When you hear “flipped truck,” your imagination probably conjures a pickup on its roof, or maybe you envision a tired-looking Ranger bought on the cheap and resold for a profit after a tune-up, interior detail, and paint buff-out. What you most likely do not imagine is turning the body and bed of a heavy-duty pickup 180 degrees and reinstalling them on the chassis, but that’s exactly what YouTuber Westen Champlin set out to do. And if you have to ask why…
“I Built a Backwards Truck To Confuse Police” is one of Champlin’s recent car-mod videos, but it’s also misleading. Because this truck confuses the hell out of everyone. It’s not clickbait but rather a dangling carrot enticing your brain to merrily malfunction.
Not a simple feat at all. Everything, and I mean, everything, had to be reversed. The truck bed is now the engine bed, and the tailpipe now exits through the front hood. When shifting into reverse, the vehicle appears to be moving forward. Um, what do you do when you see “no back-in parking” signs?
The visual disorientation is less complex than the build itself, which is documented within this tightly edited 30-minute video. From buy to try, we see the fun and the frustration. Repositioning the seats backwards (or is it forwards) was the easiest part.
Everything else was a pain in the butt, but nothing some cutting, hammering, and yanking couldn’t fix. Champlin admits that what he envisioned in his head was nothing like what needed to be done. At the 7:26 mark, he says:
“Well, guys, you know, to be honest, I thought building a backwards truck would be pretty easy. Now that we’ve got the cab off, we’ve run into our first issue.
The cab sits very low because the frame sits very low there. Considering this is where the back axle is, this frame section is too high to put the cab on. The front fenders have to fit center of the front wheel arches…
We’re going to have all this area of frame that we have to either make fit into the cab or make fit out the end of the front. I think we’re just going to have to start setting the cab on it, get the frame turned around, and then just start cutting stuff out until it sits down on it.”
Whether this project happened on a whim, it’s difficult to say, but the initial truck purchase didn’t go as planned either. When Kansas-based Champlin headed to Oklahoma to purchase a Dodge Ram diesel, instead of one hulking pickup, he ended up with two. The add-on was a V8 variant, which Champlin described, “This thing is basically a Viper.” Not bad then for $7,000.
To call the matching set of Ram 2500s a pair of beaters is an understatement, though. A fellow builder said the seller should’ve paid Champlin to take the pickups. But, hey, they all had functional tires, engines, and started (eventually). And each truck performed extended burnouts without falling apart. Well, maybe the tires did at that point.
“Besides the bed, and the body, and the interior, and the fact that the motor’s leaking, and the transmission doesn’t shift that well…pretty nice truck.”
Although he doesn’t mention how long the build took, it appears to be an all-hands-on-deck situation with a handy-dandy CNC machine fast-cutting the backwards truck’s new dash, pedals, shifter, and steering wheel assembly. Eventually, finally, the test drive at 17:39:
“You know what that means, guys? The hood stack is installed. It means it’s finally time for her maiden voyage. It’s finally time to drive the backwards truck backwards for the first time …
The first two feet are a success!”
Before exiting the garage, Champlin has a run-in with a shop chair. Driving forward backwards, even though looking ahead, will take some getting used to. Repositioned as it is, the truck’s blind spots have completely changed, and probably for the worse. After all, your front end is now a 6-foot truck bed. Despite the driving adjustment, Champlin claims the truck performs better and is more comfortable than its factory configuration. He even offers a ride to the officers who pulled him over.
Don’t worry, they were friendlies who were more than familiar with Champlin’s crazy car projects. Nevertheless, they do give the truck a brief inspection for legality. Insured, registered, and with working lights and turn signals, Champlin is back on his bet to arrive in Wichita without being pulled over. That’d be the real test of the backwards truck (19:45):
“It’s not bad to drive at all. Like actually driving it down the road, it drives just like a normal pickup. Now the thing is, right, is that’s a pretty successful first test drive. I bet I can make it to Texas Roadhouse in Wichita without getting pulled over.”
However, the local authorities offered some words of caution to calm Champlin’s excitement:
“Yeah, I don’t imagine you’re going to make it very far to Wichita without getting stopped again. If you can actually make it to Wichita, I’d be really impressed.”
The distance Champlin has to drive to reach Wichita is about 50 miles from his home location in Winfield. While on the highway and through town, he encounters no shortage of stares, photo and video requests, high-fives, and cheers. Even better, Wichita police paid even less attention to him. Champlin is all smiles (29:05):
“Guys, we officially did it. We made it to Texas Roadhouse. The backwards truck made it. And more importantly, we didn’t get impounded. And we also didn’t get arrested. So that means I win the bet. Okay, let’s go eat.”
