The process of ordering delivery pizza hasn’t changed much since its inception probably over 100 years ago. You order a pie, someone makes it, and someone else delivers it to your watering mouth. Vehicles have allowed deliveries over longer distances but aside from some notable occasions, your driver will be in some normal car, scooter, or perhaps bicycle. Note that I said “some” there, because some pizza retailers, like Domino’s, haven’t been afraid to experiment with the pizza delivery vehicle. Back in the 1980s, the pizza chain commissioned the ultimate pizza delivery vehicle from a small Michigan firm. The Tritan A2 is a trike that promised a thrifty 80 mpg thanks to a rotary engine and a slippery 0.15 coefficient of drag. The trike didn’t revolutionize pizza delivery, but you can buy one of the 10 built today!
This find comes to us from reader Hugh Crawford, and it’s making my weird piece of history meter read off of the charts. Domino’s Pizza started off as a single shop in Ypsilanti, Michigan, in 1960. That first shop was called DomNick’s and over the years, the brand has grown into a chain pizza giant. In recent years, Domino’s refined its recipes, though for a rare hot take you’ll read from me, I think the peak Domino’s taste was in the mid-2000s. Anyway, back in 2015, Domino’s unveiled the DXP (Delivery Expert) car.
Developed with Local Motors and built by Roush, the Domino’s DXP was a Chevrolet Spark with a pizza oven where the backseat used to reside and a drink carrier where the front passenger seat would normally be.
Most recently, the company partnered up with robotics company Nuro to create an autonomous pizza delivery robot. Both of these ideas are supposed to get you a pizza as quickly as possible and as hot as possible all while being a good marketing exercise. But these two vehicles aren’t Domino’s only attempts to make pizza delivery faster and more glamorous. Back in the 1980s, Domino’s once saw the future of pizza delivery happening with extremely aerodynamic trikes with rotary engines.
A Practice Over A Century Old
Before I continue, I should talk about why Domino’s seems to care so much about pizza delivery. The history of pizza delivery goes back well over a century. It seems like there isn’t a definitive “first pizza delivery,” but an often-told legend is that of when King Umberto I of Italy and Queen Margherita of Savoy visited Naples in 1889. Apparently, the Queen fell ill to some bad food and requested some local Italian cuisine. Of course, there’s no way the King and Queen were going to a restaurant; the food was to be brought to them!
Reportedly, Chef Raffaele Esposito took on the mission, baking a pizza with mozzarella, basil, and tomatoes. Together, they resembled the colors of Italy’s flag. This was the birth of the Margherita pizza and Chef Esposito delivered the pizzas himself.
At any rate, takeout pizza took off after World War II. Soldiers wanting their own pizzas could visit pizzerias and find that they could take a pizza home in a box. Bigger cities like New York City and Los Angeles even offered delivery to the immediate surrounding areas. As the Atlantic reports, dozens of inventors have tried perfecting the art of boxing and transporting pizzas. Domino’s made a corrugated pizza box in the 1960s, but allegedly didn’t patent it. The Domino’s box was a leap forward with its stackable flat-pack design.
Pizza delivery by car began to take off in the 1960s along with a rise of car ownership. This is reportedly where the promise of a pizza in “30 minutes or less” originated. And in the 1990s, the internet once again evolved how people ordered pizzas.
Tritan Ventures
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 Tritan A2
As Hemmings writes, the design goals of the A2 called for a vehicle so light and so aerodynamic that only a small engine was needed to propel it. The lack of drag combined with a tiny engine would translate to fantastic fuel economy. Remember, this was the 1980s, so fuel efficiency was very much in vogue.
At the heart of the Tritan A2 is a fiberglass monocoque shell. Under it, you’ll find three wheels, which help make the vehicle compact. At the rear is the Amick Arch, a sort of wing said to increase stability. The Amick Arch is also supposed to help move the Tritan A2 along by acting like a sail in a crosswind. The sleek body–which you’ll note doesn’t have any doors–slices through the air with its 0.15 coefficient of drag. To illustrate how huge of a deal that was, Hemmings compares the Tritan A2 to the day’s Toyota MR2, which had a Cd of 0.35 while a C4 Corvette nudged out a Cd of 0.33. Toyota says that one of the new hot Prii have a Cd of 0.27 and the best Lucid Air is a slippery Cd of 0.197.
