What if your restaurant came to you instead of you going to it?
Meet the Streat, a conceptual food-truck designed to adapt to these incredibly trying times. More than 60% of restaurants are estimated to close in USA alone because of the pandemic. This lockdown has exposed one of the most blatant realities of running a restaurant – renting commercial spaces is incredibly expensive, and restaurants, as popular as they may be, aren’t a very profitable business. Cut the cash flow for as little as even a week and the restaurant begins experiencing serious financial problems. Most of these places have been locked down since March.
However, it costs nearly 1/5th the amount to run a food-truck. You don’t worry about rent, location, or occupancy. The food truck can go where it experiences the highest demand, and can serve as many customers as possible while instituting a safe, social distancing policy. The Streat builds on that idea with an autonomous, pre-fab food-truck that can be customized based on the restaurant running within it, and can be rented out for a very nominal sum of money. The Streat operates on a low-risk, low maintenance model, and is designed to be autonomously driven (so you don’t need to employ a driver or worry about driving around the city yourself).
The Streat comes outfitted with a fully functional kitchen on the inside, big enough for as many as 3-4 cooks. The modular kitchen counter allows you to customize it based on the appliance you need, choosing between fryers, ovens, grills, hobs, and even fridges and deep-freezers for storing produce. A semi-transparent clad sits on top of the truck, illuminating it with sun-light to reduce energy consumption, while allowing patrons outside to see their food be prepared. Set your truck up with an online food-ordering system and you prevent the need for people lining up outside the truck. Moreover, the truck can even travel directly to deliver food to people, eliminating the need for delivery agents… and basically operating quite like a takeaway restaurant, but without the risk of one.
Designer: Lee Sungwook
If you're in Texas or New Mexico, you might soon see Waymo's autonomous trucks on the road. Alphabet's self-driving division is expanding tests of its big rigs to those states.
Anki's robotic toy business is no more, but the expertise behind it might live on. Waymo has hired 13 of Anki's robotics experts to head its self-driving truck efforts. The recruits include Anki co-founder Boris Sofman as well as five engineers wit...