Or maybe this was actually a failure? If the backwards-facing truck was supposed to stoke law enforcement ire of some kind, then the pickup flip is a flop because it had the opposite effect. Turns out this Bizarro World ride is as much fun as it looks. And totally legal. Well, just don’t ask about windshield wipers.
Top graphic image: screen grab, WestenChamplin/YouTube
IIRC artist Pippa Garner built a backwards ’59 Impalla in the ’80s. Now THAT’s how a backwards car is done people.
Passing through DC a few months ago heading to Richmond came across a loaded up ’59 Impalla on the highway. Glorious.
Can we just deputize someone to be the official Autopian pearl clutcher so everyone else doesn’t need to worry about making sure the obligatory “cars are dangerous” comment is up on any article in which someone does something mildly interesting? We’ve got like 6 dupes on here already.
This honestly seems less destructive than most of the other stupid ‘people breaking shit’ auto content on YouTube.
I had hoped this was a truck that law enforcement had built that way to catch speeders and reckless drivers.
Yeah, nah. This guy is a dick. Tying up emergency services and terrifying other road users is stupid.
Ah that old reverse direction car gimmick that was cool that first time you saw one at a car show when you were 7 but then really just seemed like a stupid waste of time as soon as you had any sense. File with the car that is upside down, the two-front end car, and every T-bird attempting to look like a shoebox.
Also, please don’t waste our valuable Autopian time on this….weekends are slow, I get it, but we’re better than this….
somewhere, Speedycop grips his temples and cries out in pain from your comment
I enjoyed it, by all means feel free to continue wasting our valuable time on this nonsense.
Who wants to be the one to tell him that a Viper has a V10?
Yeahhhhhhh I don’t get the feeling this guy is very intelligent.
As unique as this is, I think it’s a bad idea and dangerous to drive on public roads. I can imagine being in traffic behind a car, the car moved into the next lane and the front end of a pickup is staring me in the face. I can see this causing accidents at worst, major stress for drivers at least.
What a privilege it is to “Built To Mess With Cops” and not have to worry about ruining your life. I do as much as possible to avoid law enforcement interactions.
Messing with cops usually ends badly. But I guess as long as you’re white, in cornfield country, and your idea of a fancy meal is Texas Roadhouse, it’s less of an issue.
Yep. A lesson I learned a long time ago. The more money you have, the easier it is to deal with government.
In my twenties I worked as a construction manager for a large developer. We would roll into anytown USA, propose a new development, and every single time, the local government would bend over backwards to accommodate. Need an easement? No problem. Zoning? No problem. All we need to do is point out the numbers of jobs we create, or the tax revenue we generate.
Meanwhile, me, as a private citizen? Fill out the forms, wait in line, and maybe permits and licensing will get back to me.
Somewhere a German TUV inspector wakes up in a cold sweat.
Someone did this with a Porsche 928. Fun, but hugely impractical.
Mythbusters did it to test the “It’s more aerodynamic backwards” myth.
I have to imagine the drag coefficient is worse- but it makes me wonder if any trucks would actually have a better drag coefficient this way.
When Buckminster Fuller was building the Dymaxion cars in the early 1930s he used engines from the contemporary Ford Model A. He famously commented that the Model A would be more aerodynamic going backwards.
One would think such a comment would be a no-brainer but apparently at the time a surprising number of people simply had a hard time wrapping their heads around the concept of aerodynamics. Go figure.
Yeah, given the occasionally confounding nature of aerodynamics, it wouldn’t be too surprising if there was some merit to the idea that at least some pickup trucks would actually have better aerodynamics going backwards.
It’s all fun and games, but I’d be interested in what the insurance company has to say in case of an accident… pretty sure they’d just walk away shaking their heads and leaving you to pay out of pocket for everything
You think he actually has insurance on that thing?
How about headlights and orange turn signals in the front?
Those sight lines and a lack of side mirrors should have rendered this not road legal. If people wanna have fun with a build, I’m all for it, but don’t drive it around the uninformed, unprepared public.
Are sight lines regulated?
With all due respect to other countries, this shows just one of the many ways how good we really do have it in the US of A. Westin has some solid content.
Yeah it is all fun and games till he hits a car with a family of 4 and kills all of them.
Ease off the doomposting. You can say the same thing about practically any driving activity. I’m pretty sure DUIs, semi trucks, and falling asleep at the wheel are far more common killers of families of 4.
Let people have their fun. That is one of the hallmarks of our country, despite me also agreeing we can do better across the board. Going straight to the endgame screen all the time is how you discredit the sentiment.