I’ve done it again. I took a risk and spent a stack of cash to buy what could either be the most affordable, awesome electric ATV in the world, or a dangerous pile of steel and magnets that has no business ferrying around innocent lives through off-road terrain.
Ready to find out which it is? Me too, so let’s hit it!
How my Chinese electric ATV saga began
If you aren’t already familiar with my specific breed of shenanigans as one of my long-time readers, then first of all, welcome! This particular electric ATV escapade is in keeping with some of my other larks, including buying direct-from-China all sorts of strange electric boats, electric mini-trucks, and other odd electric vehicles. It’s usually a mixture of actual necessity and morbid curiosity that leads me down the road of risking my hard-earned paycheck on what may or may not become a fun addition to my growing electric vehicle fleet.
I’ve long enjoyed poking around through the electric vehicle catalogs of nameless, faceless Chinese factories, many of which have developed much more creative vehicular designs than we’re used to seeing in the West.
With fertile conditions for innovation, often falling somewhere in the overlap between reduced regulations, cheaper labor costs, and the general air of “let’s just try it” engineering, Chinese factories seem to pump out some of the coolest big boy toys in the world, at least if you’re into the kind of toys that come with steering wheels or handlebars.
In this case, I found what looked like a really cool combination of an ATV and a dump truck. It’s the mullet of off-road electric vehicles: business in front and party in back. With the front end of a four-wheeler and the rear of a cargo truck (complete with a hydraulic dump mechanism), it truly lives with two wheels in each world. And since a $13,000 “real” electric ATV from the West was far outside my budget, this monstrosity was looking better and better by the minute.
The price from the factory was just around US $2,000, and that felt like a high enough figure that I wasn’t going to end up getting scammed by receiving a mere photograph of the ATV in the mail, but not so much that I couldn’t face my wife if during the unboxing the whole thing went up in flames in the driveway, proverbially or otherwise. Speaking of that, you can see my unboxing and testing video of this wild electric dump ATV here. Get in now before it goes viral!
Anyway, where was I? Oh, right, so I went over the details with the factory, had them spec a few things to my liking (including getting a custom winch setup and a longer cargo bed, plus doubling the power of the motor from 1.5 kW to 3 kW), and then it was time to send my money off to the Far East and hope for the best.
Roughly 12 weeks later, my patience and anxiety were rewarded with the jankiest wooden crate I’d ever seen sitting on a trailer in the driveway at my parents’ homestead.
With a few acres of land there, my folks’ place was a better home for an off-road work vehicle like this, and so I promised it to my dad, assuming it was functional.
I got the thing uncrated and then added a pair of 72V 30Ah LiFePO4 batteries into the empty battery box (I forgot to mention that, like any good toy, it was a batteries-not-included affair).
I wired the batteries in parallel to give me a 60Ah pack with 4.32 kWh of capacity. That felt like enough, but we’re kind of making this up as we go along here, so who really knows?
With the batteries in, I finally got to fire it up and start playing around like a kid on Christmas morning.
I was instantly blown away by how much torque the thing had, made even more appreciable by the poor throttle ramping, meaning that if you weren’t careful to give the throttle the most feather-like of twists, you’d give yourself whiplash as the thing rocketed forward.
My dad and I took turns slinging gravel around and giggling like toddlers as the bright red ATV dump truck lurched around the driveway and took off to the pasture. At times, I was legitimately worried for his spine and neck, but he’s still here, so it must have gone fine enough.
The 3 kW motor surely doesn’t sound like much when you consider that plenty of light e-motos weighing 100 lb (45 kg) these days have more powerful motors than that.
But what you have to keep in mind is that 1) the Chinese tend to rate EVs like these with continuous power, not peak power, meaning this is much more powerful than the 3 kW label would have you believe, and 2) for some reason, it wants to dump all of that power in an instant instead of ramping up nicely.
So I was probably pulling easily double the continuous power rating, and that was going through an apparently bulletproof gearbox to create some ridiculous bottom-end torque.
It was certainly thrilling, but also felt like overkill, so one early mod I performed was to downgrade the motor back to the factory-suggested 1.5 kW motor.
