A British inventor has spent $25,000 turning a pick-up truck into an ap-pealing driveable banana. Steve Braithwaite, who is originally from Woodstock, Oxfordshire, spent two years building the vehicle - which has a top speed of 85mph. The 55-year-old, who now lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, came up with the idea for the Big Banana Car in 2009. The expensive concept cost around $25,000 and took Steve more than two years worth of Sundays to create. The finished vehicle is 10ft tall and 22ft long but its 302ci Ford V8 engine still allows it to hit impressive speeds.
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MotorTranscript
00:00 I've never seen anything like this before. Can we touch it?
00:02 Sure you can.
00:03 I've built a lot of hot rod cars over the years and I decided I wanted to do something completely ridiculous.
00:15 And so the idea of the banana car came from that.
00:18 I was in a gas station and there was a bowl of fruit as I'm standing in line right next to where I was.
00:25 And on top was a banana that ran fairly straight and curved at the back.
00:30 And I picked it up and I'm looking at it and I'm studying this.
00:33 And I'm picturing where the wheels would go and the engine and the seats.
00:37 And I picture it driving down the road and start laughing.
00:40 A product of the warped minds of our car fabricators, the Mutant Brothers.
00:45 The fully road legal Big Banana Car is a regular sight on the streets of Michigan.
00:53 I bought a 1993 Ford F-150 pickup truck.
00:57 Took off all the sheet metal which left the nice slender frame with the engine and all the suspension still attached.
01:03 I then built the frame, the skeleton of the banana out of rebar.
01:08 Covered it with chicken wire.
01:10 Sprayed it with urethane foam like you insulate houses with.
01:13 Then sculpted that to a nice banana shape and then fiberglassed over the top.
01:17 The fruity vehicle took two and a half years to build with the work mainly just being done on Sundays.
01:23 The cost of the banana car was spread out over two and a half years.
01:26 So it's hard to say exactly how much it did end up costing.
01:29 Somewhere between $20,000 and $25,000.
01:32 I could have done it for a lot less than that but we replaced everything.
01:36 And to credit Steve though, that doesn't include any labor.
01:38 You're looking at hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of man hours.
01:41 The big banana car is four wheel drive and is surprisingly fast.
01:45 I've had it up to 85 miles an hour.
01:47 Before you get freaked out, that was in Texas where the speed limit was 80.
01:51 So I was going five over and I was still the slowest one on the road.
01:55 I've got bad news for you. I've done 85 in Michigan.
01:58 Oh.
01:59 But it was downhill.
02:01 The vehicle stands just over 10 feet tall.
02:06 However, the stem is retractable to let the car go under low bridges.
02:10 There have been two occasions when the stem wasn't low enough.
02:15 It makes you realize quickly that you just made a mistake.
02:18 Unsurprisingly, the banana car doesn't go unnoticed.
02:22 Oh man, we get the reaction.
02:24 Quite often we'll do events at schools.
02:26 When there's 67 and 8 year olds, we'll go to the school.
02:30 We'll go to the school.
02:32 We'll do events at schools. When there's 67 and 8 year olds, they're just screaming.
02:37 It's the funniest thing ever.
02:39 We've been asked a few times if we would sell the big banana car.
02:43 But I realize that if we did, what we'd be giving up isn't just the car.
02:47 It's all of that. It's all that goodwill that just surrounds it.
02:51 And it's lovely. It's wonderful.
02:53 [Music]