The Driver That Can’t Give the Cops the Split

Every day, throughout the United States and elsewhere, police officers pull over drivers for all sorts of infractions — blowing through a stop sign, running a red light, speeding, having a broken tail light, suspicion of DUI, and more. And by and large, those happen without much controversy. There’s an understanding that drivers are supposed to follow the rules and officers are supposed to enforce those rules, and provided that neither party acts broadly outside those parameters, life goes on otherwise unabated. Most of us, as a result, will only get pulled over a few times in our lives, if that.

But most people aren’t Steve Braithwaite.

Braithwaite, it’s probably fair to say, is a car guy. Per Yahoo! Autos, in 2008, Braithwaite was a self-described “hot-rod enthusiast” but didn’t really care for the show cars being built, finding them uninspiring. So, “for the following month, he found himself eyeing everything around him as a potential car body,” and at a gas station checkout line, he found his inspiration: a banana. The vision for his dream car came into his head like a yellow bolt of lightning. He was going to build himself a banana car.

For the next two and a half years, Braithwaite — with the help of friends and others that found the idea appealing — transformed a 1993 Ford pickup truck into the vehicle seen below, via Snopes.

It’s street legal and not something Braithwaite intended to sit on the counter for a week until it turned all brown and mushy. Braithwaite set off on part two of his dream — to drive his car around the United States, and perhaps, the world.

He’s been doing that ever since, and whenever the banana car pops into a new place, it attracts attention. Over the years, it’s received local news coverage simply for driving through parts of Michigan, Kentucky, Florida, Montana, and more. And it wasn’t just getting noticed by the press — it also received a lot of attention from local law enforcement.

As Braithwaite told Cowboy State Daily, “he figures he may have spent the better part of a decade as one of the most frequently pulled-over drivers in America. Not for speeding, but simply because he was driving a giant banana. ‘For the first eight or nine years I was the most pulled-over man in America,’ he said. ‘It was constant.’” But as Braithwaite noted, he wasn’t speeding or being pulled over for downing a few too many daiquiris. (He does, occasionally, get dinged for having an obscured license plate. And yes, he has a vanity plate: it reads “Split.”) Rather, he said, “often officers simply wanted photographs.” And in some cases, the traffic stop does involve money changing hands — but not always in the way you think. In 2019, for example, Michigan State Police pulled the banana car over and the trooper gave Braithwaite $20 for the courtesy of getting a picture with the fruit-mobile.

Braithwaite’s banana adventures continue to this day, and in 2025, he brought it to New York City for an honor no one else can claim. In September of that year, Guinness World Records invited the big banana to the Big Apple to help launch the 2026 edition of its iconic record book, which memorializes the vehicle as the longest custom banana car out there.

Bonus fact: Bananas are typically for eating, not driving. But in 2016, eating them in a certain way could have gotten you in trouble in China. Per the BBC, government crackdowns on erotica included a requirement that live-streaming platforms monitor users who ate the fruit in a PG-13 (or worse?) kind of way. It’s not clear if the requirements were enforced or to what degree, or if other foods were later included in the monitoring guidelines.

From the Archives: Gone Bananas: The bananas from the mid-1900s (which was only 75 years ago) aren’t the bananas we eat today. And both varieties are radioactive.