The concept of pizza delivery hasn’t changed much in pretty much forever. You place an order for a pie, a team makes it, and someone hops into a car, onto a scooter, or onto a bicycle, and runs it out to you. Often, the pizza delivery mobile is whatever vehicle the pizza shop has available to it. But one pizza retailer, Domino’s, has repeatedly tried to reinvent pizza delivery, and has an incredible stack of failures to show for it. One of these failures was supposed to be the future of pizza. This is the 1984 Tritan A2, a rare trike that promised a slippery 0.15 coefficient of drag and a thrifty 80 mpg from a rotary engine. One of these extremely rare experimental pizza cars has shown up for sale.
Domino’s Pizza has long seemed determined to shake up the pizza delivery market, which I wasn’t even aware was ripe for disruption. The company, which was founded in 1960 in Ypsilanti, Michigan, after Thomas Monaghan and his brother James purchased the Dominick’s pizza shop. Takeout pizza had experienced a boom after World War II, as soldiers expressed interest in buying cooked pizzas and taking them home with them. Inventors sought out ways to improve the packaging and delivery methods for takeout pizza. The innovation that Domino’s originally brought to market, the Atlantic reports, was the stackable flat-pack corrugated pizza box in the 1960s. Allegedly, Domino’s didn’t patent the design, allowing all pizza shops access to the invention.
As Hungry Howie’s Pizza & Subs, Inc. says, pizza delivery also took off in the 1960s alongside the sharp rise in car ownership. This also coincided with the rise in car-based dining and fast food. Delivery changed the restaurant industry, and things got so competitive that pizza shops offered a “30 minutes or less” guarantee, where if the driver failed to arrive on time, the pizza was free.
30 Minutes Or Less
Back in 1960, Domino’s had only a Volkswagen Beetle for deliveries, but as the business grew, so did the promises. As the Hustle writes, Domino’s was one of the major advertisers for the 30-minute delivery guarantee, and the chain was reportedly so serious about this guarantee that drivers allegedly sometimes rushed so hard that they crashed their cars, causing injuries and sometimes deaths. The shocking thing is that, as the Hustle reports, some stores allegedly then passed the pizza on to another driver in an attempt to beat the timer, anyway.
Domino’s said that the real speed was its 7-minute cooking time, not how fast their drivers commanded their vehicles. Concerns for safety and lawsuits would reportedly bring the end of the 30-minute guarantee. Still, Domino’s was always looking for ways to get an upper hand against rivals like Pizza Hut. One method employed by Domino’s involved installing gas ovens in cars so that the pizza remained piping hot on delivery.
In 2015, Domino’s implemented a modern take on this idea with the Local Motors-developed and Roush-built DXP (Delivery Expert) car. These were little more than Chevrolet Sparks with pizza ovens on them and drink carriers where the front passenger seat should be, and perhaps are most famous today for being rescued by car YouTubers.
In more recent times, Domino’s teamed up with Nuro to make autonomous pizza delivery robots. The chain is also rolling out a fleet of Chevy Bolt EV delivery cars, though without the gimmicks of the DXP cars. All of this is pretty wild. Keep in mind that most pizza shops will send your pizza out in a regular car and inside of a warm sleeve, that’s it.
But Domino’s? It’s obsessed with finding the weirdest ways to deliver its cheap pizzas. The craziest idea Domino’s had was probably this, the Tritan A2-based rotary-powered pizza delivery trike.
The Tritan A2
I last wrote about the Tritan A2 back in 2023 when another former Domino’s delivery car appeared for sale. Amazingly, this trike is not that car, but one of the other 10 Tritan A2s that were built. Yes, that means that I’ve now written about 20 percent of the entire production run of this obscure trike.
The Tritan A2 is a product of Tritan Ventures, and here’s what I wrote about the company in 2023:
There is limited information that can be easily found out there about Tritan Ventures. If you search the business, your first result is a cosmetics and refrigeration company based in the Philippines. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find a Tritan Ventures, Inc. incorporated in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1984 by Douglas J. Amick. According to an owner of a Tritan A2, Amick was an aeronautical engineer and had been experimenting with trikes for years. In 1969, Amick asked his father, James L. Amick, for an ice boat. Amick’s father came up with a trike with a rigid airfoil sail on it, making a wind-propelled vehicle. This vehicle had runners at first, which were eventually swapped out for wheels. Allegedly, the “Windmobile” could travel up to five times the speed of a crosswind.
