Remember that time someone in China sent me a free panda car? Well after cruisin’ for another proverbial bruisin’ in the Alibaba electric car catalog, I stumbled upon a variant of it that seems to have a truck’s rear end tacked on the back. It’s silly and fun and just oh-so-perfect.
Meet this week’s Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week!
Look, there are times in history when combining two seemingly divergent designs has resulted in triumphant success. The spork is a good example, representing the peak of culinary engineering. The mullet haircut is ever-deserving of a spot on the list, in all its glory. The Chevy El Camino (or Ford Ranchero, Dodge Rampage, or your coupe utility of choice) certainly makes the cut.
But while all of those examples offer the right balance of “business in front, party in back”, today’s weird little half-car from Alibaba seems to have missed on both accounts.
It lacks the cool factor of an El Camino and goes straight for clown car up front, clown truck in back.
Don’t get me wrong – I still love it! It’s got an almost identical design to my own Minghong electric car that I tested out early last year (at least, it’s like mine when viewed from head-on).
It’s even a four-seater, which I guess makes it a crew cab?
In theory, it sounds incredible. A short little electric car with a pickup truck bed in back, offering seating for the whole family and enough space to carry all your cement bags at the same time. You know, for those family outings where on your way back from Six Flags you all install some home deck footings together.
It even comes right from the factory with the panda paint job, which has apparently inspired our graphics guy to go full panda this week.
The humor here isn’t only in the vehicle design though. Taking a walk through the spec sheet shows some real doozies.
The power is listed at “less than 50 kW”, which is about as useful as saying the car has less than 50 wheels. Based on my experience with these vehicles, I’m guessing it’s got around 48 kW less than 50 kW (resulting in around three horsepower).
There are a few useful specs detailed on the product page though, such as the top speed being listed as 40 km/h (25 mph) and the battery as 60V.
I’m not sure how far it will go, but I know it has a truck bed you could fill up with extra batteries if you want to go even further.
It’s nice to see that the little truck is even available in a wide range of colors, allowing you to customize it to your own personality.
The panda comes pre-installed on all of them though, so I hope you have a panda personality as well.
You don’t even have to be a man of expensive tastes to own one, as it turns out they’re listed for sale at just $1,300!
I’d advise a bit of caution there though. The last time I bought an electric mini-truck from China, it ended up costing over 4x the list price to actually land it in my driveway in the US. And that’s if you can even get it into the country – these things aren’t exactly street-legal in the US. In fact, they’re exactly not street-legal.
But hey, we can all still enjoy this one from afar, can’t we? And for our upmost enjoyment, we’ve still got the video below to soak it all in!