Despite the topshot, I have never driven construction equipment – my apologies if you were hoping for a riveting tale of backhoe operating experience. I have, however, driven a few not-cars in my life, excluding two-wheeled motorcycles – which certainly count, but aren’t really in the spirit of the question, though I am for sure interested to hear what bikes you’ve driven.
… or trikes, which is why I made the rather odd clarification of “two-wheeled motorcycles” above. While a traditional motorcycle is likely the most common not-car for a person to have “driven,” three-wheeled motorcycles are much less common. Same for four-wheeled ATVs, but especially three-wheeled off-roaders, having been banned and all.
Pre-ban, I got a lot of seat time on the neighbor kid’s ATC 200 just like the one below. On my first ride, I instinctively stuck out my leg to lean into a turn, only to discover solid-axle ATVs do not lean. I also ran over my own leg. I quickly learned to keep my foot on the pegs, and if I wanted the thing to turn with any kind of speed, I had to hang myself way off the side of the saddle lest the contraption go up on two wheels. Fun once you got the hang of it, but I definitely preferred two-wheelers.
Another weird-ish Honda off-roader I’ve piloted is the original Odyssey (aka FL250), which kid-me thought was going to me some kind of Pismo Beach thrill fest, but when I finally got to ride one on a sketchy go-kart track’s timid off-road course, my whelm was under. Even after I defeated the throttle limiter (a spacer taped under the throttle lever? Come on man), the thing just bogged around with little power and lots of slip from the torque converter, and the rigid rear end threatened to launch me out of the seat. Blech.
Your turn:
What Have You Driven That Isn’t A Car?
Top graphic image: DepositPhotos.com
https://www.volvoce.com/global/en/products-and-services/past-products/rigid-haulers/euclid/r190/
I’ve driven a monster truck, crushed cars and everything.
Mid 60’s vintage CAT wheeled loader with a 30 foot wide snow plow blade chained to the bucket and basically no heater or brakes. At Logan Airport during the 2015 Snowmageddon. Between jobs. No experience required! Prime directive: Don’t hit an airplane.
How many people said “Your Mom”?
Farm tractors, backhoes, skid steers. Dirt bikes, three and four wheelers, and a couple of side-by-eaches. Buses from school to city to long-distance coach. As large a straight truck as you can drive on a car license. A locomotive or two. Plenty of boats, power and sail-propelled. I have about 20hrs in airplanes logged – and I am going to count my time in the Air Force’s C-5 full-motion simulator too. 🙂
Almost forgot until reminded by another post – I have driven a couple of fire trucks too! In a parade no less.
Pinto (no burns) M35A2, CUCV (M1009 & M1008 including contact truck ), HMMWV (M998, M1038, M1152, more I’m sure), SEE Tractor (Mercedes UNIMOG), dozers D7G, D7H, 20 ton crane, 40 ton crane, 7.5 ton crane, 6 ton SCAMP aircraft crane; RTCH; M54-series and M925-series 5-tons. FMTV MTV & FMTV (when they were new), HEMTT, PLS, LHS; 6k & 10k M10000 & ATLAS forklifts (I could tell you a story, but then…) M88A1 & HEMTT wreckers.
Warehouse forklifts, propane & battery.
VFR750, Vstrom 650, Versys 1000
Old Ford tractor, Kioti 2620 tractor
I’ve done maintenance on all of those also.
A walk-behind forklift – that’s still technically driving something right? I used to operate it whilst working at a sports shop. We used to it move pallets of heavy exercise equipment around. To this day I’m not sure if I was legally allowed to use it, but no one ever said anything and I (foolishly, in hindsight) never asked. Every few months it’d break and we’d get a technician out to fix it, who’d always scold us for taking it on the road (the transition from driveway to roadway is really hard on something that weighs more than a tonne and doesn’t really have any suspension to speak of). During the early days I decided to take it along the footpath to the warehouse rather than the road and got it stuck in a pothole – easy to do with a 3-wheeled vehicle where drive only goes to one wheel. Luckily there was a guy from one of the roadside assistance companies (similar to what you’d call AA in the US I think) in the store at the time who was only too happy to use his Commodore wagon to tow the thing out. That incident gave me first-hand experience of how an open diff works as the Commodore burnt rubber on one of its rear tyres trying to tug the thing out. He got the job done eventually and was unconcerned about any potential damage caused to his company car. Great bloke.