Going back to the lack of doors for a moment. Getting into and out of a Tritan A2 involves sliding the upper portion open and closed like an aircraft canopy. A standard A2 was supposed to come with two seats in a tandem arrangement.
Powering the Tritan A2 is a Savkel SP-440 single-rotor 440cc Wankel engine produced by Savkel Ltd (also known as Syvaro), an Israel-based company that produced industrial engines. This engine produced 30 HP and it reportedly returned up to 80 mpg when housed in a Tritan A2. In terms of performance, an A2 can hit 62 mph in about 17 seconds and reach a top speed of 95 mph. Power is delivered via a belt-driven CVT. Given the vehicle’s low weight of 899 pounds, that’s believable. That weight figure is on par with a touring or cruiser motorcycle.
The Tritan A2 design was enticing to Domino’s, which reportedly ordered ten of them for testing at select locations. The pizza giant was apparently planning on rolling these out nationwide. Some sources report 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. Archived photos show those ovens installed. If you’re curious what it sounds like, click here to hear it. Sadly, the video won’t embed on our site.
In theory, these trikes would have been great pizza delivery vehicles. A pizza delivery vehicle doesn’t need to go fast, but excellent fuel economy means you can save a bit on expenses. Plus, a customer is absolutely going to talk about watching their delivery driver hop out of something that looks like a hovering spacecraft. The trike configuration also meant that the Tritan A2 would be classified as a motorcycle in many jurisdictions.
Domino’s ordered each A2 for the price of $15,000, or $43,240 today. It’s not known exactly why Domino’s canceled the program, but the 10 A2s would end up in the hands of various museums, starting with VIN 001, which ended up in the Pioneer Auto Museum in 1986. As for Tritan Ventures, it dissolved in 1988.
This 1984 Tritan A2
What we’re looking at today is VIN 005, located in Arroyo Grande, California. It’s up for grabs on eBay in an auction that has 7 days remaining. As of writing, bidding is at a very affordable $4,545 with 22 bids in. The seller states that this Tritan A2 has been restored and its original Savkel rotary is running.
The odometer in the cockpit shows 158 miles and the VIN plate states that it’s classified as a motorcycle. Sadly, there is an empty space where the rear seat should go, so this is strictly a single-seater.
Keeping this trike alive is bound to be a challenge. Given the fact that Tritan has been dead for at least 35 years, I wouldn’t expect to find replacement parts. As for the engine, Savkel’s assets were sold to Freedom Motors a long time ago. Those assets, among others, were used to create the company’s Rotapower series of engines. So, I suppose in a worst-case scenario you could get an engine that’s close enough to original. You even get a custom trailer with the purchase of this A2.
Either way, in buying this Tritan A2, you’re getting both a weird piece of pizza delivery history alongside a rare and very obscure piece of vehicle history. It’s one of those vehicles you can roll into a Cars & Coffee in and nobody is going to know what it is. If that sounds alluring to you, head over to eBay and place a bid on it. If you buy it, we would love to drive it!
Update, October 18, 2023: It would appear this Tritan A2 failed to sell on eBay. It will now go across the Mecum Auctions Las Vegas block on November 10. The seller says they purchased it for $25,000 back in 2021. There is no auction estimate this time, so who knows what it’ll go for!
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What are the vents in the front on both side for? To me they look like cannon barrels from a fighter jet.
I was surprised to see an article on this obscure piece of history. I was aware of this and its drag coefficient. 80 mpg is really good considering how inefficient its engine is. It definitely needed more power.
If I had a place to keep it, I’d be bidding on it. But alas. It would make an excellent EV conversion. A 10 kWh pack of Model 3 batteries would probably yield somewhere around a 150 mile range, while having a cheap Chinese hubmotor and ebike controller powering each wheel would allow AWD and the potential to accelerate from 0 to 60 in under 4 seconds, the combination of components allowing the mass to be kept near or possibly under stock.
I think most regular commenters immediately thought of you as soon as we saw this article 😉
Talking of an EV version, in the old pictures Mercedes linked to, there’s pictures of a Tritan with solar panels all over the hoop at the back (wing?), and stickers claiming it’s solar powered. I’m pretty sure even a vehicle as light and streamlined as this would need more than a couple of square meters of (1990’s vintage) solar panels to power it, but someone tried at least.
