Was The Iconic 'Pea Car' Really A Volkswagen?

American car culture has a strange fascination with food-related automobiles. The most famous is the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile, and in recent times, the Red Bull Mini has become popularized, but hot on the Wienermobile's heels is the oddity often referred to as the Volkswagen Pea Car.

This orb-like microcar might be well known, but there's also a ton of misinformation about it. The biggest misnomer about the VW Pea Car is that it isn't even a Volkswagen. In fact, the only Volkswagen parts you'll find on it are the headlights from the original VW Beetle, although the hubcaps and front grille design look reminiscent of old VW products, too.

The reality is that the Pea Car was cobbled together from an assortment of different vehicles, designed to literally fall to pieces to get its message across. Join us as we take a deep dive into an automobile that defies convention and evokes both fascination and bewilderment among car enthusiasts and casual observers alike.

While many consider the Pea Car a concept, it's far from it. It was a promotional vehicle designed to feature in a TV commercial for American frozen food brand Birds Eye. Instead, it emerged as a brilliant idea from the imaginative minds of Matt Waller and Dave Monk, who collaborated at the advertising agency BBH London. They shared the idea with Muriel MacCallum and Sofia Costa, who led the creative team at Birds Eye, and the idea quickly took flight.

The Pea Car was featured in a captivating marketing campaign in 2005 emphasizing the importance of healthy eating and showing how modern processed foods stripped food of its natural goodness and nutrients.

It took Asylum Models & Effects a mere six weeks to create the Pea, going from an ice-cold concept to hot and ready to fall apart... literally.

With a weight of around 1,653 pounds, the Pea Car was crafted to mimic a pea's appearance, conveying a significant message about the merits of healthy eating habits. In the commercial, which you can watch below, the Pea Car starts whole as it drives through the rural countryside, but then starts to toss its body panels as it goes, before arriving in suburbia as a mere frame on wheels behind a refrigerated truck.

Out of a refrigerated semi-truck rolled a perfectly intact Pea Car with its shiny green body. This signified the loss of nutrients in fresh produce over time, and how frozen Birds Eye peas and other foods, kept their nutrients intact.

The pea car's structural integrity was never questioned because it was intentionally engineered to shed parts during the commercial's production. Its twelve body panels were crafted with the primary objective of being easily disassembled. This list included components like the exhaust pipe, hub caps, doors, rear bumper, sunroof, a distinctive wing mirror here and there, and, of course, the humble Volkswagen Beetle headlights.

Volkswagen wasn't the only automaker whose parts were used in the creation of the Pea, though, as the turn signals came from a Lancia, while the wing mirrors came from a specialist shop for automotive accessories. Every other custom part, including the fiberglass body panels, and the 'Pea' license plate, was custom-made exclusively for the pea-shaped car.

The finishing touch was the application of its iconic green paint in Pantone 396c.

The Pea Car was built using a heavily modified chassis of an off-road go-kart and powered by a Honda engine. The Pea had only a single gear, but it could still hit a top speed of 60 mph despite this. Before incorporating any additional components, they needed to modify the chassis of the Pea Car to enhance its stability and usability so that the structural integrity remained intact, even with all the body parts off.

During the ad, a stunt driver drove the Pea down a closed-off road in the English countryside. The road had to be closed off because the car wasn't actually street-legal.

As there were no doors and the interior couldn't be affixed to the fall-apart bodywork, the driver had to be strapped into a racing bucket seat affixed directly to the chassis.

As for what happened to the Pea Car after its stint in the commercial, it now resides as a display piece at the Unilever Ice Cream and Frozen Foods Co in Walton on Thames.

After its center-stage appearance in a Birds Eye commercial, it found its way through the showrooms of numerous prestigious galleries and museums. Amongst them was the National Motor Museum in the United Kingdom.

From its conception as a simple marketing campaign tool to an icon in the automotive world, this one-of-a-kind car is about as unique as they come. But above all else, it's definitely not a Volkswagen.