Photo: Toyota
For Toyota, the SEMA 2018 event in Las Vegas is all about the full-size Tundra pickup truck. The star of the Japanese booth is undoubtedly the Tundra Platinum brought to the show by Hollywood actor Kevin Costner.
But there’s another pickup there, possibly just as exciting: the Tundra PIE Pro. A pizza factory on wheels, Toyota says, built by Toyota’s Motorsports Technical Center (MTCI) just to show that they can.
Assembled with help from Pizza Hut and Nachi Robotic Systems, the truck is based on a Tundra SR5 of which only the bare rolling chassis remained. Once stripped naked, the car was rebuilt to incorporate both the required hardware for pizza-making and a completely zero-emissions powertrain.
The PIE is powered by a hydrogen fuel-cell electric power unit taken off a Mirai, but that’s hardly the most interesting side of this Tundra.
It’s the bed where all the magic happens, a bed affectionately dubbed The Kitchen. It comprises a refrigerator to keep the pizzas fresh, a pair of computer-guided articulating robotic arms to pick them up and a portable conveyor oven to bake them hot.
The production process works a bit like this: when the order is received, a robotic arm opens the refrigerator door and picks up the selected pizza. It places it on the conveyor and then heads back to close the refrigerator door.
Once the pizza is out of the oven, the second robotic arm picks it up, places it on a cutting board and slices it up into six pieces. Because a robot is doing the cutting, the slices are this time perfectly even.
Of course, all the power needed by the hardware comes from the hydrogen fuel cells. And enough of it too, as Toyota says it only takes between six and seven minutes to bake a Pizza Hut from scratch.
Usually, most of the tech shown at SEMA has some type of future in real life. It’s unclear yet whether this Tundra PIE will mark the next step in Pizza Hut’s expansion. It’s also unclear why this special pickup is called PIE.
All the details why could want about the Tundra PIE are included in the document attached below.
Assembled with help from Pizza Hut and Nachi Robotic Systems, the truck is based on a Tundra SR5 of which only the bare rolling chassis remained. Once stripped naked, the car was rebuilt to incorporate both the required hardware for pizza-making and a completely zero-emissions powertrain.
The PIE is powered by a hydrogen fuel-cell electric power unit taken off a Mirai, but that’s hardly the most interesting side of this Tundra.
It’s the bed where all the magic happens, a bed affectionately dubbed The Kitchen. It comprises a refrigerator to keep the pizzas fresh, a pair of computer-guided articulating robotic arms to pick them up and a portable conveyor oven to bake them hot.
The production process works a bit like this: when the order is received, a robotic arm opens the refrigerator door and picks up the selected pizza. It places it on the conveyor and then heads back to close the refrigerator door.
Once the pizza is out of the oven, the second robotic arm picks it up, places it on a cutting board and slices it up into six pieces. Because a robot is doing the cutting, the slices are this time perfectly even.
Of course, all the power needed by the hardware comes from the hydrogen fuel cells. And enough of it too, as Toyota says it only takes between six and seven minutes to bake a Pizza Hut from scratch.
Usually, most of the tech shown at SEMA has some type of future in real life. It’s unclear yet whether this Tundra PIE will mark the next step in Pizza Hut’s expansion. It’s also unclear why this special pickup is called PIE.
All the details why could want about the Tundra PIE are included in the document attached below.
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