Some of you who follow this tongue-in-cheek series may know that I’ve long sought after an electric aircraft from Alibaba to bestow upon it the dubious honor of being featured here. I’ve gotten close, but no cigar. I still haven’t caught my white whale this week on China’s largest online shopping platform Alibaba, but they say if you’re going to shoot for the stars, then you’d better aim for the lowest one. And that’s what I plan to do with my very own electric aerial work platform. Or as we called them as kids, cherry pickers.
Apparently these things go by a lot of names. Cherry pickers, aerial work platforms, bucket trucks, mobile elevating work platforms, bad ideas on wheels, etc.
But they all have two things in common: They drive around and the stick people where the gods didn’t intend them to get to.
And for a mere $5,000, this Chinese electric cherry picker could be mine, lifting me to heights of 10 meters (33 feet) with the same fuel source running through my e-bike and your Tesla: electricity! Think of all the sleeping giants you can sneak up on with this silent stalker of the skies.
I assume these Alibaba specials require some basic level of training, but if SONDORS can ship electric motorcycles without even the hint of an instruction manual, then why can’t I just figure out an electric articulating arm crane on my own?
Alibaba’s finest electric lift
The cool thing is that the 10-meter version is just the beginning. These bad boys come in a model line that goes all the way up to 18 meters (59 feet)! At that height, it might be worth reading the instruction manual, lest you suffer the same fate that our graphics guy seems to think will befall me.
Amazingly it only takes a 4,000 watt motor to power the various hydraulic pumps and rams on this massive children’s toy. Considering that’s around the same power of the motor in my mini Chinese electric pickup truck, I’d say that’s pretty impressive for such a little motor.
But don’t let the low power of this Alibaba electric lift fool you. This thing was made for getting stuff done, I tell ya! When the next hurricane comes and your neighbors are all out of power, you’ll get the last laugh when the next morning you’re up there plugging stuff in and jamming high voltage wires wherever they look like they should go.
You know why they make telephone poles so high, don’t you? It’s because they don’t want us seeing all the cool stuff they keep up there. Well now that we can all buy our own elevated work platforms, those utility men are going to have build even higher ivory towers, now aren’t they?!
There are a thousand and one uses for these things.
Hang the most awesome Halloween decorations. Clean your gutters yourself. Save a kitten from a tree without bothering the fire department. Put another more annoying kitten up IN a tree. Hey, some of them have it coming.
I’d say the sky is the limit, but that just isn’t true anymore, now is it?
The next time you need help changing the lightbulbs in your lofted ceiling, you know who to call. I’ll be there in a jiffy with my Alibaba special to help you out for the cool price of $5,000. I gotta pay this thing off somehow!
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