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]
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