W
hen we heard that Domino’s Pizza was
claiming its new DXP is “the ultimate
pizza delivery vehicle,” we took it as a
call to action. Those pizza suits in their
fancy office park on the other side of our very
own Ann Arbor might know a thing or two about
tomato sauce, but making baseless claims about
automobiles is encroaching dangerously on our
turf. So we called Domino’s corporate with an
ultimatum: We’d stay out of the pizza business if
Domino’s would let us test the DXP, preferably
one that’s delivered full of fresh product. Noth-
ing short of a scientific evaluation would do.
The DXP appears to be unprecedented. If there’s been a sort-of-
purpose-built pizza car deployed by another pizza megacorpora-
tion, C/D’s intelligence network is unaware of it. So, in order to
stage a proper comparison test, we needed a “typical” pizza-deliv-
ery car. Working from lazy stereotypes and lurid high-school
assumptions borne out of watching bad 1980s VHS porn (“Ma’am,
did you order the large pepperoni?”), we set off to acquire a late-
model Pontiac Firebird. “Not a Trans Am,” explained features
editor Jeff Sabatini, himself a former pizza-delivery driver,
“because that’s actually cool. A ratty fourth-gen V- 6 Firebird, how-
ever, would be the perfect car to embody all the desperation and
economic marginalization of the average delivery driver, while also
reflecting his unreasonable aspiration to something greater.”
Cheap Firebirds may grow under trees in the Midwest, but
in my neighborhood of Santa Barbara, California, they are in066. COMPARO. CAR AND DRIVER. MAR/2017 illustration by SEAN McCABE, photography by SCOTT G. TOEPFERHOT VS.
CHEESY
2015 DOMINO’S DXP
Price: $25,750*
Power: 84 hp
Torque: 83 lb-ft
Weight: 2347 lb
0–60 mph: 11.2 sec2001 MITSUBISHI
ECLIPSE GT-R
Price: $2560
Power: 140 hp
Torque: 155 lb-ft
Weight: 3113 lb
0–60 mph: 10.6 secWE PIT THE DOMINO’S DXP
AGAINST THE WORLD’S LAMEST
MITSUBISHI ECLIPSE IN A
BATTLE FOR PIE-DELIVERY
S U P R E M ACY.
BY JOHN PEARLEY HUFFMAN