Tesla files trademark paperwork for restaurant concept | Hacker News Reader

Tesla files trademark paperwork for restaurant concept

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38 pointsrsj_hn55 comments

I'm surprised they're not taking the McDonalds approach and buying the land surrounding the charging stations, while only providing the basic infrastructure themselves like power, plumbing, and possibly a basic brick-and-mortar building that can be leased out.

If everything goes according to their plan, these supercharger stations and the surrounding areas will be potential consumer hubs since they provide a steady supply of a temporarily captive consumer base. If you need to spend an hour charging your car, you may as well get some lunch and do some grocery shopping or whatever.

Tesla would then also profit from increased property values over time, similar to the long term business strategies of mom-and-pop McDonald’s franchises.

That's the strategy of McDonald's corporate, not the mom and pop franchises. Franchisees do not own the land the franchise is on. The McDonald's corporation buys the land and leases it to the franchisee.

"McDonald’s owns thousands of iconic pieces of real estate around the globe. From New York City’s Times Square to Moscow’s Red Square, McDonald’s has ventured around the world, buying up prime real estate. Franchisees pay McDonald’s a cut of their food sales, but a much larger portion of McDonald’s revenue comes from the rent it’s paid on its real estate. After all, rent in Times Square isn’t cheap, but a Big Mac is.

McDonald’s still takes a royalty on its franchisee’s sales but enjoys a much fatter revenue stream from the leases on nearly 33,000 franchisee-owned restaurants." - https://1851franchise.com/why-is-mcdonalds-considered-a-real...

If I recall correctly, Japanese and Hong Kong subways make more money leasing out space in and around their train stations than they do selling train tickets. A similar model could apply to superchargers.

correct; this is how their subway systems aren't a black hole money pit. pretty smart macro planning, imo.

Setting up the situation where you make more money if your cars charge slower and more often sounds like a dangerous game for an EV manufacturer to play.

I think, like the Laffer curve, there’s a peak income somewhere between “charging takes zero time” and “charging takes 100% of the time”. I suspect that peak is in the range 15-45 minutes.

Shorter dwell time is like faster table turnover in a restaurant. More customers will be better, financially, than fewer who spend slightly more time. Maximize wallets-per-hour.

> Setting up the situation where you make more money if your cars charge slower and more often sounds like a dangerous game for an EV manufacturer to play.

You mean like that time that London Heathrow airport ran a trial in which they specified every flight's gate number when passengers checked in, instead of only revealing it shortly (40 mins?) before scheduled departure?

Retail revenues in the terminals dropped, passengers went straight to their gate instead of hanging around the shops.

The idea was quietly dropped.

I've definitely been to some US East coast rest stops that have a pretty nice food court and there were Tesla superchargers in the parking lot. Not every state has them but it seems like Tesla could build something like that where they need them and rent out the space without having to get into the restaurant business. I guess it could be tricky staffing up some of these places if they are pretty remote, maybe that's where more automation could come into play.

I've noticed Tesla charging stations popping up in places like Wawa and Sheetz, both of which offer a slightly more upscale experience than your typical gas station and usually include a grill where you can order lunch, coffee, or a frozen drink.

They’re also colocated at Meijer grocery stores, Target, and in Texas, an HEB or two. Waiting for the day they install 21 station chargers at Buc-ees.

https://buc-ees.com/about/

Up until very recently Tesla has barely had enough cash on hand to run its core operations, let alone fund expensive land purchases.

But now they've got $20B in the bank. Investing in land seems to be a lot smarter than buying Bitcoin in my opinion.

The captive customer base could be really powerful. My wife and I took our first trip in our ID4 last weekend, which includes free charging at the ElectrifyAmerica stations for 3 years. Several of our stops were at Walmarts, and we'd go in and buy a few things we needed because we were there already waiting for the car to charge. It was the most time I'd spent in a Walmart in years

Agree about buying up land nearest the most popular charging stations being a smart stategory, but not sure about restaurants. I feel like a coffee subdivision would be much easier to pull off and more lucrative.

Presumably this would be easy to pivot to if the initial run is successful. McDonalds didn’t start with its franchise structure either. You would want to own the whole stack while developing the concept, if it were successful then franchising it out once all of the details of quality operations are worked out.

i.e. you have to start a hamburger stand before you think about how your burger empire is going to run

I'm genuinely surprised to see that someone hasn't taken this idea and run with it already.

In the southeast US there's chain called Waffle House that seems to have a restaurant on every exit of the highway, in some cases they have a restaurant on either side of the highway so you don't have to cross over.

They're open 24/7 and they're a sit down style restaurant for quick meal so you can get back on the road. You're typically there for an hour or less. Their business seems like the ideal location to drop DC Fast Chargers.

In my area (mid-Atlantic), that already seems to be Tesla's modus operandi for Supercharger placement. In developed suburban areas, they're placed somewhere in a multi-use development / shopping center complex with at least a coffee shop, but more frequently a restaurant or two nearby. In rural areas they're typically co-located with a 24/7 gas station that has at least basic food service capabilities, or 'travel plaza' type development with a small assortment of convenience-type food vendors.

For Superchargers specifically, I've seen them in a variety of locations. Some make sense like shopping centers or near restaurants. Others though seemed poorly thought out like the back of a mall in Asheville a good 10 minute walk from anything.

Except Waffle Houses don't typically coincide with your typical Tesla demographic, it will take education to teach how good a grilled chicken biscuit with a double order of hash browns topped actually is. They do have tons of real estate in rural areas that would be ideal (cheap) for placing charging stations.

I've seen maybe a dozen Tesla charging stations in Meijer (Michigan/midwestern mid-market grocery superstore) parking lots. Typically the cars are empty while charging, but will have already cycled through by the time you get groceries-- so I've always assumed the owners run in for some supplies or walk to a nearby restaurant.

That's exactly what we do. Detroit native. Before we got the home charger installed we would combine it with shopping to top off or charge while at a nearby restaurant.

I think what telsa could do that other restaurants couldn't compete with is:

Allow people to remain on the charger - even if complete - while they are inside eating. No idle fees.

maybe a little unethical, like ISPs that allow their TV services to bypass their data cap.

EDIT: explanation - Tesla allows you to supercharge, but wants you to move your car promplty when charging completes. To prevent people from abusing the limited resource they charge per-minute "idle fees" for people that let their car sit in a spot without charging.

yes, or concierge/valet to move your car off charger into the dwell lot

I like that this seems more likely to people than FSD/Full Self Driving working anytime soon, at this point :-D

They'll need a new charger plug, one that can be automatically removed and retracted.

Doesn't Tesla already have a feature where the car will pull out of its parking spot and come to you when you click a button on your phone? That would solve the "hey, were did my car go?!?" problem with this scheme.

They have a prototype of a robotic charger, aka the snake charger.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMM0lRfX6YI

That's hilariously overdesigned and underenginnered. I doubt it will ever see mass production.

They could have multiple plugs in the same charger which are stand-by in a queue

That's kind of a cool idea. Enter your table number and it would charge by the time you're ready.

I ve been watching videos of people from Norway where electric cars are popular, and ppl tend to spend hours in their car waiting for cars to charge. It makes sense to think that this will be a new place where people find themselves. But is this going to last? I understand the novelty the first 5,10, 100 times but at some point people will demand battery swaps instead because waiting hours for the car to charge every time becomes a friking chore

Maybe the new convenience store model is a shop next door to the chargers that will bring you out snacks and drinks you order from in your car while you wait.

Most Tesla superchargers will charge from 0-80% in 20-30 minutes. There's no need for anyone to spend hours in their car charging.

Hours? Is that hyperbole or are the chargers really slow in Norway? At a Supercharger, a Tesla Model 3 charges from 0-50% in under 15 minutes, 0-80% in 30 minutes and 0-100% in an hour.

Out of curiosity, what's the 20%-80% time? As I understand it, that's the range you want it to be in most of the time.

It means you only actually use 60% of the max capacity, and max capacity is only for rare-ish extreme cases.

But if it's only, say, 15 minutes for 20%-80%, that's not really all that far out of keeping with a 5 minute gas fill-up.

In real life, a 5 minute gas fill-up and a 15 minute charge are approximately equal. You don't have to wait at the charger like you do for gas, so it can charge while use use the bathroom and buy a coffee.

But unfortunately 20-80 is only 3-4 minutes faster than 0-80, just over 25 minutes give or take a few minutes depending on temperature etc. Like cell phones, car batteries can charge a lot faster when they're empty.

and ppl tend to spend hours in their car waiting for cars to charge

er ... citation needed?

One of the things my wife and I like about having a Tesla is that it often can settle the where-to-eat question, or at least narrow it down. If we're passing by a charger the answer is whatever is in walking distance of the charger (usually it's in some strip mall). I think we kind of prefer that there's no branded restaurant attached, it's always a bit different what we go to in that case.

One man's bug is another man's feature.

To me that sounds like a fanboy talking a bad feature into a good one. The same argument could be used to talk up communism.

Huh?

Clearly, the process goes as follows. My wife and I are driving somewhere and on the way we decide to stop and pick up a new socieconomic order. We usually stop some place where we can charge our EV and as it happens, they usually have a store serving communism within walking distance. So more often than not we charge our car and get some fresh communism to go.

I could also just have compared two cases, which both make it easier for the consumer to decide, by eliminating options he had before. There were no troubles to choose between ananas and bananas whatsoever in Eastern Germany. Very quick decision making possible, no kids crying in the back of the car.

I will continue: Inside prison, you have even less problems with choosing where and what to eat.

Is store-bought communism as good as freshly made communism?

Store-bought communism offers better value, but freshly made communism is so much better I think.

Oh believe me, it's very definitely a feature. "Sorry kids, there's no McDonald's at the Supercharger".

So wouldn't a car that would actually fix your problem just be a two-seater?

If I were a fanboy wouldn't I be in favor of a Tesla-brand restaurant existing near every super charger? I'm saying it wouldn't be so great.

Get Michelin Stars and it's full-circle absurdity.

There's a balance here between a mall/restaurant and a supercharger, and tesla does not have the upper hand. There's a limited supply of drivers per hour that can become customers so their franchise will probably not perform well. It's more likely that tesla will be paying malls to install their chargers rathef than vice versa

They should buy the Howard Johnson's restaurant trademark.

"The film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) was "one of the first to carry 'product placements' for companies" such as Howard Johnson's, whose logos appear aboard the space station."

Isn't this like the Autogrill concept you can find on any highway like Italy?

TL;DR

The idea is for a branded chain of cafes/restaurants and pop-up dining at the charging stations :)

is tesla becoming a brand now like Apple?

Were they not a brand before?

Of course Tesla motors is a brand, just not one like Apple.

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