Also when touring up and down the US West coast I drove a 30ft campervan which was somehow legal to do on a normal car licence. That thing was a monster, the whole thing would sway and rattle at 70mph on the freeway. It also drank like a fish with its V10 petrol (!) engine.
Another one is a jet ski I drove in Thailand with my at-the-time girlfriend riding on the back. I took a sharp corner and she was thrown off into the water, her $500 sunglasses falling off and sinking without a trace. She was a good sport about it. A few years later I heard about a tourist who was arrested in Thailand after having an accident on a jet ski that killed his girlfriend. He was arrested because he was operating the thing without a licence… Which is exactly what I did. I’m more careful about these things now.
Also driven the usual array of golf buggies, go karts and small boats, things that most people come across from time-to-time in their lives I imagine.
Lotsa stuff…I grew up driving tractors and skid steers long before I was old enough to legally drive a car. ATVs and golf carts are about all the powersports I’ve forayed into, but being a farmer o find myself operating lots of different equipment. I’ve run telehandlers, dump trucks (still regret selling a crew cab S1700 I owned briefly), grain trucks, combines, mini excavators, and probably more stuff I’m forgetting. I love machines, and the opportunity to run equipment is one I rarely turn down.
Most interesting might be an SAE Baja race car which was my senior design project in college. It was kind of a piece of shit though and the project was kind of hell.
More entertaining has been a skid steer while helping my dad do some work at his house. I also have driven a couple of tractors and a medium duty dump truck with a 10 speed. That was cool.
Side by sides are fun but that’s probably pretty similar to a car. Some of the most fun I’ve ever had driving something was thrashing a rental side by side in Moab. I was on a trip with friends and it was the last night. Everybody who went in on the side by side was gone (I didn’t because I brought a dirt bike). I was tired of riding so a friend and I took it out and absolutely SENT it. We literally looked for the hardest lines on the trail and took them as fast as we could. And the thing just took it.
I’ve driven a couple of ‘speeders.’ They’re small vehicles that ride on rails. We use them at California’s Railtown 1897 State Park. We follow along after the trains checking to see if any of the railroad ties have caught fire.
Being a rail vehicle, there’s no need to steer but the ones we have have non-synchromeshed transmissions. So while I have known how to drive a stick forever, double clutching was a new skill I needed to master. We don’t go fast, so usually one shift is all you have to make.
Massey Ferguson 245
Ducati Monster
Triumph Daytona 675R
Formula SAE cars
Margay Brava 206 kart
Fire engines
Ladder trucks
24-foot sailboat around Sarushima and off the coast of Yokosuka, Japan
Airport tugs
and a few helicopters
I used to work for a seller of road paint, and as part of that job I got to drive a Graco LineDriver HD:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kk_XP7gUyjg
Hydraulic transmissions are weird.
I had the privilege of doing a brake job on a WWII-era Ford BNO-40 MotoTug, an aircraft tug that saw duty pulling TBM Avengers around the Quonset air base in Rhode Island. It was owned by a WWII vet (he’d helmed a landing craft during D-Day) who ran a little insurance business out of his house. It was a wild brake setup, using what appeared to be Lockheed aircraft brakes. When I finished the job, he let me drive it. I’ll never forget it!
Oh, yeah, and the first powered water craft I ever operated was a 170′ cruise boat. I got to drive that quite a bit as a deckhand when the Captain and First Mate couldn’t be bothered.
What have I driven that isn’t a car?
-a bicycle
-a tricycle
-a 3 wheeled offroader
-a 4 wheeled offroader
-a bumper car
-Go Karts
-Uhaul moving trucks ranging from smaller ones to the largest 26 footer… one of which even had a diesel engine and a manual.
-A small motor boat (6 passenger with an outboard motor)
I know a lot of people have said forklift – and they’re fun. In college I worked at a metal distributer and drove one there as well. But it was a special version – much larger and heavier to handle the slabs of metal. At the time it was the first and only forklift I’d ever been on – so I didn’t appreciate the mass I was moving around. That is until one day when we were playing “hide and seek” in the back rows of the warehouse. Heavy rains had left some puddles on the floor. I hit the brakes, nothing happened – not even a gentle ‘nudge’ that I was slowing down. I looked down and the wheels were stopped. The end of the aisle was coming in about 50 or 60 feet. Slowly the wheels dried and started to roll/grip and the thing ground to a stop about 20 feet shy of the wall racks at the end (with many tons of slabs on them). If Clarkson was there he would have asked, “How much excrement?” I respected the hell out of those things after that day (and even small forklifts).
