The Silicon Valley Elite Are Renting The Google Bus For Napa Valley Wine Tours

The private charter buses that shuttle Silicon Valley tech workers to their jobs are a constant presence around the Bay Area.

Though the buses have become for many a symbol of the gentrification sweeping the Bay Area, Google touts the environmental benefits of shuttling more than 6,000 employees who might otherwise drive their own cars to work.

"In addition to an ultra comfortable ride, real-time location information, and wifi, our shuttles have the cleanest diesel engines ever built," Google writes on its site. "In fact, Google is the first and largest company with a corporate coach fleet to exceed the EPA's 2010 bus emission standards."

It turns out, however, that the Google bus' usefulness extends well beyond the work week .

According to New York Magazine's Kevin Roose, "The buses have non-environmental benefits, too - at Google, for example, employees can rent them on the weekends to shuttle friends to a party, say, or host an outing to Napa Valley."

It looks like plenty of people have made use of the Google bus for social events.

Apparently the Google bus gets rented out for many different occasions, including trips to sporting events and Outside Lands, San Francisco's biggest music festival.

On some weekends, the Google bus looks more like a party bus than a corporate shuttle.