A later project was the Tritan Aero 135, an 800-pound aerodynamic trike powered by a 390cc 14 HP Tecumseh riding lawnmower engine. Apparently, this one-off vehicle sported a coefficient of drag of just 0.135 and scored 75 mpg. The Tritan Aero 135 was tested by Car and Driver and published in a November 1982 issue of the magazine. Allegedly, Car and Driver billed it as “An Answer to a Question That Nobody’s Asking,” though I could not find a version of the issue uploaded online.
According to the Dayton Daily News, Douglas Amick was once stopped by police in the Tritan Aero 135 after the sheriff received reports of a plane landing on an expressway. At the time, Amick targeted a price of $6,400, or $20,640 today. Two years later, the younger Amick was still at it, dreaming up a super aerodynamic and efficient vehicle.
The primary goal of the Tritan A2 was to make a car so lightweight and so aerodynamic that it could be propelled with the smallest possible engine, and thus get stellar fuel economy, perfect for a vehicle built in the fuel-conscious 1980s.
The heart of the Tritan A2’s lightweight design is its fiberglass monocoque shell. At the rear is the so-called Amick Arch, a sort of wing which was said to increase stability and help move the Tritan A2 along by acting like a sail in a crosswind. The body–which you’ll note doesn’t have any doors–slices through the air with its 0.15 coefficient of drag. Entry and exit were achieved through opening and closing the vehicle’s canopy, somewhat similar to how you’d get into the cockpit of some planes.
The three-wheel delta trike configuration helps keep the vehicle’s size down, and reportedly, Tritan Vehicles hit an impressive curb weight of only 899 pounds. There are motorcycles that weigh more than that!
A vehicle as slippery as the A2 would be impressive today, but it was almost unheard of in a production vehicle back then. A Toyota MR2 of the 1980s had a Cd of 0.35 while a C4 Corvette nudged out a Cd of 0.33. Even a new Lucid Air has a slippery Cd of 0.197, which is still not as slick as a Tritan A2.
Power came from a Savkel SP-440 single-rotor 440cc Wankel engine produced by Savkel Ltd (also known as Syvaro). This engine produced 30 HP, and it reportedly returned up to 80 mpg in a Tritan A2. The Tritan A2 can hit 62 mph in about 17 seconds and reach a top speed of around 95 mph. The Savkel delivers power via a belt-driven CVT. Don’t worry, there are sound clips of this engine running! Check out the video above.
The Tritan A2 design was alluring to Domino’s, which reportedly ordered ten of them for testing at select locations. The pizza giant had planned on rolling these out nationwide. Some sources note that all ten examples had their rear seats replaced with pizza warmers, and that those pizza warmers were removed at the end of Domino’s testing.
If you look no further than the 80 mpg figure and the spaceship looks, the Tritan A2 probably sounds like the perfect pizza delivery car. I mean, your pizza shop is going to be the talk of the town when your drivers show up at customers’ houses in this thing. Having such a frugal machine is also great for the bottom line, too.
But if you start thinking about it more, then you realize that it’s sort of a terrible idea. These trikes were meant to eventually run at Domino’s shops nationwide, which presumably means running in ice, snow, or blazing heat – and there was no air-conditioner. Further, the delivery driver had to slump down into the cockpit and lift themselves out of it with every delivery. After a shift making deliveries in the Tritan, your quads were probably hotter than the pizzas.
Oh yeah, and then there’s the whole Wankel rotary, which isn’t exactly famous for reliability, or actually hitting advertised fuel economy numbers. In other words, as much as I love the Tritan A2, I can see why only ten of them were built. Domino’s perhaps had the right idea, but the wrong wrapper for that idea. The pizza chain canned the idea in the mid-1980s, and by 1988, Tritan Ventures itself was gone.
This Tritan A2
That brings us to the 1984 Tritan A2, chassis 07, that is currently for sale on Bring a Trailer. That chassis number is important because while this looks similar to the Tritan A2 that I wrote about two years ago, that trike was unit 05. These things are so rare that they can easily be counted by single digits in their serial numbers.
