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Toyota Develops Full-Size Pickup Truck That Delivers, and Makes, Pizza in Transit
The Tundra PIE Pro is a rolling pizza oven with robotic arms
By Rain Noe - Nov 01, 2018
"Bar talk prototypes" are our term for when a design project sounds like it was conceived by folks sitting on bar stools, several beers deep. The most recent example: "Dude…what if a customer orders a pizza, and the delivery vehicle could make the pizza on the way to the customer's house?"
Those conversations go nowhere when held by two losers like you and me. But when it's Toyota North America CEO Jim Lentz and Pizza Hutt CEO David Gibbs saying these things, well, both men have the juice to actually get it done. Toyota's Motorsports Technical Center was tasked with creating the vehicle, with a few more directives: It would be zero-emissions and ought employ robot arms of the sort used on Toyota's production line.
The result of this mad assignment is the Toyota Tundra PIE Pro:
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Enter a caption (optional)Ridiculous, we know, but it was interesting to see that they went with a sort of radial arm saw to cut the pie slices.
Here's how the project came together, including how they developed the cutter idea:
Rain Noe
Rain Noe is a writer and industrial designer based in New York City.
4 Comments
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"Our pizza is so terrible, it can be made on the back of a pickup truck by a robot"
!Report as spam -
"What would you like for toppings?"
"Cheese, pepperoni, and road debris, please"!Report as spam -
I'm ah gonna like ah dis truckah!
!Report as spam -
Didn't you guys give an award to Zume Pizza a while back? Last I checked, they were quite a few steps ahead of bolting robots on the back of a truck. I guess it is, not the first time that a company has put a truckload of time and money into a PR project for a trade show.
!Report as spam
Continued Reading
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By Rain Noe - Oct 29, 2018
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