.

Imagine how promising it would be if these charging stations were all remodeled or expanded into restaurant-like rest stops.

Yijie, the leader of domestic convenience stores, has become the chain convenience store brand with the largest number and highest sales in China just because it is backed by Sinopec.

Although the number of car charging stations is far less than that of gas stations, the difference between the two is that pure electric vehicle owners stay longer because of charging, and electric vehicles are charged more frequently than fuel vehicles. This means that car owners have more consumption opportunities.

Of course, Tesla is going to launch a charging station restaurant, and the most important impact may still be a traditional foreign drive-in restaurant like McDonald's.

In the past, the gas station did not provide catering services, perhaps because the refueling time itself was short, and probably no one wanted to taste food in a place full of car exhaust, but the charging station for pure electric vehicles is completely different.

I checked the number of McDonald's restaurants in the United States. In 2021, there will be a total of 13,000 McDonald's in the United States, 80% of which are drive-in restaurants. Although the number is still crushing compared to Tesla's charging stations.

But imagine that as the number of Tesla charging station restaurants continues to increase in the future, and more and more other models are gradually open to charging, as an electric car owner, you are willing to just go to McDonald's to buy a light meal.

Or go to the Tesla charging station restaurant for a light meal while charging, watching a movie or chatting with other electric car owners?