High gas prices got you down? A Georgia handyman feels your pain. In fact, he may feel it more than most people because he was so fed up that he transformed his daughter’s pink Barbie Dream Camper into a fully functional gas-powered road vehicle to deal with the high cost of fuel.
In a move that takes “fuel efficiency” to a whole new level, Mali Hightower from Ellenwood, Georgia, took the Power Wheels Barbie Dream Camper, normally a battery-operated toy car, and put a two-gallon, one-piston engine from a power washer into it.
The 30-year-old now tools around town in his tiny errand-running vehicle (he also installed a rack on top of the Barbie vehicle for groceries), his unique solution for saving money at the gas pump. Especially since his real car, a 1996 Mercedes-Benz convertible, costs about $90 to fill up with gas.
“That’s too much,” Hightower told Reuters. “I drive this when I can.”
While it certainly isn’t street legal – it has no side mirrors or turn signals – it gets the job done
“I’ve always kind of just had a niche for like building goat carts and little things, and once I started seeing how gas prices were and things like that, was like, you know what, I’m going to start making little mini cars, and this is just one of them that I kept as my personal creation,” Mali Hightower told WWL-TV News.
According to Reuters, AAA reports that as of May 18, Americans paid an average of $4.52 a gallon for regular gasoline, up from around $3 before the Iran war started. Of the ten states that have seen the largest one-month change in the price of a gallon of gasoline, Michigan leads at 98 cents, while Wyoming is tenth at 65 cents. Ohio, Wisconsin, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, Iowa, Montana, and South Dakota all fall somewhere in between.