There’s a very rare car for sale right now, a remarkable limited-production (only 154 built!) machine designed by low-volume pioneers Local Motors and built by Roush Performance. It’s a purpose-built machine, one designed to accomplish one task, a task that requires speed, maneuverability, efficiency, and thermal efficiency. That task? Bringing you a pizza.
Yes, pizza delivery! There’s severe time constraints for each delivery – every run is like a micro-rally – and the driver must somehow keep that pizza hot and not overly jostled, which can cause the dreaded Topping Slippage, not to mention what it can do to two-liter bottles of fizzy soda. The truth is that most of the cars used for the task today are woefully unqualified for the task, which is why back in 2015 pizza delivery giant Domino’s showed the world their purpose-built pizza delivery car.
The original plan for the purpose-built pizza delivery car was to start from scratch, so they commissioned Local Motors to come up with an ideal design for a pizza delivery car, under the lead of designer Nicolas de Peyer.
A global competition was held for entries, and Slovenian designer Anej Kostrevic’s entry was selected as the ideal pizza delivery candidate: small, agile, able to hold lots of pizzas and keep them warm.
Unfortunately, Domino’s didn’t seem to understand that developing a car from scratch is what economists call “not cheap,” so they changed their minds and asked Local Motors to find a way to pull this off with an existing platform.
Local looked at small city cars like the Scion iQ, Ford Fiesta, Fiat 500, Nissan Cube, Chevy Sonic, Honda Fit, and the Chevy Spark (which was really a re-badged Daewoo Matiz).
Here’s a good video of the project:
The end result was a highly modified Spark, one that seats one but holds 45 pizzas and a dozen two-liter soda bottles, and had a special pizza warming oven that could hold 10 pizzas at a time out of the 45. I guess the pizzas were swapped into the oven 10 at a time?
There’s one of these for sale now on Facebook Marketplace, and it’s not exactly cheap: $14,500! The car looks to be in pretty good shape, and the seller claims it “runs great” and just the “brakes need attention,” like all of us.
What I want to know is what would one do with such a car, should – sorry when – one decides to buy it. I mean, you have a one-seater small car with a lot of cargo room and a special volume designed to keep things warm! So what could you do with it? Assuming you don’t want to deliver pizzas, I mean.
I have some ideas!
- Mobile Quick Sculpture: You know how they have caricaturists at theme parks or fairs or papal conclaves or carnivals? Well this would be like that, but in three dimensions, since it’s sculpture! The pizza oven would be for holding and warming clay, so it’s ready to sculpt!
- Mobile Chick Incubator: Who doesn’t love baby chicks! Monsters, that’s who. It would be so easy to adapt that pizza warmer into a baby chick incubator, and you could bring the joy of baby chicks to people wherever they are! And when the chicks grow up, they become chickens, which, I’m told, are able to produce chicken caviar, also known as “eggs!” You can then sell hot eggs from the warmer while your chickens comfortably roost in the cargo area!
- Mobile Warm Oil Massages: Think about this: one phone call can have a masseuse at your door in 15 minutes, hands slathered in warm oils, heated in their car’s built-in oil warmer!
- Fast Fondue To Your Door: Okay, imagine this – you’re on a date you didn’t really plan well, but you desperately want it to be special. So what do you do? I’ll tell you what you do: you make one quick call or a visit to a website and give your location and then boom, in 15 minutes or less you’re feeding each other the cheesiest, drippiest fondue, right out of the car’s special fondue warming compartment. It’s dairy-based romance, done quick!
- Emergency wax figure repair: If you’re one of the many thousands of Americans who own and operate a wax museum (that’s just an estimate, don’t look into it), you’ll have times when some rowdy teens will chew off Henry Kissinger’s pinkies or one of Taylor Dayne’s ears or maybe a nipple or two from Lada Gaga. What do you do then? You call the quickest mobile wax figure repair is what you do, who shows up with plenty of hot wax ready to make any repair or replace any standard body part.
These should give you a good start, right? With these sure-fire business ideas, I’m sure you’ll find $14,500 a small price to pay for your future life of wild success.
It’d be a shame to let these remarkable vehicles just rot away, after all.
45 pie total capacity is so you can deliver an entire catering order with one vehicle and one employee. The 10 pie capacity warmer is for the vast majority of orders that are 3-5 items each and one or two stops per trip. Pizza starts losing it’s quality immediately out of the oven, which is the real reason most restaurants have a 30 minute guarantee, quality of product rather than quickness of delivery.
What would I do?
1. Hang a Bad Andy plush from the mirror.
2. Stick a NOID bobblehead on the dash.
3. Play the Pizza Tower soundtrack on loop, full blast!
4. Order more pizza for “pick up”.
Wish for a scion iq?
I might figure out how to put a fast 3D printer in the back of that thing, using the warming oven as a way to keep the print at the right temperature. Then I’d put out my shingle for custom repairs of weird things. Show up somewhere, create a model of the broken thing, print a replacement part, charge big $$$.
