oh so that’s why Kamurocho is always changing every game

So this is massive bazinga-brain shit but…

Imagine you’re Elon Musk at the peak of his wealth and clout. The government is literally throwing cash at you constantly.

You need to expand the Tesla brand and capture the US EV market before it gets away from under you in a few short years.

What do you do?

You go to somewhere in San Francisco and buy an old gas station to turn it into a charging station. You hype the shit out of it and do all the techbro aesthetics and Tesla branding. You turn the gas station into a “tEsLa LiFeStYlE dEsTiNaTiOn” where you offer overpriced trendy food, rentable WeWork style office spaces, and fucking sleeping pods or VR rooms idk. If Tesla managed to get their tech sorted (lmao) you could offer some sort of seamless transition where whatever you were doing on your stupid Tesla tablet when you were supposed to be focusing on the road can be transmitted to the office that you rented or your pod or whatever. (Shit, you just promise that you’ll roll this feature out “within the next 18-24 months” and never come through with it, if you want to be the Biblically-accurate Elon.)

I guess you do something about offering drycleaning too? Rich techbros don’t like doing menial labour and it feels like something they’d pay lots of money for someone else to do idk…

Anyway, you have some sort of slick one-stop shop that you build around your chargers. Maybe you do shit like screw around with having lower cost/free throttled recharging so you can milk people for their cash in your glorified roadside carnival sideshow while making them feel like they’re getting the better deal by saving a few bucks on charging while they’re being part of something visionary and futuristic and lifestyle-y.

It gets hyped (it’s Tesla 🙄) The exclusivity makes those early-adopter marks who are Tesla’s key market go wild. You take some senators for a tour of your operation and you wow those shmucks with pretty lighting and sleek, minimalist (and inherently bougie) interior design.

Then you hit the government up for funding to roll out this model across the country with some agreement that you’ll allow non-Tesla EVs permission to use the throttled charging rate to make it satisfy the lowest level that the anti-competition regulations have sunk to in the US by this point.

You buy up more defunct gas stations, do the same shit, sell overpriced “services” and all on the government’s dime while effectively capturing the US EV market by sidelining the competition.

Start offering a feature with your drycleaning service so that you can dictate which charging station you want to pick your stuff up from via your car’s tablet to make mahogany suite types feel like they’re really getting their money’s worth because of all the “convenience” (you’re going to get it sent to the exact same location every time except when you’re on a business trip, you clowns) and the sense of control it provides them. That sort of shit.

Then you go one step bigger and make a Tesla Supercharger Centre or whatever. I guess it needs more of the letter x in the name, like Tesla Supercharger Xentre or something. Build a gym onto the station to really lean into the lifestyle nonsense and you do the usual marketing gimmicks to hook people - offer to pay people out of their current gym membership if you sign up to the Tesla one or give them a 50% discount for a year upon the purchase of a new Tesla or whatever. (I guess you’d probably need to provide a valet service to make it truly viable so that people aren’t clogging up the charging spots while they’re taking a conference call or in the middle of a workout though…)

I have absolutely zero faith that Tesla’s production capacity would be able to handle the increase in demand that such a plan might be able induce. But that’s beside the point. If you made the right manoeuvres you could charge non-Tesla owners a premium rate… I mean you could “offer a significant discount” to Tesla owners, stitch up the market, maybe run the gym as a loss-leader in the knowledge that you would be luring people in to buy some food or some microgreens health smoothie thing on their way back to their cars, and do pretty much the whole thing on the taxpayer dollar.

To begin with, you just outsource all the extraneous sides of the new venture via contracts but if you get big enough on some elements of the model then you start doing bean-counter shit and you start buying up a drycleaning business or a gym chain or you launch a health supplement subsidiary or a company that makes premium ready-meals which you offer in-store (or whatever it happens to be) which you already know will turn a good profit because you can measure this from within your current operations - and you have just diversified your company and its revenue streams without pissing capital up the wall on a stupid venture like The Boring Company.

If all of this sounds like something you could turn into an absurdist sci-fi short film about the near-future becoming a banal hellscape, it’s because that’s exactly what it is.

But what it really boils down to, in classic silicon valley-style “innovation”, is a glorified airport lounge except Tesla-branded and for charging your car instead. Or just a glorified truck stop for rich techbros. In any case, there wouldn’t be anything new about it, it would just be reconfiguring what already exists, combining a few existing things together into one, and slapping a dumb logo on the whole thing so you can charge a premium from an existing customer base that you know isn’t just willing to pay but that is genuinely excited about it too. If there’s any kernel of an actual good idea in all of this it’s that this would be a way of turning the wait-time for EV recharging from being a downside into an exciting money trap that extends the Tesla experience and brand prestige while convincing people that they’re being productive (you are being charged to use a desk that’s in a different location), being healthy (you don’t need a gym membership to exercise), or doing self-care (you can nap in your car, you don’t need a sleep pod).

I guess I’m just glad that Elon missed this opportunity because he was too preoccupied with berating his underpaid workers on the factory floor or demanding that his engineers redesign his rockets so the shape “looks cooler”, and I hope that one day he comes across this idea when it’s already far too late and his business empire is in ruins so he can be constantly plagued by the thoughts of what could have been until the earth is finally free of his wretched existence.

Yes. The rest stops on I-95 between New York and Washington DC have chargers. I think they become less common south of Richmond