What was the name of McDonald’s first drive-through restaurant, opened in 1975?

McDonald’s first drive-through restaurant opened in Sierra Vista, Arizona, in 1975.

The location was near Fort Huachuca, a U.S. Army installation. McDonald’s added the drive-through partly to serve soldiers who could not leave their vehicles while wearing field gear. The restaurant’s format allowed customers to order and collect food through a service window rather than entering the dining room.

This innovation became important to McDonald’s branding because it reinforced the company’s association with speed, convenience, and automobile travel. Earlier McDonald’s restaurants had already been designed for motorists, with prominent roadside architecture and parking areas. The drive-through extended that automobile-centered identity into the ordering process itself.

Sierra Vista is sometimes confused with other historically important McDonald’s locations. San Bernardino was the site of the McDonald brothers’ original restaurant, while Des Plaines was Ray Kroc’s 1955 Illinois restaurant. Downey is famous for preserving one of the oldest surviving McDonald’s buildings, but it was not the first drive-through.