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A British inventor has spent $25,000 turning a pick-up truck into an appealing drivable 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.

Category

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Motor
Transcript
00:00I've never seen anything like this before. Can we touch it?
00:03Sure you can.
00:10I'd built a lot of hot rod cars over the years,
00:13and I decided I wanted to do something completely ridiculous,
00:16and so the idea of the banana car came from that.
00:22I was in a gas station, and there was a bowl of fruit
00:24as I'm standing in line right next to where I was,
00:26and on top was a banana that ran fairly straight
00:29and curved at the back, and I picked it up,
00:31and I'm looking at it, and I'm studying this,
00:34and I'm picturing where the wheels would go
00:36and the engine and the seats,
00:37and I picture it driving down the road and start laughing.
00:41A product of the warped minds of our car fabricators,
00:44the Mutant Brothers.
00:47The fully road-legal big banana car is a regular site
00:51on the streets of Michigan.
00:56I bought a 1993 Ford F-150 pickup truck,
01:02took off all the sheet metal, which left the nice slender frame
01:05with the engine and all the suspension still attached.
01:08I then built the frame, the skeleton of the banana,
01:12out of rebar, covered it with chicken wire,
01:15sprayed it with urethane foam like you insulate houses with,
01:18then sculpted that to a nice banana shape,
01:20and then fiberglassed over the top.
01:22The fruity vehicle took two and a half years to build,
01:26with the work mainly just being done on Sundays.
01:29The cost of the banana car was spread out over two and a half years,
01:32so it's hard to say exactly how much it did end up costing,
01:35somewhere between $20,000 and $25,000.
01:37I could have done it for a lot less than that,
01:39but we replaced everything.
01:41And to credit Steve though, that doesn't include any labor.
01:44You're looking at hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of man hours.
01:47The big banana car is four wheel drive,
01:50and it's surprisingly fast.
01:52I've had it up to 85 miles an hour.
01:54Before you get freaked out, that was in Texas,
01:56where the speed limit was 80.
01:58So I was going five over,
02:00and I was still the slowest one on the road.
02:02I got bad news for you.
02:03I've done 85 in Michigan.
02:05But it was downhill.
02:07The vehicle stands just over 10 feet tall.
02:12However, the stem is retractable to let the car go under low bridges.
02:16There have been two occasions when the stem wasn't low enough.
02:21It makes you realize quickly that you just made a mistake.
02:25Unsurprisingly, the banana car doesn't go unnoticed.
02:29Oh man, we get the reaction.
02:31Quite often we'll do events in schools.
02:33When there's 67 and 8 year olds, they're just screaming.
02:38It's the funniest thing ever.
02:40We've been asked a few times if we would sell the big banana car.
02:43But I realized that if we did, what we'd be giving up isn't just a car.
02:47It's all of that.
02:48It's all that goodwill that just surrounds it.
02:51And it's lovely. It's wonderful.

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