You could cover the entire vehicle in panels, it would be barely enough to allow 30 miles range on a good day. Its shape just isn’t suited for it. Covering the hoop alone would be next to useless. You’d be lucky to get 25W from the hoop alone with the best off-the-shelf technology available. Solar cars are designed to have low drag coupled with a lot of surface area facing the sun through the day, and there is a limit to the curvature with which you can install flexible panels, which greatly limits design options. This Tritan A2 simply doesn’t have much good surface area to place them.
I am building my microcar/”bicycle”s next body with solar panels in mnd. I’ll be looking at about 150W, which should be enough to get around 30-50 miles free range a day depending upon how I drive it. Maybe in direct sunlight with light pedaling effort, I might be able to hold 25-30 mph without drawing any of the battery down. Maybe. I need to get it to that stage.
The Solar Challenge racers show that it can be done, the question is, how much comfort/practicality/’car-ness’ do you give up?
You won’t be giving up as much as you think. Aptera and Lightyear One do show that practical solar-assisted cars ARE possible. If you drive 30 miles a day, you might be able to cover all of your commuting miles on sunlight alone.
Because of the solar panel specifications used, the Lightyear One does sacrifice aerodynamics to achieve its solar panel throughput in a sedan body. The Aptera can get away with lower drag and a similar amount of solar assist as the Lightyear because it is a 3-wheeler.
But if you’re going to make efficient/economical use of solar panels, the car MUST be designed around them.
I’ve thought of slapping a set on my electric Triumph GT6 and turning their use into a black stripe down the centerline of the car from front to rear(after I paint the car dark British Racing Green, that is). They’d function as both a racing stripe and auxiliary propulsion. But at best, I’d only get about 10 miles of range per day out of them, and they probably won’t pay themselves off. I might still do it.
On a car designed around them, they are very much a useful and functional technology.
Hey, this thing is just down the road from me here on the central coast. No way would I want this, but might be interesting to see in person. And if you decide to come here and buy it, definitely get a great pizza from Fatte’s, you won’t regret it.
I wonder if this will also end in Domino’s taking legal action like they did with Samcrac and the DXP he bought at a salvage auction…
I wonder not if but when this piece of tin gets in an accident how do you separate the pizza from the driver? Also the only way you can do decent pizza and fast delivery is make the pizzas at the shop, and bake them in oven or air fryer in the car. The pizza takes 22 minutes to bake you are sitting outside the house waiting for it to finish rather than leaving the shop.
> how do you separate the pizza from the driver?
You don’t, the customer just gets a free deep dish with extra toppings
Aah pizza ugh delivery pizza. Pizza is perhaps the worlds most perfect food. Then Dominoes, when i think good food food cheap fast delivered on a bicycle car is not what comes to mind. In fact i ate dominoes back when $3.99 got it delivered in 30 or less. As a broke college student it was better than Ramen. Then like Subway costs went up, $5 foot longs are $10 now. Dominos went the other way. They started using ingredients such as cheese food, bread like substitute, generic ketchup, you get my drift. Heck even now Dominoes advertises your pizza will be delivered by an EV robot vs what the now $8.00 pizza tastes like. I prefer to pay double, pick it up when done, still tip and enjoy the flavorful world of pizza. My local shop recognizes my order and says hey dave is that you? When do you need it? Actually i moved and go an hour our of my way to get their pizza. I save money by buying during the 2 pie special and eat pizza for 3 days breakfast lunch and dinner. So Dominoes thanks for ruining pizza, you put family businesses out of business by selling cardboard brushed with ketchup, and shredded cheese food because drunks thought that it tasted good.
Domino’s has always been better at delivery than pizza.
Insert cheap Tesla joke here.
Pretty slick, though I don’t think I’d trust a teen pizza delivery driver with one of these things.
Why not it is ruined before they get it loaded.
And somehow they are also loaded before it gets ruined.
I wonder if Neal Stephenson used the Tritan A2 as the basis for Hiro Protagonist’s pizza delivery vehicle in the book Snow Crash. The timeline is right as the A2 is from the early 1980s and Snow Crash was published in the early 1990s. My recollection of Stephenson’s description of Hiro’s pizza delivery vehicle matches the Tritan A2. However, the A2 probably does not have “enough potential energy to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt,” as Hiro’s vehicle had.
