Kanyaboyin Sudhakar Yadav is driving a vehicle shaped like a yellow motorbike helmet around a small, sun-blasted Hyderabad car park.

The helmet car is just one of many quirky homemade vehicles created by Yadav, who is surely one of India’s most eccentric inventors. Now in his late 60s, Yadav has been making vehicles since he was a teenager. His “wacky cars,” to use his phrasing, include a burger-shaped car, a camera car, a full-size double bed car and a driveable chess board. It’s even got chess pieces on it that you can move around.

But many of Yadav’s vehicles have deeper meanings than wackiness, and over the decades, his hobby has ended up being a far wider-reaching project.

In 2000, Yadav founded the Sudha Cars Museum in Hyderabad, South India, to showcase his eccentric vehicles. Among the most popular is his toilet car; to drive it, you stand in the vehicle’s bowl section, with the flush handle behind you.

He’s also made a basketball car, a football car and a coffee cup car. This being India, naturally, there’s a huge cricket bat car too. It’s parked near a shoe car, complete with laces.

Yadav’s long-running family business is running a printing press. He says he was lucky to have a well-off background and parents who encouraged him to pursue his unusual hobby.

During Yadav’s school and college years, a local small-time garage owner took him under his wing, teaching him how to ‘visualize’ new vehicle concepts.

 “At that time I used to pass through one garage [in Hyderabad],” he said. “There used to be one guy, he used to make beautiful cars. I used to observe him when I’m coming back from school. Then one day, I went and requested him to help me out.”

Yadav started out making motorbikes and a dune buggy. Then in 1991, he visited a carnival in the US where he saw a car shaped like a skating shoe. That inspired him to make his own wacky shoe car. He soon started working on vehicles with more purpose than delighting children and making museum visitors laugh.

In the early 2000s, Yadav made a pink condom-shaped vehicle that you sit on, with the tip in front of you. It was made to mark World AIDS Day. “That [was featured] in Playboy magazine,” he said. “When you do something different, then you get wonderful publicity.”

Yadav made a cigarette car, then deconstructed that vehicle, to encourage people to ‘break the habit’ of smoking. His helmet car promoted road safety.

Then during the Covid pandemic, Yadav quickly knocked up a garish green car in the shape of the coronavirus. It was driven around Hyderabad as a reminder for people to stay home and isolate.

“I took the virus-shaped car all over the city,” he said. “People were peeping from windows and doors; seeing, watching. But the message was clear: be indoors. It was a great message.”

Yadav also made a gold-colored birdcage car. When on display at the Sudha Cars Museum, the cage has a large stuffed-toy tiger sitting in it. But Yadav said he recently made schoolchildren go inside it, to teach them first-hand that caging birds is unethical.

“I made this bird cage car, took the thing to a lot of schools,” he said. “We made the children go and stand inside and see how suffocating it is when you are put in the cage. The message was: not to cage birds … you have no right.”

In the museum’s car park, Yadav showed off a small vehicle in the shape of a book that was just big enough for one person to sit on. He made it to mark Guinness World Records, recognizing him for having the biggest number of wacky vehicles in a museum. He’s now made over 60 of them.

Yadav sat astride the book vehicle, his knees splayed wide, and drove it around the car park. A museum visitor named Vaibhav Gauba was standing nearby, watching the scree-ing showcase.

Being a Hyderabad resident himself, Gauba, who works as a DJ and events organizer, said he was proud that Yadav represented the city. He described Yadav as “the king” of homemade automobiles, and said he came to the museum to seek advice about making his own vehicle.

Gauba added that he had visited Sudha Cars Museum as a schoolchild, and that children were “fascinated” by his vehicles.

Yadav may be old enough to retire, but he says he’s scouting locations to launch Sudha Cars Museums elsewhere in India and possibly abroad. And when the next public health crisis emerges, he’ll be ready to make a corresponding car.

When asked what his next ‘vehicle with a message’ might be, he shrugged and said, “I have to go according to the time … I don’t know what is going to come next.”