The listing gives us details about the A2 that we didn’t know before, such as the fact that it has an 8-inch wheel in front and a pair of thirteens in the rear. This A2 features a hydrogas suspension with a leading link up front and a trailing arm in the rear. The only brakes are a pair of drums in the rear.
Inside, there’s an incredibly basic dash panel hewn from plywood and a single Renault-sourced seat. As noted earlier, the pizza warmer was removed from this car decades ago.
Something amusing about this particular Tritan A2 is that the rotary engine was removed and a 670cc Predator V-twin engine was installed in its place. That engine drives a snowmobile clutch, which turns a CVT. These engines make 22 HP stock, which isn’t far off from what the stock rotary made. Small engine tuners have easily doubled the output of these engines, so it’s technically possible to get more power out of this than what you got in the stock rotary.
That said, the seller does say that the stock rotary does come with the vehicle. This rotary is described as running, but poorly. The seller decided to do the engine swap rather than try to troubleshoot the rotary. But, if you are a Tritan A2 purist, the seller says you’ll have the parts to bring it back to stock. Granted, Tritan has been dead for nearly 40 years, and Savkel was sold off to Freedom Motors a long time ago, so who knows what parts availability looks like.
Otherwise, the trike appears to be in okay shape, with a crack in the canopy and its taillight covers currently not installed. Should you buy this, you’ll get a Michigan motorcycle title that matches the vehicle, but has the brand misspelled as “Triton.” Yeah, DMVs do make mistakes like this. My 2009 Smart Fortwo is titled as a “Smart Lee,” whatever the heck that is.
Sure, this Tritan A2 is imperfect, but chances are you aren’t going to see another for a while. If you want in, the Bring a Trailer auction is sitting at $4,600 with five days to go. To get an idea of what these are worth, the Tritan A2 I wrote about two years ago sold for $35,200 at Mecum.
The Tritan A2 is perhaps the weirdest part of the history of Domino’s Pizza’s relentless search for pizza delivery perfection. The company has seemingly tried everything to get a pizza to your door, even slinging those pizzas in a low-slung rotary spaceship. Today, the Tritan A2 is probably best as the weird car to take to car shows, and I’m all here for it.
The auto museum in my town had one of these before it closed down. Standing next to it the proportions were just really weird.
According to Yahoo: “By 1989, news outlets reported that Domino’s drivers were involved in a reported 20 fatalities. Shockingly (NOT!!!), upper management didn’t seem to care…”
Before you start experimenting with something that looks like Burt Monro would race on Mars, get your sh*t together enough to deliver your employees to the customer ALIVE.
I hear that you can deliver a pizza by rock just like the pioneers used to.
The problem with driver’s actions wasn’t the 30 minutes guarantee, it;’s the very nature of delivery driving for tips.
When I started, the guarantee was already scaled back to $3 off. However, at least 50% of customers would give it back to you as an added tip. So there was no incentive to ‘beat the clock’ for the driver in that regard, as ‘being late’ would net you more money. Plus, you actually wanted a few deliveries a night to be late. If no one ‘wins’ the prize (free/reduced price food) they they stop playing the game (ordering). Also having no lates generally means you’re running labor too high and need to cut a driver or two. Lastly – if we noticed things were getting really backed up (and hence a lot of lates were incoming) then we’d pull the phones and just stop taking orders until we caught up. So in short, lates weren’t really costing the store that much money, they frequently benefited the driver – so where’s the incentive to speed to get it there a minute early.
Next, 20 deaths, yes that’s bad. But in the overall scheme of things, there are going to be a certain amount of accidents and even fatalities if your business involves driving. Is 20 deaths in 3 decades out of line with the number of hours/miles driven by all drivers for the company?
Lastly, the real reason delivery driver drive at the edge of legality – it’s how you make money. The key to making more money is taking more deliveries per night. It’s as simple as that. Every little thing you can do to shave a minute here, a minute there means at the end of the night you take more deliveries. I mean UPS drivers are making over 100k per year, and they do essentially the same job, except the vehicle is provided for them, they don’t have to collect money, they only have to get it there that day (instead of within minutes) and they only have to return to base once per day. Meanwhile food delivery drivers are getting paid minimum wage with tips to help pull it up, while usually have significantly higher expenses.
Tell it on the mountain! And don’t forget about that damn Noid. Bastard cost us a fortune!