Honestly, the first time I saw the Hyundai N 74 concept, I thought, “Holy shit, it’s the Deliverator’s car.” That’s pretty much exactly what I pictured.
Being hydrogen powered, the N 74 might possess enough energy to fire a pound of bacon into the asteroid belt. But you gotta admit the A2 would look better than the N 74 at the bottom of a burbclave swimming pool.
The N74 conjured up images of the Deliverator’s car for me s well. In fact, that was my very first comment on the topic of that car when it was unveiled. I read Snow Crash more than 20 years before the N74 existed as a concept within the public domain, but it is uncanny how close the N74 fit my imagination at the time I read that book.
The Tritan is also a little similar to a classic-era Doctor Who vehicle that Jon Pertwee’s Doctor drove/flew in the ’70s episodes when he was stranded on Earth b/c the nefarious intertemporal menace of low BBC budgets.
Really cool, but I can’t imagine driving that around on the streets these days what with the proliferation of lifted bro-dozers and all.
Hey trucks havent limited motorcycle riding. And really it is the porsche bros who try to compensate by buying bright and shiny
It solves traffic congestion! Just drive under the average F150.
That is super duper cool. Although a CD of 1.5, that miniscule frontal area, and 900lb means 80mpg is only okay. Vehicles much heavier, bigger, and draggier have exceeded 100mpg more than once, an XL1 being a good example. As somebody else said, if it had a small diesel engine I would expect ~150mpg.
Yeah but heated pizza area and a few dozen 2 liters aint apples to oranges. Reality vs ideal test conditions.
Unfortunately, this project didn’t pass Dominos’s rigorous handling tests. It failed to avoid the Noid.
Despite numerous strongly worded emails to politicians and Joe Rogan I can’t get anyone outside of my small circle of loyal fanatics to recognize that the Noid is real.
Why do you think Dominoes started filling potholes with their own money years ago.
They are trying to keep the Noid underground!
Just think about it.
The Noid WAS real!:
“On January 30, 1989, Kenneth Lamar Noid, a mentally ill man who believed that the “Avoid the Noid” campaign was personally directed towards him and was antagonizing him, entered a Domino’s restaurant in Chamblee, Georgia. Armed with a .357 Magnum, Noid then held two employees hostage for over five hours.
After ranting to the employees that the then-owner of Domino’s, Tom Monaghan, was fraudulent and had stolen his name, he first forced them to call the Domino’s headquarters to demand $100,000 and a white limousine as getaway transportation for him. After offering to exchange a hostage for a copy of American postmodern author Robert Anton Wilson’s 1985 novel The Widow’s Son, Noid reneged on his offer when an officer brought him the book. Noid then became hungry and forced the captive employees to make him two pizzas; while Noid ate the pizzas with his gun in his lap, the hostages escaped. Noid surrendered to the police shortly after. Two shots were fired by Noid during the incident, both of them hitting the ceiling.
Noid was charged with kidnapping, aggravated assault, extortion, and possession of a firearm during a crime. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity. Noid subsequently spent time in a mental institution, but committed suicide on February 23, 1995. This incident was widely believed to have caused Domino’s Pizza to discontinue advertising using the Noid as their mascot, but this claim has been rejected by the company and their advertisers.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Noid
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-01-31-mn-1499-story.html
Thank you CB ,I was waiting for this …
Damn.
You think Dominos has a driver shortage now? Put those crazy kids in 3-wheelers and you’ll be carting them off in pizza boxes.
the Wankel motor probably actually hurt overall Fuel Economy here. Had they used a 1 liter or so motorcycle motor, I suspect the results would have been superior on all accounts. had they used say a 3 cylinder turbo diesel, the numbers might have been outrageous, assuming the weight penalty was not terrible.
I agree with that take! I’ve found no explanation, but I wonder why a rotary was chosen and not a motorcycle engine. Surely, you could have purchased some used Hondas, dropped in their engines, and got better results for a cheaper price, maybe?
Then again, I suppose these were still the days when folks thought rotary power still had a chance of being the future, so maybe that was the logic there.
Possibly. The RX-7 was a big deal in 1984 (when this thing was built), so maybe that was front of mind for the designers.
I don’t know how well a motorcycle engine would have worked in that enclosure. At that time the Goldwing was water-cooled, but most of the liter bikes – KZ, GS, CB – were air-cooled. Some had oil coolers as well.
