June was a good month for answering questions nobody thought to ask.

For example: How fast can a two-ton Lego car go?

The answer, because apparently this is now a measurable category of human achievement, is 69 mph.

The project was built to celebrate the launch of a new Lego Technic set based on a Koenigsegg hypercar. The result was a full-size, drivable replica of the 1,603-horsepower Swedish supercar, which made its debut in June at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in England.

The speed was impressive, more than doubling the previous record for a large-scale Lego Technic vehicle, but the commitment is borderline concerning.

The car is built from 327,906 Lego elements, weighs approximately 3,968 pounds, and required more than 9,400 hours to design and build. It even features a working “Ghost Mode” that opens the doors, hood and mirrors at the touch of a button.

The previous title of world’s fastest Lego car belonged to a Lego McLaren P1, which reached 31 mph in 2024.

Which means this wasn’t the first meeting of the World Association of People Who Build Full-Size Lego Cars and Then Race Them.

Par For The Course

After Apple’s electric car ambitions quietly came to an end in 2024, one former designer moved on to a much less crowded corner of the automotive market: golf carts.

In June, former Apple designer Julian Hoenig unveiled the Amble One, a minimalist electric buggy designed for short trips around hotels, neighborhoods, campuses and private communities. The open-air vehicle tops out at 40 mph and can travel about 60 miles on a charge.

“Amble One is built to embody that idea in its open, simple design, with no unnecessary separation between interior and exterior, people and place,” Hoenig said in a press release. “No doors to close you in, no unnecessary screens to pull you away. It is about the people on board and how they enjoy the world around them.”

Think golf cart, but with the sort of minimalist styling usually reserved for smartphones and Scandinavian furniture.

Amble says its entire 2027 production is already reserved for hospitality customers, with Bloomberg reporting average orders of about 40 vehicles worth roughly $1 million.

The Amble One starts at around $25,000, which may make it the first golf cart whose owners will insist it’s “not a golf cart.”

Top Banana 

In June, the Montana Highway Patrol pulled over a 23-foot banana-shaped car near Billings after a state trooper noticed its licence plate was partially obscured. Remarkably, operating oversized fruit wasn’t the issue.

No ticket was issued, but photos of the stop quickly spread across social media.

The vehicle belongs to Steve Braithwaite, who earlier this year sold almost everything he owned, put the rest into storage and retired into a giant banana instead of an RV.

Braithwaite is used to the attention the vehicle gets.

“I would say the first eight or nine years, I was probably the most pulled-over man in America,” he told KBZK News.

The idea first came to him while standing in line at a gas station more than 15 years ago.

“I pictured it down the road, driving down the road, and started laughing,” Braithwaite recalled. “I thought, if it makes me laugh now, I’m going to build it.”

Braithwaite began construction on “The Big Banana Car” in 2008, spending weekends transforming a 1993 Ford F-150 into rolling produce. By 2011, the joke had become street legal. It’s difficult to think of another great engineering project that began beside a rack of beef jerky.

The Big Banana Car has now spent more than a decade travelling the continent. In June, Braithwaite embraced the lifestyle completely, becoming what he describes as a “full-time banana car nomad.”

His latest adventure is appropriately called the “World Needs More Whimsy Grand Tour.”

“The world is seriously low on whimsy right now, and driving around in a banana, it just brings it out of people, and it’s lovely,” Braithwaite said.

These days, it’s difficult to argue with a man whose life plan involves making strangers smile with oversized produce.

David Matthews has been chronicling the unexpectedly humorous side of transportation news since 2000. The stories are all true.