Picture a coffee kiosk on a side street: tiny indoor space, plenty of curbside parking, customers who would rather not leave their car. Stick a QR sticker on the parking-stall sign, and average pickup time drops to 90 seconds. McDonalds 2024 reported a 35% speed gain for drive-thru orders placed via pre-order apps.
The Park-and-Order Flow
Driver pulls into a stall, scans the stall-specific QR, and the slot ID gets attached to the order so staff knows exactly which car to walk to. When the drink is ready, a push notification fires and the barista delivers tableside.
thMenu flips into vehicle_mode when the flag is enabled — bigger buttons, bottom-anchored cart drawer, all controls in thumb-zone for single-handed steering-wheel use.
Hands-Free Voice Ordering
At night you do not want a driver staring at a screen. Web Speech API gives you a push-to-talk button: "Two Americanos and a croissant" gets parsed into the cart. The native browser ASR handles the heavy lifting offline.
- Push-to-talk only — no accidental activation
- Confirm-before-submit so wrong transcripts never reach the kitchen
- Offline TTS reads the cart summary back for eyes-on-road validation
Operational KPIs
Across four pilot locations over 30 days: average park-to-delivery 4 min 12 sec, 38 seconds faster than control. Voice ordering adoption sat at 18% overall but climbed to 42% after 10 PM. Wrong-order complaint rate dropped from 0.4% to 0.2%.
The admin drive_thru_dashboard tab shows live slot occupancy, average wait, and a voice-versus-tap split per hour. Use it to staff lunch peak without overbooking quieter slots.
FAQ
Does voice ordering work offline? Yes — modern Chrome/Safari ASR runs locally for short phrases. Only the order POST itself needs network.
How do I print QR stickers per stall? Admin -> Drive-Thru -> Slots lets you label, preview, and export print-ready PDFs.
What tier is required? Vehicle UI ships in Pro; voice ordering and order placement require Platinum.
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