The delivery thing appears to have a vent on the right side but I think a literbike engine would have cooked itself in there. More power = more heat (generally) but the rotary was air-cooled as well so who knows.
Maybe they could have redirected some of that heat into the pizza storage compartment.
I would guess packaging. The rotary engine, for the amount of power generated, was about the most compact solution available on a HP/Litre basis(Litre in terms of total space occupied by the ICE drive system, not specifically the engine). Space is at a premium in a vehicle like this, and in those days, we didn’t have mass-produced lithium batteries or in-wheel hub motors.
Amazing, the company was only in business for 4 years, and they managed to build at least 10 vehicles that were delivered to a real customer and used on public roads in real world conditions, as opposed to, say, Elio, which now only slightly younger than the Ford Motor Company was at the time they took over Lincoln, and has, what, exactly, to show for it?
Samcrac needs this for his fleet
As a former pizza delivery driver, this would have been a welcome alternative to using your own vehicle. At least at the end of your shift your personal car wouldn’t smell like the den of an intense pizza orgy.
Frankly towards the end of my willingness to eat dominoes it all smelled like warm cardboard.
Mmmmmm pizza orgy (mouth agape, drooling).
I fail to see a problem
This thing looks so cool. The exterior doesn’t even look like it’s from the 80s. I bet if you upgraded the lights to LEDs and swapped the powertrain for an electric motor it would be a pretty sweet little vehicle and would eliminate many of the service/parts issues.
Ah yes… this would go nicely with my Domino’s Rolex.
All my Battle of the Planets G-Force spaceship dreams have been realized. Battling it out with Suburbans, Bro Dozers and the grey scale CUV forces of evil on modern roads makes it a non starter.
Is self driving a good term for autonomous vehicles? I self drive myself to work every day. All autonomous vehicles should have Robert Picardo mannequin in the drivers seat.
I’m not seeing any HVAC or ventilation of any sort. I’m not sure I’d want to drive it in summer, but there would be no question about keeping the pizzas warm! Also, potential engine issues scare me, but if it failed, I’m thinking the engine and CVT from a Suzuki Burgman 650 would be a good fit and improve performance overall.
Burrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgman!!!!
If they used delivery vehicles like that today, there would be no worker shortages. Heck, I’d be a Dominos delivery guy if it meant zooming around in one of those.
I am a pizza delivery driver, and I can’t imagine working a 8-10 hour shift in one of these. First off, where do you put the pizzas? Not all orders are 1-2 pizzas, and you frequently take more than 1 delivery at a time. I’ve filled my car with pizzas, and on busy nights you’ll fill it up over and over.
Second, while fuel economy is important, so is being zippy in traffic. 0-60 in 18 seconds is hot garbage, and the top speed really doesn’t matter. The low height will make visibility poor and it doesn’t look like there is much crash protection, either.
Then let’s talk about the driving position (very low) the pizza load height (very low) and you discover it takes longer to get into and out of this than a normal car. They want us to run to the door to save 1 second, yet they are perfectly fine with a 10-15 second delay every time you get in or out?
Back in the 80’s, that 1 second was the difference between paying and free.
Not really. Although I only worked there for a short time when it was $3 off, not free, we didn’t really argue with people about it unless they were a total PITA about it, like failing to answer their door for 5 minutes when we clearly arrived on time. The main reason (and the reason why the ‘driver was driving crazy to get it there on time is BS) is at least 50% of the time the customer paid us the same as if we got it there on time. So it was an extra $3 tip, and this was a time when a $1-2 tip was average.
On the flip side, wrecking a delivery vehicle like this will cause worker shortages.
Don’t forget the Domino’s DeLorean!
When this baby hits 88 miles per hour, you’re going to see some serious pizza.
I feel like we’re going to find out shortly this was actually a project of young Toecutter’s…
Standing by for Toecutter’s critique in 3, 2, 1…
This vehicle predates me.
(pulls up a chair, listens intently)
I was in high school when I was designing my first EV conversion, but that was in 2001/2002. I wasn’t aware of this vehicle’s existence until 2005.
(listens intently)
I do believe that is the headlight switch from an air-cooled VW.
Maybe JT could confirm.
I wanna commute to work in this thing.