I rode a jet ski once, which was fun, and of course I’ve driven go-karts many times. Other than that, not a whole heck of a lot, surprisingly. Unless you count the time I got to steer a tractor as a kid when visiting a relative’s farm, but I don’t think it really counts as driving if you’re not operating the throttle or brakes.
If we count a pickup truck, minivan, not-mini 15-passenger van, and assorted cargo/work vans as “not cars” though, then I can include those as non-cars I’ve driven.
OH OH WAIT I JUST REMEMBERED I’ve also driven a Ford F650 commercial truck with a huge box of technical something on the back! I briefly worked at a Ford dealership, and had to pull that beast out of the shop and park it, which was nerve-wracking as heck. That is by far the largest and heaviest vehicle I have ever driven, and of course there were no convenient places to park it, so I had to back-and-forth my way into an inconvenient corner spot, periodically jumping out of the vehicle to check my positioning.
One of my coworkers saw me pulling the truck out, when I stopped because another truck was in the way and I needed more space. He could only see the front of the truck and thought it was a more normal-sized vehicle so was waving at me thinking I was stupid for not moving. When I finally drove the whole vehicle into the sunlight, I saw him mouthing “OH SH**” as his eyes went wide and he realized why I waited lol.
I grew up farming so I’ve driven a conservative assortment of tractors and related equipment, although nothing with tracks… just thinking about the clanks and screeching of an old Caterpillar sets my teeth on edge.
My grandpa was really into coastal fishing, so I piloted a few boats in the 25’ range when I was a kid, mostly with twin Volvo I/O power. He also let me take the controls in his Piper Super Cub, if only briefly.
Of the non-cars I’ve driven, my favorite was a neighbor’s Stewart & Stevenson M1079. I still want one. Picture a ‘roided-out 4×4 box truck on 46” tires… it needs a hydraulic arm just to lower the spare. The thing was shockingly easy to drive, with a pushbutton Allison gearbox and road-friendly gearing. Its party trick was the tire inflation system, which lets you adjust traction by airing up or down from the driver’s seat… and it works on the trailer, too.
I spent hundreds if not thousands of hours driving unenclosed almond sweepers and loathed every moment. Trying to find a picture of one is hard since they all seem to have cabins now. That’s a critical feature if you don’t want to end your day so covered in dust that there are little mountain ranges on the tops of your thighs. A face mask was mandatory since you’d be surrounded by airborne topsoil and all the chemicals and such therein. Ditto with ear protection, given the air-cooled Wisconsin V4 howling away at full operating revs directly behind you.
A forklift. It was a summer job when I was in college.
Not driven, but I’ve stood on the helm of the Stealth Shadow and in the cockpit of a B-2 prototype. Both of these experiences are 40+ years old. This is almost embarrassing to write after comment by Aaron ‘driving’ the submarine.
Also driven some forklifts, pallet lifts, 4-wheeled dune-type vehicles, 5-ton dump truck, and a moving van (not 18-wheeler).
Highlight for me is a ballistic missile submarine. Qualified helmsman/planesman onboard the USS Henry M Jackson SSBN 730, drove for 3 patrols. And I swear the whale hit me….
Other than that the usual 3 wheeler, gocarts, forklifts, tractor, occasional overhead crane.
Where’s the gas pedal on a ballistic missile sub?
Engine room?
Ring the bell, some other poor sailor turns a valve 400 ft away, zoom zoom
That is the job I wanted when I graduated high school. Those whales never signal before they turn.
I can say it was hours of boredom, punctuated by moments of excitement. Sometimes that excitement would get your heart pounding, sometimes….it was a left turn….
Various small tractors, various dock trucks, many go-karts, snowmobiles, forklifts, Gators, a couple of boats, a Peterbilt 359 (sans trailer), a Caterpillar Challenger farm tractor, and some other stuff I’m probably forgetting.
Lots of stuff. The highlights:
-747
-S58T
-Shuttlelift rubber tire gantry crane
-Hyster H1050 container handler
Pretty boring; I’ve just done motorcycles (MX and street), quads, side by sides, boats, forklifts and aircraft munitions loader (aka “jammer” in the Air Force).
The national guard used to bring tanks and other big things to our county fair. One time when I was a kid I (of course) starting flipping switches and stuff and managed to fire one of the tanks up – got yanked out of there long before I could have figured out how to get it going.
Other than that pants-shitting experience maybe a couple of boats and grandpa’s little International Harvester yard tractor.
Tractor, four wheeler, side by side, go kart, lawn mower