If you’ve spent any time on American highways, you’ve probably seen some odd things rolling past. A mattress strapped to a sedan roof. A truck hauling what appears to be an aircraft engine. The occasional riding lawnmower making a go of it on the interstate shoulder.
But Steve Braithwaite has a standing challenge to all of that: he drives a 23-foot-long banana. Not a banana-colored car. Not a banana sticker on a Civic. A full, three-dimensional, bright yellow roadgoing banana, and he has been doing it for 15 years now.
The Big Banana Car rolled through Billings, Montana this week, where a Montana Highway Patrol officer did what law enforcement officers have apparently been doing to Braithwaite since 2011. He turned around and pulled him over. The stated reason was a license plate issue, though no ticket was issued.
Braithwaite, watching the trooper loop back in his mirror, said he already had his paperwork out before the lights came on. At this point in his driving career, the stop was more routine than remarkable.
That’s the kind of detail that makes this story worth telling. It’s not simply a novelty vehicle piece, which the internet has plenty of. What makes the Big Banana Car genuinely interesting is the sheer accumulated mileage behind it. Over 250,000 miles on the odometer, with Braithwaite estimating he was pulled over constantly for roughly the first eight or nine years of ownership, making him, by his own accounting, one of the most frequently stopped drivers in the country for the better part of a decade.
None of those stops were for aggressive driving or mechanical failures. Officers simply wanted a closer look, or a photograph, or an excuse to have a conversation with a man in a fruit.
The whole enterprise started with a moment of accidental inspiration at a gas station in 2008. Braithwaite was a hot-rod enthusiast who had grown bored with the car show circuit, which is already a fairly specific kind of restlessness. He’d been watching an episode of the British automotive program Top Gear that featured street-legal oddities, including a drivable garden shed and a motorized couch.
For the following month, he found himself eyeing everything around him as a potential car body. Then, standing in a gas station checkout line, he noticed a bowl of fruit. The banana sitting on top stopped him cold. He could see the windshield placement. He could see where the wheels would go. He stood there long enough that the woman behind him had to tap him on the shoulder to let him know the line had moved.
Built on a Punchline, Driven Into History
The mechanical foundation beneath all that yellow fiberglass is a standard pickup truck chassis, which says a lot about the engineering logic at work here. Braithwaite is not a trained coachbuilder, but hot-rod culture has always involved fabricating things that probably shouldn’t exist and then driving them until they do.
The pickup platform gave him a reliable drivetrain and a known parts supply, both of which matter considerably when you’re 200 miles from the nearest town in Wyoming and the banana dies on you. That exact scenario did happen, somewhere on a lonely highway crossing the state, and he managed to get it running again largely through a combination of mechanical knowledge and, presumably, sheer stubbornness.
Peel Out: A Traffic Violation for the Ages
Among the hundreds of police encounters Braithwaite has logged, one stands above the rest. In a small mountain town in West Virginia, he stopped for a red light, waited for green, and made an entirely ordinary left turn. Moments later, a patrol car lit him up. The officer walked to the banana with a straight face and delivered the citation rationale: he had peeled out at the intersection.
Braithwaite wasn’t sure, briefly, whether the officer was joking. He was.
But the delivery was so deadpan that it took a beat to register. Fifteen years of banana car jokes have trained Braithwaite to expect them from almost anyone, but a cop who could keep a poker face through that setup deserves some credit.
From Parade Float Ambitions to a World Tour
What began as an idea for parade appearances has expanded considerably in scope. Braithwaite recently drove the Big Banana Car into Mexico, where he was stopped five times in three days. Every encounter was reportedly friendly. His current ambition is to drive through Central America, find a way to get the banana onto ships, and eventually work his way around the globe.
He has titled this project the World Needs More Whimsy Grand Tour, a slogan he has mounted on the back of the vehicle itself. He has also formally challenged the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile to a race, though he suspects Kraft will decline, largely because any journalist covering the event would eventually ask which vehicle was carrying the healthier food, and the hot dog people would lose that argument badly.
What the Big Banana Gets Right
Custom vehicle culture in America is old and well-documented, from the Barris Kustoms era through the Art Car movement that has been active since the 1980s. Houston’s Art Car Parade alone draws hundreds of modified vehicles annually.
But most art cars spend the majority of their time in garages or at events. Braithwaite drives his as legitimate daily transportation, racking up miles the way a serious road tripper would, with all the mechanical realities that entails. That’s a meaningful distinction.
At 250,000 miles, the Big Banana Car has covered more ground than most standard passenger vehicles ever will, which is either a testament to the underlying pickup truck platform or to Braithwaite’s mechanical diligence, or most likely both.
The car is ridiculous. That’s entirely the point, and Braithwaite has never pretended otherwise. But there is something genuinely respectable about a person who commits this completely to an idea and then puts 250,000 miles on it.