As it turns out, I probably should have listened to the factory guys who build thousands of these things instead of thinking I knew better. My inner Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor initially just wanted to grunt and demand more power, but eventually swapping out the motor and controller to something more reasonable made the thing much more pleasant to actually use.
I know guys all over the world right now are staring at their phones or computer screens, utterly confused by me reducing the power on my new toy, but believe me, it made it so much better. And now I have a spare 3kW motor/controller pair for some other crazy future project.
And don’t worry, it does not appear that I’ve dinged its cargo-carrying capacity too much. I loaded a 650 lb (300 kg) 30 kWh electric bus battery into the back (big thanks to BatteryHookup, which is where I tend to go for all my strange battery needs), and the ATV still pulls it around like it’s carrying a box of tissues.
That battery, by the way, is part of a future project, where I intend to turn the huge battery into a large electric battery generator, basically making this ATV into an electric fuel truck. With 30 kWh of capacity back there, I can drive around and charge up my various off-road EVs like my electric tractors without them ever needing to come back to home base for a charge.
That battery is so big that, between it and the 200 lb pallet forks, I was pushing the 880 pound lift limit of my smallest tractor I have. But my NESHER L880 electric loader just slipped in under the wire.
This is also a chance to show off some of the cool features, like the combination of tailgate AND side gates that allow the cargo bed to be loaded from three sides. In fact, the cargo bed is 1.5 meters (5 feet) long, which means it’s actually longer than the bed in some of today’s brand-new American pickup trucks, believe it or not. It’s just a few inches shy of the bed in a Cybertruck, not that any Cybertruck owner has ever been over-fixated on a few inches…
With the triple gate setup allowing easy loading, not to mention the relatively low deck height back there, it’s really convenient to lift and haul heavy things since you don’t have to pick them up to your chest height in order to drop them into the bed.
But when it comes to really heavy things, I don’t mind having the power of my electric loader around, either.
Another standout feature has got to be the dump capability. There’s a massive hydraulic ram that powers the rear dump bed, meaning you can use this platform to move bulk material like dirt, gravel, mulch, sand, etc.
The rear gate even has a proper dump truck-style swinging tail gate that automatically unlocks and swings open when the bed dumps, then locks itself again when the bed drops back into its driving position.
How much did it really cost?
Some of you are probably suspicious of the US $2,000 cost, and rightfully so. It’s not clickbait. I really did pay the factory $2,000 for this thing. That was the price tag. And if I lived next door to the factory, that would have been the end of the story. But alas, I do not live next door to the factory, and the ATV had to travel several thousand miles to me, plus I had to pay several ransoms – I mean tariffs – to get it to me.
All told, with ocean freight and customs and tariffs and brokers and arrival fees and everything else, the final summation of costs came out to around US $4,800 – and that’s with me saving some good money by hitching a trailer to the family mini-van and picking the crate up in port myself. And I should mention that I’m so far behind in my video editing that I actually received my ATV before the tariff war escalated last Spring, meaning I paid significantly lower tariffs. More recently, the last time I imported something from China around a month or two ago, the total tariff load was around 70-80% with all the various stacked-on tariffs, and so this would be much more expensive now. Theoretically, some of those tariffs might be removed soon if the US Supreme Court’s recent tariff ruling holds any weight, but we’re post-law these days, so who the heck knows?
To sum it up, in the end it cost me just under $5k, but would likely cost significantly more today. Also, it appears the factory I got it from isn’t around anymore, but if you search online for “Chinese electric ATV” then you’ll find literally dozens of sources from various Chinese websites for this thing and similar models. I highly advise that you click on none of them and that you don’t take a risk buying something like this yourself, but if you want to ignore my advice, that’s how you’d do it.
All told, this was another fun experiment in testing out the kind of odd electric vehicles that were never destined for our shores, but that I think could make an interesting addition to the type of work (and play) vehicles that folks like my family use every day. Instead of needing a dedicated farm truck, an electric dump ATV could be a cool, smaller-format alternative. This one is still pretty rough around the edges and might not be ready for primetime with a Western operator in mind, but it’s always fun to see what is out there in the wild world of Chinese electric vehicles.
It also makes me wonder what I’ll be testing next…
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