Complete list of the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicles of the Week

If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you combine a fruit cart, a cargo bike, and a Piaggio Ape all in one vehicle, now you’ve got your answer. I submit, for your approval, this week’s feature for the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column – and it’s a beautiful doozie.

Feast your eyes on this salad slinging, coleslaw cruising, tuber taxiing produce chariot!

In what could either be a sign of the times or perhaps the start of a terrible decision-making chain, that famous $2,000 electric mini-truck I bought from China several years ago has somehow gotten even cheaper.

When it comes to oddities of the electric vehicle variety, it doesn’t take much to pique my interest. If it’s got an electric motor and a funky shape, I’m down to clown. But being an electric bicycle guy through and through, anytime we can work some good ol’ pedaling action into the mix, I’m all the happier. And this week’s edition of the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week sure tickles my fancy!

So many of the fun electric go-karts I’ve found while window-shopping on Alibaba have been of the child-sized variety. To be fair, I’m not opposed to folding my body in ways it shouldn’t in service of a good time, but it’d be nice to get the same experience while maintaining full blood flow to the extremities.

That’s where today’s find comes in, as a full-size electric go-kart that adults can enjoy, too! It’s both awesome and weird, but perhaps for once, this week’s honoree of the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week is more of the former and less of the latter!

What would you get if you created the illegitimate love child of a Mercedes G-Wagon and a Brinks armored truck (and perhaps if the Mercedes chain-smoked through the pregnancy)? I think you’d wind up with something like the wacky-looking electric cart that has earned the dubious honor of being named this week’s Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week!

I was recently in China on yet another trip to tour the factories and showrooms of several leading micromobility companies, and I’ll have more to share with you on that trip soon. But first, while I was getting ready to fly out of the Shanghai airport, I stumbled upon the coolest little motorized carry-on suitcase that functions like a seated electric scooter. I ended up buying it on the spot.

Here’s what happened next when I tried to take it 8,000 km (5,000 miles) home.

I’ve got a bit of a reputation for testing out some of the wildest, strangest, and most interesting non-car electric vehicles on the internet. In order to find many of these far-fetched electric steeds, all I have to do is pop open a few (dozen) Alibaba tabs in my browser and start window shopping through the world’s largest repository of creative EV engineering. That’s exactly how I found this week’s focus: a surprisingly fast and fun-looking suitcase that you can giddy-up and ride till the wheels fall off, which they very well might.

As I peruse Alibaba for all sorts of fun and interesting electric vehicles, I often stumble across seemingly outlandish products that often have a real use case behind them. The best of those make it into the recurring Awesome Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column, and that’s precisely where this man-carrying drone lands today.

They say there’s no better test of a relationship than riding a tandem bike with your partner. But I propose that whoever penned that axiom never tried the go-kart equivalent. Who’s ready to step right up and pop a squat into this dual-steering wheel go-kart for some around-the-track fun with your better half?!

I’m no stranger to collecting weird Alibaba electric vehicles, and that includes aquatic vessels. But after buying an ultra-cheap Chinese electric boat last year, this new one makes my own lazy lake cruiser look like a luxury yacht.

When I first got into flying quadcopters (back when they were still called quadcopters), I would sometimes imagine what it would be like to shrink myself down Rick Moranis-style and hop aboard. But now thanks to some enterprising Chinese engineers – or perhaps garage tinkerers – I don’t have to imagine it anymore. Instead of shrinking the passengers down, they’ve scaled up the entire drone and added a pilot’s chair.

Now the only question is, how brave are you?

Remember how the Bluth family drove that airplane staircase truck in the TV series Arrested Development? My apologies if not, since that’s a bit critical to the lead image gag above. But either way, you can surely appreciate how ridiculous it would be to actually own and drive one of those as a real vehicle. And now thanks to Alibaba, you might not have to purely imagine it anymore.

Ah yes, good ol’ Alibaba. It’s the place to go whenever you want to see just how weird and wild the world of Chinese electric vehicles has become. It’s all fun and games to laugh and enjoy the weirdness, though it’s important to remember that China actually leads the world in real electric vehicles, too. But we’re not here for those boring things. We’re here to see a full-size bug-eyed electric bus shaped like a fish, and at the cost of a couple car payments in the US.

I’m not sure if you could really call it a legit SUV, but these fun-looking little Chinese electric vehicles might just be an interesting alternative to the car bloat clogging the streets of cities around the world.

Oh, and they make an excellent entry for this week’s Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week.

Panning for gold in Alibaba’s electric vehicle catalog is bound to find some real doozies, such as this week’s Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week. Meet this fun little purple three-wheeled electric car that barely manages to fulfill the requirements of a car.

There are precious few things that car drivers and cyclists can agree upon when it comes to cities, but one universal concept seems to be the hatred of massive box trucks clogging up streets and bike lanes. Could this miniature version of a box truck built on a golf cart frame be the answer?

This one style of vehicle is known by many names. In India, it’s an auto rickshaw. In Thailand, a tuk-tuk (a fun onomatopoeia that arose from the traditionally loud two-stroke engines powering them). But whatever it’s called, these three-wheeled taxis have used their half-bike, half-wagon design to shuttle folks around cities for decades. And now, a new era of rickshaws is seeing electric drives enabling interesting new designs.

Have you ever been in the mood to drive an electric bus, and then thought to yourself, “the only thing that could make this better is if the bus was shaped like a marsupial”? Yea, me neither. At least not until I stumbled upon this precious specimen of a koala bus.

When I first coined the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column nearly three years ago, this was precisely the type of thing I had in mind. Searching for all of the coolest and wildest electric vehicles from China’s largest online shopping site has finally landed me on the one I think I want the most right now: a chair that also happens to be an electric tank.

It’s a situation we’ve probably all experienced before: you’re riding your e-bike and thinking to yourself, “This is nice, but you know what could make this bike even better? Tank tracks!”

Well now there’s an easy way to do it in the form of a conversion kit that takes an e-bike and turns it into something of a snowmobile with the inclusion of a snow track kit.

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!