You want to shake up the delivery business? How about we go back to the pre-2020 approach of actually offering free delivery? Then maybe I could save some money AND tip the driver a little more.
Seriously, when people doubt that Covid changed things permanently, they often forget about the hundreds of little things that happened along the way and never returned. I actually get slightly frustrated with people who use DoorDash or Postmates or Shipt. I get the convenience, but that (plus every single store requesting a tip for some reason) is all a part of why costs are going up and you’re just encouraging these shady business practices.
Case in point: I can barely go down the aisles at Target because it’s full of employees, stone-faced, shopping for people who are idling outside in their cars. This seems fundamentally f*cked up to me. Individually, each decision to make this happens is perfectly logical. Collectively, nope.
It does seem odd that the grocery stores don’t utilize the BOH warehouse area to “shop” for those unwilling to do it themselves. The big aluminum Shopping trolleys used by drone shoppers is definitely unappealing.
Maybe that is the goal though, no in person shopping? It would probably stop the thefts at walmart a bit. And they could in theory utilize more of the wasted vertical space in most big box stores these days.
Most grocery stores don’t keep much if any inventory in the back of store. Most vendors deliver stock directly to the shelves.
Groceries and produce are the original “just in time” supply chains. Double for fish.
The business model of big box stores is built on putting all the inventory on the floor, so there’s no stock room to pull product from.
Clothing ,shoes, cameras jewelry, and auto parts stores have stockrooms, but that’s a different retail model.
Why delivery isn’t free: Costs (particularly gas and insurance) went up. Wages did too. Then the biggest factor – the habits of the American consumer. You get more sales by advertising a low price, and then adding a bunch of extras over advertising a higher price with everything included.. Lastly, if you have free delivery, that means your carry-out customers are effectively subsidizing the cost of delivery for delivery customers.
App delivery seems like it ought to be more efficient. Instead of having dedicated drivers who are sometimes not doing anything and sometimes overwhelmed, you have a fleet of drivers servicing many restaurants. I know there are many, many downsides however I’d think it would be more efficient. Curious if delivery drivers make more working for a pizza place vs doordash.
“Seriously, when people doubt that Covid changed things permanently, they often forget about the hundreds of little things that happened along the way and never returned“
Death by a thousand cuts.
Generally I agree with the tone of what you are saying. But lets not forget that there are many people with disabilities that make walking around a store difficult if not impossible. They would tend to concentrate shopping on stores such as target where employees do the walking for them.
It’d be easy enough to fit a Sachs rotary to this, should the original engine be un-fixable.
I wonder how fast it would go with a 200 hp motorcycle engine.
Quick calculation, about 190 mph.
Not that I’d want to.
“Power came from a Savkel SP-440 single-rotor 440cc Wankel engine”
Is that a pull-starter, like a lawn mower?
And I find it hard to believe that the low drag car will produce any benefits at urban speeds. Drag only takes effect at higher speeds.
And how many pizza deliveries missed the 30 minute window because of how long it takes to open the canopy and get out of the damn thing?
This car is sufficiently light in mass that aero drag force likely dominates somewhere around 25 mph. For a 4,000 lb sedan, that might be closer to 35 mph.
Drag is drag. It’s proportional to the square of velocity, so speed matters quite a bit. The formula for drag doesn’t include weight at all – Coefficient of drag times frontal area times velocity squared times a constant related to the density of the fluid through which it’s moving. Mass has an effect on acceleration but not on velocity. The difference in Cd between this thing and a Honda Beat aren’t going to matter at 25.
I was referring to percentage of total load.
A lighter vehicle with less rolling resistance will have a larger percentage of load composed of air drag vs a heavier vehicle with the same CdA.
For my mountainbike, rolling resistance and aero drag are equal with each other at about 10 mph, even though the mountainbike has the CdA of a small car.
I think you’re mixing terms, and we don’t know about any differences in rolling resistance between the trike and a car. One or both could be on steel wheels for all we know, and I’d bet a vehicle designed for high mph is running higher pressures than the sedan.
Aero drag is not related to weight. Rolling resistance is marginally related to weight, but its change is almost negligible with increasing speeds.
I know that aero drag is not related to weight. However, the total road load is a function of both aerodynamic drag and rolling resistance.
