A Montana Trooper Pulled Over Steve Braithwaite on I-90 and the Story He Told Next Had the Whole State Laughing
America has been watching weird things roll down the highways for years.
The Montana Highway Patrol just pulled one of the weirdest over on Interstate 90 near Billings – and what the driver had ready before the lights even came on tells you everything about this man.
That moment is worth reading to the end for.
The Most Pulled-Over Man in America
Steve Braithwaite spotted the trooper going the other direction.
He already had his paperwork out.
That's what 15 years and more than 250,000 miles behind the wheel of a 23-foot banana does to a man.
"I would see a police car going the other way and get my documents ready," Braithwaite told Cowboy State Daily. "I knew they were going to loop around and pull me over."
The stop near Billings was for a blocked license plate – a container on a trailer hitch carrier had covered part of it.
No ticket was issued.
The plate, for the record, reads "SPLIT."
Montana Highway Patrol posted the photos on Facebook and the reaction was immediate. "We've stopped speeders, distracted drivers, and even a few unusual vehicles… but this one definitely stands out," they wrote. "The Big Banana Car was stopped cruising near Billings today. While it may be apPEALing, traffic laws still apply to fruit."
Thousands of comments followed.
Braithwaite estimates he's been pulled over hundreds of times since hitting the road in 2011 – for roughly the first eight or nine years, he was probably getting flagged more than anyone else in the country.
Not for anything he'd done.
Just for what he was driving.
Built on a Dream and a Ford F-150
The whole thing started in 2008 when Braithwaite – a British-born hot-rod builder living in Michigan – watched an episode of Top Gear featuring a street-legal garden shed and a drivable couch.
He spent the next month looking at everything around him and asking the same question.
"Everything I looked at, I thought, 'Can I turn that into a car?'" he said.
Then he found himself standing in a gas station checkout line, staring at a bowl of fruit.
"I pictured it driving down the road and started laughing," he recalled. "I thought, if it makes me laugh now, I'm going to build it."
He and a group of friends spent two and a half years building the car on weekends – pulling a 1993 Ford F-150 from a junkyard, stripping it to the frame, and hand-shaping 23 feet of bright yellow fiberglass over the top.
The whole build cost around $25,000.
It holds a Guinness World Record for the longest custom banana car ever built.
The speedometer tops out at 85.
He's had it there.
The Stop He'll Never Forget
Among the hundreds of police encounters logged over 15 years, one stands completely alone.
Braithwaite was driving through a small mountain town in West Virginia.
He stopped at a red light.
Light turned green.
He made a normal left turn through the intersection.
Flashing lights appeared behind him.
The officer walked up, stone-faced, and delivered his reason for the stop.
"'The reason I pulled you over, that light back there, you peeled out.'"
Braithwaite wasn't sure if the man was serious.
"He said it so straight-faced," Braithwaite recalled. "And I'm like, 'Oh yeah.'"
He was joking – but the delivery was so committed that Braithwaite nearly argued before realizing what he'd just heard.
Fifteen years of banana puns from strangers, and a West Virginia cop still caught him completely off guard.
The World Needs More Whimsy
Braithwaite recently cleared out his home – sold most of what he owned, put the rest in storage – and went full-time on the road.
He calls himself a "banana car nomad" now.
The Montana stop was part of a run west toward Seattle, where he parked the Big Banana Car at an art car parade during Solstice festivities.
His next goal is bigger than Montana.
Braithwaite wants to drive the banana through Central America, ship it around the Darién Gap, and circle the globe – what he's calling the "World Needs More Whimsy Grand Tour."
A sign on the back of the car carries the mission statement.
"The world is dangerously low on whimsy," it reads.
He also has an open challenge to Oscar Mayer's Wienermobile, which he'd like to race somewhere in the Rockies.
Braithwaite doesn't think Kraft will go for it.
But he's got time.
More than 250,000 miles in, every one of them has delivered the same thing: people showing up at their best.
"I don't think we realize anymore how wonderful people really are," he said.
Sources:
- Kolby Fedore, "Giant Banana Pulled Over in Montana: Driver Says Cops Have Stopped Him 100s Of Times," Cowboy State Daily, June 18, 2026.
- Staff, "Man Driving Giant Banana Gets Pulled Over in Montana," The Drive, June 23, 2026.
- Staff, "The World Needs More Whimsy: Giant Banana Car Draws Attention, and a Traffic Stop, Near Billings," KBZK, June 22, 2026.
- Staff, "Michigan Man Takes Over New York Driving a Giant Banana Car," Guinness World Records, September 29, 2025.
