Eating in your car isn’t a new concept. We’ve been dropping French fries down the sides of our seats for generations now. And neither is food delivery a novel concept. Yet somehow it’s taken this long to bring the two together in the way that Burger King has with its “Traffic Jam Whopper,” a new product system that delivers Burger King menu items directly to your car window while you’re stuck on a highway moving at 2 km/h. What you’re about to witness is evolution, folks: The program was introduced in Mexico City where gridlock traffic is a part of daily life for many, AdAge reports. Basically, digital billboards use real-time data to let drivers know how long they’ll be stuck in traffic and tempt them into an in-vehicle meal. “You’ll be stuck for 59 minutes. Order to your car now,” one of the digital billboards in Mexico City read. To discourage hungry drivers from texting while behind the wheel, the BK app apparently also functions with voice commands. Once the order is made, a motorcycle courier tracks the customer down with Google Maps tech and, by traffic filtering, or lane-splitting, delivers the meal. The program has proved so successful, with Burger King’s daily delivery order seeing a 63-per-cent increase and the BK app a 44-per-cent boost to its download rate, according to a campaign case study, that the fast food brand has decided to expand to the congested streets of Los Angeles, Shanghai and Sao Paulo. With numbers like that, it won’t come as a shock if other players start to enter the traffic-food-delivery game, too. Imagine getting a hot coffee delivered to your window while you wait out the morning traffic. A service like this wouldn’t be of much use to drivers in Canada, though, where lane-splitting on motorcycles or mopeds is illegal. Which is ironic, as the traffic jam is usually caused by the lineup to the Tim Hortons drive-through.
Origin: Burger King now offers food delivery to people stuck in traffic