What I was getting at, is that if you take two vehicles travelling on flat ground with the same CdA and different mass, the speed at which aero drag will be the dominant factor in total road load will be different between the two vehicles.
There is a Mythbusters episode testing vehicle drag and the impact to mpg… the general tldr take away…
– Below 45 mph windows down is OK w/o impacting mpg
– above 45 mph, windows up
Having just completed a +5200 mile road trip in a 2017 prius prime I had a lot of time to think and found at Interstate speeds it was most efficient to keep the windows all the way up And use ac on recirculation.
Surprisingly to me, even when it was cool out (below 70 degrees F), having the ac on with recirculation was More efficient at => 7p mph than having fresh air through the vents (with ac off) and windows up.
Kudos to the Toyota engineers that were able to create recirculating ac more efficient than the increased drag by fresh air cabin vents being open!
At least that’s the only conclusion that makes sense to me.
I remember that episode, but they also said that the crossover point (in this case 45 mph) is different for every vehicle.
My point is that aero / drag affects fuel economy when cruising at speed.
Not when driving around urban areas, constantly stopping for junctions and traffic lights and… delivering pizzas.
So regarding the vehicle in this article, yes the aero could potentially produce amazing fuel economy. But not in this use case scenario.
Something something “apparent wind angle,” “low aspect ratio sail plan,” that wing’s not doing anything but looking cool. Which it does.
Not sure where to post this, but it would be nice to have Autopian forums to discuss all our random, incredible car insights and questions. I forget what my question was that brought on the forum notion, but it was surely deep and meaningful.
That would be super cool! We don’t have one of those (yet?) but we do have a Discord if you’re into that platform.
I was literally just thinking about this earlier this week!
Forums would be good. There are several great discussions hiding in completely unrelated topics.
Also private messages while we are making a wish list.
What Renault is that seat from? It looks more like it was designed for a motorbike.
It’s a later Alpine A310 seat.
Thanks!
It really is the perfect seat for this ‘car’.
“We made this bespoke ultra advanced pizza delibery vehicle capable of 80MPG. We’ll be able to deliver cross-country pizzas no problem.”
“But where do the pizzas go in it?”
“SHIT”
<furiously builds half-ass box in the back>
But where do the drinks and bad salads go in it?
“SHIT”
If I had a place to keep this, I’d be tempted to place a bid, but alas.
Seems like a good car to turn into a bonneville racer.
Dominoes would have succeeded in their delivery plans if it wasn’t for that dastardly Noid.
I’m still trying to avoid that bastard!
Kenneth Lamar Noid
As the largest chain in the US and world, I think they have succeeded in their plans.
Sounds like something Sylvia Plath might dream up.
Saw one of these at Radwood L.A. a few years ago.
I hope people have sent this to Rob Dahm. If anyone can get that rotary singing, it’s him.
This whole thing smacks of the bright idea of someone in the corporate office who’s never actually delivered. Like you mentioned, the canopy and the sills and all that make it a pain to get in and out of and handling boxes. But also, it tends to be a local gig, where you’re mostly not hitting the speeds where the extreme aero matter, so you’ve compromised it for nothing. They might as well have tried to federalize Piaggio Apes or something. Pretty much the only value it has is as a rolling advertisement.
You joke, but the perfect city pizza delivery vehicle is something like a Cushman Haulster with some better gearing. Fifty five mile an hour top speed and enough space for a ten person party delivery.
I’d say more deliveries are made in suburban locations and areas bordering on rural. Gearing to increase the Cushman’s top speed is going to slow down acceleration. Acceleration is important in stop and go traffic. Plus how’s the AC and heat in that Cushman? Driving comfort on an 8-10 hour shift?
Eight to ten hour shift? Dude, when you’re doing pizza delivery you’re basically sitting around during downtime helping assemble boxes or pulling stuff out of the freezer if you don’t have your food handler’s card. Then starting around four in the evening you get a three hour rush.
Pretty much no pizza place would schedule you for more than six hours a day anyways because they want to pay you as little as possible, and they assume you’ll get tips which means they can bet on cutting your hours down to as little as possible. The only time a driver gets more than six hours is when it’s a franchise location where the owner’s such a cheapskate that there’s two people running the entire place plus the driver and the parking lot is more dirt than pavement from the size and depth of the potholes.