Yeah, there are a lot of problems with this idea… 3D printers are too slow, CAD modeling takes time, etc. But it’s a fun concept.
Speed it up by taking a 3D scan of the broken item? Then you only have to model the repair section and a fit is easier to match, saving time on the CAD modeling.
If I learned anything from Samcrac’s youtube channel, I know there’s a huge difference between what I want to do with this thing and what Domino’s legal team is gonna let me do. He’s got two of these things that he rebuilt from crashed ones and as far as I can tell, all he can do is let them rot in a cattle field in the Sarasota area. (Not really, but I don’t think he’s allowed to drive them on public roads)
Reading a news piece on this made me sad. I wonder why removing the branding isn’t enough.
If I recall correctly, they wanted him to return all the Domino’s items (the warmer, the branding, and the cupholders off the car and turn it back into a stock Spark). I believe he won the car free and clear from the insurance auction as-is so it was Domino’s responsibility to ensure its branding was removed from the car. Kind of like that situation in TX where the plumber’s truck ended up on TV being used by ISIS because he didn’t remove his branding when he sold the truck.
I felt so bad for that guy…even if one makes an argument for “you cheaped out and didn’t remove the decal, so you reap what you sow” that’s still far more than proportionate consequences.
Plus, I mean, at that point you have to repaint the whole side, right? Because otherwise just going over words means the outlines are still visible.
This is a unique vehicle. I hope somebody manages to get the branding visibly removed and actually use it somehow, because it’s quite cool that these exist.
Torch, if you’ll excuse some Spark pedantry: the Spark indeed originated as the Daewoo Matiz and was primarily marketed as such for the first two generations (though the facelifted second gen was already sold as the Chevy Spark in the European market).
However, the M300 only retained the Matiz (specifically, Matiz Creative) name in its native Korea, and only for the first two years. By 2011, the Daewoo marque was phased out and this thing was only sold as the Chevy Beat/Spark/ChevyTaxi, Holden Barina Spark, or Ravon R2. Seeing as it only hit the US market in 2012 for the 2013 model year, I wouldn’t call the Spark the DXP was based on a rebadged Matiz 🙂
To preempt the argument that the generation still started its life as the Daewoo Matiz regardless of US sale date: um, ackchyually, the 2007 concept that greatly resembled the finished car in 2009 was unveiled as the Chevy Beat.
Another fun fact: these were all supposed to be retired at the 100,000 mile mark and returned to Roush, to be returned to stock (in fact, they still have all of their seat belts and airbags underneath the pizza stuff) and sold as regular used Sparks. It’s mostly the crashed ones that have survived and made it to private owners’ hands (and yes, owners have been threatened with legal action for holding onto them or using the Domino’s name in reference to them).
Thanks for writing this – always love reading anything Spark-related!
Mobile front for the Italian Mafia?
Start an Undercutters Pizza franchise?
If I had one of these, I would park it in front of Domino’s, hide nearby and leave it there until some people were hanging out on the parking lot. Then, I would leap out and come running at the car laughing maniacally, jump in, shout “It’s mine, suckers!! All mine!!” and speed away, enjoying everyone’s baffled looks.
I’m kind of surprised this was allowed to be sold by Domino’s. I know I’ve seen stuff from the USPS and UPS that talked about how they never let their delivery vehicles hit the consumer market because they never want people to associate the designs with anything else. This is a lot more niche of a vehicle but the reasoning applied there would still fit, I’d think.
You could get the Grumman LLV in the 80’s if you were a municipality, then those municipalities sold them off to the public. There are just strict laws about making sure you DO NOT paint them to look like USPS vehicles. I believe USPS retains the factory grills and pieces for the Mercedes vans so they can be sold off.
UPS trucks are scrapped once their service life is over, same with FedEx I believe.
Fedex trucks are definetly not scrapped. They got into some hot water about selling old step vans with false odometer readings. I dont know if they were corporate owned “Fedex Express” trucks or contractor owner “Fedex Ground” ones. Im betting the latter.
Apparently the speedo/odometer gauge(theyre one unit) was a real piece of junk on the Freightliner trucks. So theyd swap them out with used ones, run them for years with broken odometers, put in new ones. Never documented the actual miles then sold them on as odometer being accurate. You think people would be smarter buying a 10 year old van with only 150k miles on it, cause that sure as hell doesnt pass the basic smell test
I thought they didn’t sell the big box trucks, only the local vans and semi’s. I must have had remembered that wrong then. Doesn’t surprise me that FedEx would pull some shady shit, I loathe them as a shipper.
Iirc ground is a different company and the contractors are yet again separate. So far easier to dodge rules
Exactly. Fedex Ground is a seperate entity from Fedex Express and runs exclusively thru third party contractors that deliver your package.
I could be Emperor of our Meals on Wheels.
Swap out the heating lamps for UV tubes, and you have yourself a tanning salon (for children and small adults?)
If only Local Motors went with a fullsize sedan. You could go Brown in a Crown
Tropical fish delivered to your door in 30 minutes or they’re free.