Isuzu launches new peanut cart

WILKES-BARRE, Pa. – – It’s a peanut-company truck shaped like a peanut and it runs on peanut oil.

Or, more accurately, B5 peanut-based biodiesel.

This 2011 Diesel Isuzu NPR, built specially for Planters Peanuts — now a division of Kraft Foods — has just hit the streets and will tour America promoting green living.

The biodiesel-fuelled medium-duty will mostly visit projects run by The Corps Network, an American do-gooder agency in which about 30,000 volunteers restore and maintain green spaces in cities across the U.S.A.

The truck is covered in solar panels and fitted with a wind turbine and a bank of batteries.

A two-hour drive can charge the batteries enough for a one-hour publicity stop. Even body panels and the interior are recycled. Floorboards were reclaimed from an old barn. The windows are recycled glass in recycled steel frames.

 

The Planters truck joins a wide collection — or peanut gallery if you must — of weird promotional vehicles that includes the Oscar Mayer Weiner mobile and the Goldfish Crackers smiley fish. Check it out here.

While we have to wonder what Planters founder Amedeo Obici would have to say about the truck.

Obici’s is a colorful history– he migrated to America as a non-English-speaking kid and started selling peanuts from a cart Harpo Marx style in 1906. While we can’t know precisely what Amedeo’d say about the new Isuzu, we’re sure of one thing.

He was from Italy. He’d say it’s not fast enough.  


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