Basically the only time I did deliveries outside of the city was when it was for an event, like someone was hosting a birthday party or there was a tournament at a golf course or something. Otherwise it was mostly me dodging through side streets at 25MPH to avoid busy intersections on the 35MPH to 45MPH main roads.
These days there’s even less long distance deliveries because most places have implemented a fifteen mile radius rule. Anything more than that gets delivered via DoorDash or Grubhub or a similar service.
I work an 9-10 hour shift 4 times a week, and a 6 hour one the 5th. Paying 2 people to work 4 hour shifts is the same money as paying 1 driver for an 8 hour shift.
Our delivery radius is 15 minutes, not 15 miles, and we don’t sub out to anyone.
We basically don’t do any side work anymore, we don’t even pre-fold the boxes, you do that at the cut table now after you put the food on it. We don’t have downtime anymore. It’s pretty much deliver all night (I will say I work at a campus store, so the students order all night.)
There are no ‘cards’ for being a food handler in my state.
We have a mix of speed limits in our area, going from 20-55 mph. I wouldn’t want to take a Cushman to the edge of our area.
What there is is a lot more pressure on delivery times than there ever was back in the day of the 30 minute guarantee. For one thing we can’t just unplug the internet like we used to leave the phones off the hook. The orders keep coming no matter what.
Does Domino’s really run things that differently from Pizza Hut and Papa John’s? I mean, I never worked for Domino’s, only the other two and a local chain, but it was a hard radius to make sure we didn’t overlap with the delivery areas of other stores. And we weren’t allowed to prep food if we weren’t certified for it. I was told some drivers took that as a get-out-of-work route by refusing to get the food handler’s card that said they knew basic kitchen safety so that way they could just sit around for most of the shift, but I got mine because I wanted to be able to switch back and forth between in-store and driver if someone didn’t come in and a shift needed covering.
This was probably… 2018? Was the last time I was a delivery driver. Although I have a friend who had to go back to pizza delivery because the computer repair place they were working at closed thanks to debts racked up during the pandemic, and so most of what I know about how Domino’s in specific works nowadays is through them. According to them drivers still aren’t allowed to do food prep, but that doesn’t really matter because they’re responsible for doing order handling an store cleanup in between deliveries. Shift manager does order handling otherwise. I haven’t really asked them about how much downtime is in between deliveries, but I will later and post a reply to this comment if they get back to me.
What’s your perspective on working for a pizza place vs doing door dash? It seems like the latter would be less stressful, but what do I know.
Said friend got back to me and said most of the time their shifts are five hours, either 11AM-4PM or 4PM-9PM. Rare days they said they get eights, coming in at 1PM and staying until 9PM. But normally they’re scheduled for only fives, and they spend only about thirty minutes at a time in the car before they either get out for deliveries or return to the store.
If your name is Hiro Protagonist and you want to relive the glory days, this is the vehicle for you!
The Deliverator’s car was electric.
“The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator’s car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.
You want to talk contact patches? Your car’s tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator’s car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady’s thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta. “
Yeah Neal, I’ll take one of those.
That’s actually quite small for an EV battery. Maybe about 15 kWh would get that pound of bacon out of Earth’s orbit, neglecting aero drag of course. Accounting for all of the drag forces at speed that a pound of bacon stored in an unopened rectangular-shaped package would generate(assuming it didn’t burn up at 7,800 m/s), you could easily triple that, if you launched it flat with the thin profile facing forward(minimize frontal area).
45 kWh is almost the size of the battery pack in the OG Tesla Roadster.
Neal knows his shit!
it takes a shockingly small amount of energy for space travel. The problem is you have to carry it with you, and that takes more energy, that you have to carry and so on.
I was reading about a plan to use lasers and a light sail to send a small space probe to Alpha Centauri at half the speed of light. I thought, ok that’s fine, I guess, but how do you slow down when you get there?
With a spaceship providing a comfortable 1G acceleration for 22 years, a round trip to anywhere in the galaxy is possible. Of course, when you get back, 100,000 years will have passed. It’s carrying that darn fuel that’s the problem, just like EVs
Came here for this, thank you
Pizza puts off a LOT of moisture fresh out of the oven. The box gets soaked in the hot bag because of that. The oven doesn’t seem to address that. Without defrost, this would have been a foggy ride in cool weather.
Yep, the wiper should be on the inside.
