28°
"It's like a billboard on the highways," said Arbelaez, 43, who is a partner at The Columbia Inn in Montville, known for its super-thin-crust pizza, with Ryan McDermott.
Arbelaez will slap a company magnet on the side of the truck and head to a party, where he'll cook The Columbia Inn's signature pie in a conveyor-like oven that he plugs into the bed of the truck. The pizza is ready in about two minutes and can feed 25 people in an hour.
And by the time he's back at the restaurant, Arbelaez will have dozens of emails from people who saw his truck out on the streets, he said.
Arbelaez ordered his Tesla Cybertruck five years ago with the goal of it one day becoming a driverless delivery truck for the restaurant. While New Jersey isn't quite there with driverless cars yet, the Cybertrucks have been innovative in their own right for the restaurant, the owners say.
"We're huge Tesla guys and really believe in the company and what Tesla is doing here," said McDermott, 54, of Towaco. "I love the product so much — I truly love these cars and I love what they stand for. Our dependency on oil and stuff like that has got to be broken and in time you’re going to see that with the technology that Tesla is working on."
Prior to the Cybertrucks' arrival over the summer, The Columbia Inn only had a food truck. Equipped with a restaurant-grade kitchen, it's massive, it requires gas, and it gets booked up fast.
Once the Cybertrucks came, The Columbia Inn slowly started knocking through the wait list for the food truck, and by now, the Tesla-made pizza trucks are just as popular.
The Columbia Inn's Cybertrucks are the first of their kind. The all-electric vehicles come with two 110-volt outlets and a 240-volt outlet in the bed — that's where they plug in the Impinger oven.
"What's neat about the Cybertruck is that it's all self-contained," McDermott said. "I could drive to the top of a mountain as long as it's charged up, plug in this pizza oven, and make pizzas. I don't need gas, I don't need propane. It's really amazing and I think there's a bright future with this thing."
Arbelaez grew up working on a coffee farm in Colombia, which ran on natural resources. Seeing them put to use firsthand made believing in natural resources easy for him. After moving to the United States, Arbelaez became one of the first people to buy a Tesla S series.
"The car was like a magnet," he said. "A quick run to the store for milk would take me an hour because when I came out of the store, I was like a celebrity. It was an eye-catching vehicle."
But for every fan, both McDermott and Arbelaez had a hater. Both were told they were "stupid" for buying their Teslas, and that "electric cars will never happen."
The Cybertruck was even more polarizing: "People either love it or they hate it."
McDermott was out driving the truck just after he got it over the summer in Garfield, and happened to be in front of a school that had just let out for the day.
"The kids were about 10 or 11 years old," he said, "and there were literally 30 of them running down the street taking pictures of the Cybertruck."
Then, there were the haters.
"I had a guy scream at me with his wife from his car, 'That's the ugliest thing I've ever seen!'" he said. "I can't understand why people react to this thing so animatedly. A lot of people look at it and say it looks evil," he said. "I’m like, come on man it’s just a car. There's something sinister about that thing."
Arbelaez had a similar interaction at The Columbia Inn with a customer, no less.
Cybertrucks aside, pizza is what led McDermott and Arbelaez to where they are now.
"It was pizza that was our passion," McDermott said. "Now we're combining it with Tesla, and it seems to be a really good fit."
"This was a project where we never looked at our return on investment. We didn’t know what it would look like. It’s been fun and luckily we have the latitude to experiment. In time, I think we can have a fleet of these things, which have raised our profile to a national level and I think it'll only keep growing as we progress.
"It’s fun going to work doing new things. It’s been fun. I can’t imagine it will continue not to be."
The Columbia Inn owners expect more fun on the horizon, and also more hate.
Arbelaez has his response down pat: "Let the future tell the truth," he tells his haters. It's a line from Nikola Tesla's biography.
"And," Arbelaez said, "the future has started talking."
The Columbia Inn also sells its own pizza ovens, which can heat up to 550 degrees in 10 minutes. The restaurant ships its frozen pies intended for the oven nationwide. Click here to follow the Cyber Pizza Truck on Instagram.
Click here to follow Daily Voice Branchville-Frankford and receive free news updates.
