this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
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No mention of the small table that seems to be attached to the car window
It’s a serving tray that hooks on to the window. The other guy is carrying one that he will bring to a different car window.
Yup we used to get those at Stuarts!
It's a drive-in tray:
There's a lot I don't understand about that picture. I'm so old I remember window trays at the drive-in in the 1960s, and they attached differently, with the window fully open and the bumpers against the door. With the one in the picture I don't see how you're supposed to get your drink past the opening without spilling it. Even the cherries on the banana split would scrape off. Also, it looks like they have the hood up? Which makes the rest of the scene hard to see but the girl with the balloon animal and the car behind her are from at least 20 years later than the orange car. So maybe it's vintage and they're being careful about the orange paint.
I'm not as old as you, but I remember window trays at Dog n Suds (and our local, the Mug-n-Bun) in the 90s. They did actually clip on the window, and if you had your window fully open they had you roll it up an inch or two so it could attach. I assume that wasn't new technology at the time. They didn't look quite like this, though; they were cantilevered on rubber pads so that the top of the tray lined up with the top of the window. By then they had moved away from glass serving dishes to Styrofoam with lids, so it wasn't really a problem to get things into the car, height-wise.
I mean, this is almost certainly a staged display for a car show, but I'm just verifying that these trays (well, ones kind of like these) do exist and were (are?) used.
It's a display for a car show.
Wild guess here because I don't know anything about vintage cars or drive in trays or america in the 60s. But could it be that this tray is designed to sit on the inside of a car, on the passenger side, so that someone in the driver's seat can use it? This would be convenient in bad weather but totally useless if you do have an extra passenger with you.
How does that work?
Would people just park somewhere at the drive in and eat in their cars or would they just put everything inside the car and then give the tray back?
I doubt they drove home with the tray attached and the food on it?
Back in the day people in US would never leave their cars. They lived like hermit crabs, working, eating and sleeping in their cars. If they had children they would move to a bigger car. The cities were simply considered too dangerous to move around without the protective shell of a vehicle. Only after WWII they invented suburbs and started moving from their cars to homes. Today it's safer so they sometimes leave their cars and move around on foot but it's still not very common and seen as liberal invention.
Eat in the car
I think Seattle still has one. I've never done it though. I'm not sure if they still do the trays, but they do take it to your car (I think):
https://burgermaster.com/about-history/
People knew how to prioritize back then.
What good is it for your car to be aerodynamic if it slightly hinders the ease with which a man in what looks like leather shorts serving you?
The table is a temporary addition that clips/clamps on. It probably belongs to the restaurant and would be removed before driving anywhere.
(In fact, actually ... look at the underside of the other guy's serving tray. It seems to have a folding mechanism on the bottom of it, and I think it's the same thing. Their serving trays are made to be clamped onto car windows to provide customers with a little table.)
Anyway, in modern times, we have nifty inventions called 'cup holders' in our cars, that allow us to hold beverage bottles conveniently in place without compromising aerodynamics.
But there's still a distinct lack of fully flat table-surfaces in most vehicles. Including our minivan although it could be a loss from the wheelchair conversion, along with the middle row of seats.
Strangely enough, tray tables are a common feature ... on extremely high-end luxury cars.
Which has always struck me as odd. Tables are useful for everyone, not just rich fuckers. And it's not like that would be an expensive or difficult feature to implement. Okay, skip the mahogany and brushed aluminum trim -- make it from cheap plastic. But I really don't see why more down-market cars -- especially family cars -- haven't implemented that feature. (Yes, I know there are actually a precious few out there that have. But why so few? Why is it such a rare feature for anyone spending less than $200k for their car?)
There are at least two drive-in restaurant chains near me (Sonic, which has lots of locations nationwide, and The Varsity, which claims to be "the world's largest drive-in"), but AFAIK neither does the car window tray thing. 😠