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When Zach Sutton drives down the street in his Chrysler minivan, it’s hard to know if he’s coming or going.
The Detroit man drives Bak2Bak, his name for what he created when he welded the front ends of two vehicles together. The front half is an old 1993 Dodge Caravan, the back a 1991 Plymouth Voyager. Combined, they look like two conjoined vehicles that could drive in either direction.
The clincher: the front half vehicle was built in Canada, the latter in the U.S.
For Sutton, who works in the Detroit auto industry alongside Windsorites who cross the border, it’s an unexpected bit of vehicular diplomacy.
Detroiter Zach Sutton speaks to CBC Windsor about his unique vehicle fashioned from two halves of ’90s minivans.
“It’s a model for what we could want to be, in a weird way,” said Sutton, after driving to Windsor to speak with CBC News.
“Working well together as brother and sister countries.”
Sutton crossed the border for the first time with his franken-car on Tuesday. No stranger to tinkering, the 29-year-old mechanical engineer is part of the Detroit Freakbike Experience, a group that builds bicycles using unexpected parts and designs.
In addition to “crazy bike creations,” he does sewing, woodworking, metal working and “anything I can do with my hands.”
Sutton says he thought up building the vehicle with two front ends because he likes car projects, but they tend to be “a little insular, so I wanted something everyone could appreciate and understand.”
“Silliness and whimsy is something that’s universally appreciated.”
He built the vehicle over three days at the i3detroit community workshop in Ferndale, a maker space where people with engineering-oriented minds make creative projects. There, Sutton used a laser to split the vehicles in half.
When he put the two front pieces together, “they matched almost perfectly,” he said. “It was very satisfying.”
Bob Katovich, a fellow builder at the community workshop space and member of the Detroit Freakbike Experience, helped Sutton with the division.
“We had to remove everything from the inside and basically dismantle everything,” Katovich said. Once the vans were cut in half, “we had to figure out what to do with the back halves.” They loaded them onto a pickup truck, which was “kind of a surreal, ridiculous experience.”
Sutton removed everything from under the hood of the Voyager. Its headlights became the vehicle’s taillights. The steering on the rear vehicle is locked out, so it all drives like a regular vehicle. The fuel tank is in the Voyager’s engine bay.
There are only two-seat belts, Sutton says. Four people could fit into the vehicle off road, but it would be a tight fit.
At the border, he says, the passage was easy. The guards just asked him “the usual questions.”
When people see it, he says, they’re “either super confused” or “laugh and take pictures.”
“The second day I had it on the road, someone took it and put it on Instagram and it got millions of views,” he said.
“I didn’t really build it for anyone else except for me. I just wanted to drive around and have fun with it.“