00:00I've never seen anything like this before. Can we touch it?
00:02Sure you can.
00:10I'd built a lot of hot rod cars over the years,
00:12and I decided I wanted to do something completely ridiculous,
00:15and so the idea of the banana car came from that.
00:21I was in a gas station, and there was a bowl of fruit
00:23as I'm standing in line right next to where I was,
00:26and on top was a banana that ran fairly straight and curved at the back,
00:30and I picked it up and I'm looking at it,
00:32and I'm studying this,
00:33and 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
00:49is a regular site on the streets of Michigan.
00:57I bought a 1993 Ford F-150 pickup truck,
01:02took off all the sheet metal,
01:03which 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,
01:21and 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.
01:42And the 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 and is 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've got bad news for you.
02:03I've done 85 in Michigan.
02:06But it was downhill.
02:09The vehicle stands just over ten 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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