It looks sort of awesome, but we all know the instability of 3 wheelers with the one-in-the-front configuration. Definitely would be more interesting with a Hayabusa engine in it. Do I hear an Amen?!?!
I’d hoon the shit out of that.
This is the main thing I learned from Mr. Bean.
If only Dominos spent the effort on making better pizza
This. My son still says it’s the best pizza in the world, and he is serious. I hang my head in shame.
I think its one of the higher quality among the low quality pizzas. I mean, its usually better than a Sbarro slice that’s been sitting under a heat lamp for 7 hours
They at least know their niche and stick to it: semi affordable food quickly into your mouth. They’ve never pretended to be anything but what it says on the box. Points for honesty.
The last time I got Dominoes everything was absolutely swimming in grease.
We were also called a homophobic slur by someone working at our local Dominoes, so we haven’t been back since then. I know it’s not the company’s fault, but still not going back.
Dominos is an interesting company. If you ask the people who work at corporate, they will tell you they are a tech company who happens to make pizzas on the side.
They were the darlings of the new fangled “global economy” in the 90s; incredibly adaptive to regional resources and demands. Seems like a lifetime ago… and in some ways it has been.
Well literally if you’re a thirty year old.
Then why is their tech so terrible?
I’m deeply skeptical of any company that says “we’re actually a tech company.” In this case, if that’s actually true, wouldn’t people rather order pizza from a pizza company?
I mean, if you want pizza you probably don’t really want dominos. But I do kind of get what they are saying. To a large extent cheap pizza is perfectly competitive–so you can either lower prices or you can try and add “features” to create differentiation, which dominoes has tried, including some of the things mentioned in this article.
Maybe? Coke and Pepsi, Crest and Colgate…our gift to the world is convincing people commodity products aren’t commodities. I’ve definitely heard more than one passionate debate of Dominos vs Pizza Hut vs Papa Johns. I think a lot of that comes from commercials rotting our brain and creating these preferences–it’s why I only drink one brand of fizzy sugar water and will probably buy the same laundry detergent for the rest of my life, for reasons I can’t explain. If these chains are really moving to technology/gimmicks as the primary differentiator, it’s sort of saying “we’re not even going to pretend our pizza is any better or different than anyone else’s.” I find that both sad and amusing. C’mon Dominos, at least try to BS us about how good your pizza is.
I come b/c Mercedes’ penchant for off the beaten path vehicles, but I stay for Toecutter’s eventual take.
I gave my take on this car two years ago.
I think it would make for an excellent EV or small diesel conversion, of no less than 150 horsepower, keeping weight near stock. Potential for 200+ mpg on diesel, or less than 0.080 kWh/mile @ 70 mph as an EV.
I feel like I just read that other piece about the Tritan, but it was two years ago. Time has lost all meaning.
Domino’s has had some crazy delivery scheme. Back in the late 80’s they did deliver by boat at the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri, same 30 minute guarantee. Delivered to your dock. I can’t imagine how they were even able to find the places pre GPS.
Any idea how widespread it was? Seems like a great publicity stunt, as shown by you remembering it 35+ yrs later.
I couldn’t find anything on it, just some facebook posts of others remembering it at the ozarks. If they did it anywhere else, it not well documented.
I did find this interesting one
https://media.dominos.com/stories/pizza-by-plane/
Ha. At first it sounded like a dumb gimmick but that’s actually pretty cool. Having spent a few days on Kelleys Island, I can completely understand why the locals would be so excited about this.
Another interesting fact: Domino’s put these through an accident-avoidance test similar to the famous Moose Test, in which it had to “avoid the Noid.” It failed that too.
The Noid was such an asshole, messing up our pizzas and avoidance tests back then. Of course, back then it didn’t matter anymore after a bong hit or three.
Don’t forget that The Noid made that one poor guy lose his mind.
Not the only tragedy that has befallen those who partake of the Pizza de Dominos.
I had to look it up and it’s a crazy story. A mentally ill dude with the surname “Noid” thought the ad campaign was aimed at him personally. He held two dominos employees hostage while he tried to negotiate with Dominos corporate.
Sad, right? 🙁
That’s because no one can see The Noid. To see The Noid, sprinkle a bit of angel dust on the bowl before lighting and inhaling…
That’s why I never order shrooms on my pizza.