The exotic Tritan A2 Aerocar will cross the auction block in Las-Vegas at the beginning of the next month. Only ten such vehicles were made in the mid-1980s as a collaboration between Tritan Ventures and Domino’s Pizza. There are no price estimates yet.
The goal of the team that worked on the project was to come up with a lightweight and fuel-efficient means of pizza delivery. This is exactly why the car looks so bizarre: its drag ratio is a record-low 0.15, according to the spec sheet.
Power comes from a Syvaro rotary engine with 440 cc (0.44 liters) of displacement and just 30 horsepower (22.4 kilowatts) headed for the wheels. The fuel consumption is rather impressive by the standards of the time – less than 3 liters per 100 km, or 78+ MPG.
Apparently, Domino’s wanted to create its own vehicle fleet for pizza couriers. The bizarre appearance of the Tritan A2 Aerocar helped with the publicity, even though it meant that getting inside the two-seat cabin was only possible by pushing the windshield out of the way.
Domino’s CEO of the time asked for the passenger seat to be replaced with a pizza oven to ensure that it stayed hot throughout the delivery, and for the exterior to be finished in the brand colors. The original plans involved making 180 such tricycles, but only 10 ended up rolling off the factory lines. Rumor has it only seven have survived to the present day.
The example on sale was one out of two privately owned ones, and comes equipped with a trailer for towing it to shows. Unfortunately, the pizza oven was lost somewhere underway.