Fast Food Drive-Thrus Are Tough For AI Self-Driving Cars, But They’ll Eventually Get It

Dr. Lance Eliot, AI Insider

[Ed. Note: For reader’s interested in Dr. Eliot’s ongoing business analyses about the advent of self-driving cars, see his online Forbes column: https://forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/]

Drive-Thru Is Big Business

In the United States, there’s an estimated 200,000 or so drive-thru operations (possibly a lot more, depending upon how you are counting).

Some statistics claim that Americans do about 6 billion drive-thru “visits” each year.

For these kinds of stats, they often count only fast food drive-thru operations, while other counts include our drive-thru efforts at pharmacies to get prescriptions and at banks to use ATM’s.

The drive-thru is essential to most of the fast food restaurants, including for Starbucks about 40% of their locations have a drive-thru, and in the case of McDonald’s it accounts for 70% of their business in the United States.

According to fast food drive-thru insiders, the average total time to navigate through the drive-thru and pop out the other side with your food is around 3.5 minutes.

That’s pretty quick.