#HTE

Toyota Develops Full-Size Pickup Truck That Delivers, and Makes, Pizza in Transit

“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:

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: