Tesla co-founder Elon Musk's "Teslaquila" hit a regulatory speedboat

Tesla co-founder and CEO (but no longer Tesla chair) Elon Musk has many bold ideas. He has ideas about electric cars. He has ideas about rocket ships. He has ideas about radical mass transit systems that so far do not exist, but one day maybe.

He also has ideas about tequila – especially an as-yet-hypothetical spirit called his "Teslaquila." Unfortunately, the Mexicos Tequila Regulatory Council (CRT), which governs what is legally considered tequila in the US and Mexico, has gained wind of these ideas – and it's not happy.

Like all the best ideas, Musk's tequila vision was first introduced with an April Fool's Day tweet.

Because, because he is not you or me, but Elon Musk, Tesla filed an application with the United States Patents and Trademarks in October for the trademark "Teslaquila." According to CNBC, the trademark is "Distilled Agave Liquid" and "Distilled Blue Agave Liquid."

He tweeted a "visual approach" to what "Teslaquila" could look like when and if such a product should exist.

At The Verge, Elizabeth Lopatto makes the point that while it's easy to make fun of it, this is not really a terrible idea. "Merch is normal for high-end car manufacturers," she writes, noting that Porsche sells earplugs, and Maserati sells a key ring that is a leather oval and costs 163 dollars. Tesla would be part of a great tradition. And starting a tequila brand is a popular celebrity lobby, like ordinary people knit. Justin Timberlake has one, Diddy has one, and George Clooney had one, until he sold it for around $ 1 billion.

The Tequila business is notoriously difficult – the space is very crowded, waste is a problem, and agave is a dangerous shortage – but it makes it an attractive fit for Musk, Lopatto wondered. He is a man who likes difficult things. For example, in addition to launching Teslaquila, he tries to colonize Mars.

But now there is a new difficulty: CRT claims that the name "Teslaquila" evokes the word Tequila … [and] Tequila is a protected word, "reports Reuters, explaining that the Council has strict rules on what is tequila, among other things, the spirit must be produced in the Mexican states Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoacan, Nayarit or Tamaulipas. Timberlake, for example, worked with the Tequilera Newton Distillery in Jalisco; Clooney, after a hard two-year search, worked with a named "master distiller" in the same state.

"If [Tesla] will make Teslaquila viable as tequila, it had to be linked to an authorized tequila manufacturer, comply with certain standards and require authorization from the Mexico Industrial Industrial Institute," said CRT in a statement. "Otherwise would make unauthorized use of the designation of tequila. "

CRT's concern is that the proposed name" Teslaquila "could trick people into believing that it was true tequila, as per definition It would not It is not without approval from CRT, as the organization has the right to control the designation of Tequila in both Mexico and the United States. Be Teslaquila, which has not yet been approved by the patent office, and may or may not be a joke, to proceed without approval, Fortune says that the company can "feel sued by the Mexican government."

Predictably, Teslaquila is not Musc's top priority, compared to other things, like making Tesla profitable and quitting traffic jams in Los Angeles. But for all reasons, this particular vision can not be realized, Musk says that regulation is not one of them. In response to a story about the issue, released by the electric vehicle InsideEVs, he tweeted that he was willing to "fight against Big Tequila!"

Such is the struggle to create the future.