New vehicles arrive at the plant as stripped-down chassis assemblies that include wheels, a drivetrain, a steering wheel, a dashboard, a driver’s seat and nothing more. Trucks used to be just white, but now customers want to make their trucks look like celebrities.”įounded in 1965, AA Cater Truck operates from a sprawling facility here in central Los Angeles, where the food trucks are designed, built, financed, sold and serviced.Ī sister company, Hivco, a manufacturer of the delivery vehicles known as step vans, operates under the same roof. “There’s also a lot more emphasis on marketing and graphics. “We’re seeing demand for customization based on specific menus or food concepts, which may mean installing a pizza oven or a baking oven for cupcakes,” said Richard Gomez, customer sales engineer and plant controller at AA Cater Truck, the largest food truck manufacturer in the country. Schick and other chefs seek to take more exotic foods like agedashi tofu and foie gras torchon to the streets and sidewalks of San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, they are demanding a host of upgrades to the traditional catering trucks, from teppanyaki grills to vertical chicken rotisseries.Īnd those who manufacture catering trucks are rushing to accommodate such special requests, which have rescued their industry from a recession-induced plunge in demand for the more traditional taco and hamburger trucks. “You get a kitchen that’s not designed by a chef, but by an engineer who’s simply trying to figure out where to make things fit.”Īs Mr. “It’s basically like buying a trailer home,” Mr. Schick and his business partner, Blake Tally, decided to open Le Truc, a San Francisco “bustaurant,” with a gourmet kitchen and dedicated seating area inside a converted school bus, the two quickly learned that the kitchens in food trucks are very different from their brick-and-mortar equivalents. He took classes at the Culinary Institute of America, studied under the Italian food expert Marcella Hazan and served as a private chef for the likes of the writer Christopher Hitchens and the venture capitalist David Cowan.īut when Mr. The crossover SUV market is white hot right now, and Tesla requires profits from that segment to fuel the debut of the Model 3, scheduled to hit the road in 2017.LOS ANGELES Chef Hugh Schick has cooked in some of the finest kitchens in the land. Historically, the startup has done almost no advertising, but it wants the Model X to post better sales numbers, catching up to the Model S sedan. That was art direction this is marketing, something Tesla needs. It was a deft combination of the classic - the first Airstream trailers went on sale in the 1930s - and the futuristic. When the crossover SUV was launched in 2015, it of course pulled a retro-groovy Airstream on stage, to showcase its 5,000-pound towing capacity. "Like all Tesla galleries, the mobile Airstream fleet will be staffed with Tesla product specialists, combining Tesla’s friendly, informative approach and best-in-class customer service with the opportunity for customers to see Model X first-hand and design a Tesla of their own," the automaker said in a statement.Īs with the pop-up galleries that Tesla has opened for brief periods in the past - there was one in New York's chic Hamptons vacation community last year - the Model X-plus-Airstream idea literally drips cool. The latest salvo involves a half-dozen Model X SUVs towing Airstream trailers that have been outfitted as rolling Tesla design studios. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.
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