If there’s one thing you could say about Elon Musk, it’s that he never stops surprising us, whether that means smoking weed on podcasts or saying crazy things on Twitter.
But where he is especially surprising – and honestly way more interesting – is with new product reveals.
And his most interesting reveal this year was the Tesla bipedal humanoid robot. The new robot, which Musk teased at Tesla’s AI day, was in retrospect something that we should have expected; after all, Musk is building space ships and human-to-computer brain interfaces for goodness sake. Still, most of us were a little surprised, at least mainly because you’d think a guy who is trying to go to space and build brain implants would be too busy to build a robot.
Another surprise this year was the Tesla restaurant. The restaurant concept, uncovered via a Trademark search, was something Musk mused about in 2018 when he talked about creating an old-fashioned carhop which would feature high-tech touches like pop-up menus and Tesla charging stations.
And maybe robots? Nowadays, restaurants deploy front-of-house restaurants bots like Servi to move trays of food around and bus tables. Using robots in a carhop restaurant, where navigating back and forth to cars on pavement, seems like a comparably easy task.
It’s something Musk and his team has no doubt discussed. What I’m less sure about is whether any robot servers at Tesla restaurants would be humanoid. The current generation of front-of-house bots roll around on wheels, a mode of mobility that is a much easier engineering task than building a humanoid walking around a busy fast-food foodservice environment.
But who knows? Musk almost always aims for the stars – literally and figuratively – with his ideas, so building a restaurant with C3POs walking around delivering burgers and fries seems on-brand for the world’s well-known – and most surprising – tech entrepreneur.
