Alibaba

Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week: $2,500 Chinese farm truck

Micah Toll | Jan 8 2022 - 4:15 am PT

Electric farm trucks are awesome – I actually bought one from China to use as a utility vehicle around my parents’ sprawling property. But while mine looks like a knockoff American truck, I recently found a much more Eastern-style truck that has me intrigued. It’s a perfect selection for the latest entry in my Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column!

As usual, I’m not quite sure what to call this thing.

It’s kind of like a convertible truck, except that it doesn’t convert into anything other than an open-top ride.

The company calls it a four-wheeled electric tricycle, which sounds like a contradiction on wheels.

I get where they’re coming from though. It takes on the design of the heavy duty electric tricycles that are popular all over Asia, but swaps in a two-wheeled front end instead of the typical motorcycle-style front fork and single wheel.

Up front we actually have dual-wishbone independent front suspension, which is more than I can say for my personal electric truck’s solid front axle.

Tucked up next to those front wheels are what appears to be a pair of four-piston hydraulic disc brakes, though the rear gets a set of drum brakes. Still, not too shabby!

They offer several motor sizes of 800W, 1,000W, 1,200W and 1,500W. Obviously I’d max this beauty out with the 1.5 kW motor. That’s a whole two horses of muscle power!

I guess the relatively slow top speed of 40 km/h (25 mph) means that you don’t really need that much power. This isn’t going to win any stop light races, and the fact that it is primarily used for off-road utility work means that it likely won’t even hit its top speed very often.

The 60V battery pack is also available in multiple capacities of 1.92 kWh, 2.7 kWh or 3.1 kWh. Again, I’d max this bad boy out for peak performance.

Despite the four-wheeled design of the farm truck, it still has motorcycle style handlebars and includes a twist throttle instead of a gas pedal. Brakes are also controlled by the handlebar-mounted brake lever, though there’s another emergency brake lever to the right of the seat. That’s obviously for drifting.

The horn button, oddly enough, is mounted in the center of the bars. That’s where you’d expect to find it on a steering wheel, and further exemplifies the odd mashup of motorbike and truck we have going on here.

In case there weren’t enough levers already, there’s one more in front of your knees that controls a two speed gearbox. Yank it and you’ll drop your speed but increase your torque, which would be helpful for off-roading or hill-climbing.

But what really tickles me isn’t the performance (or lack thereof), but rather the utility of this engineering marvel. Just look at that cargo bed!

It’s a full meter wide (39 inches) and comes in multiple lengths of 130 cm, 150 cm and 160 cm (4’3″, 4’11”, 5’2″). That last one is nearly as long as the bed on a 2024 Chevy Silverado EV pickup truck. Eat your heart out, GM!

The hilarious thing is that the 500 kg (1,100 lb) load capacity is almost as much as the Silverado EV’s 1,300 lb hauling capacity too!

But even cooler than that is this little nugget: the bed doesn’t only have a fold down tailgate, but also fold down sidegates! Check it out in the video below.

That triple-tailgate setup means you can release a few buckles and instantly convert it into a flatbed.

How cool is that!?

You can haul a pile of manure one minute and then a stack of 4×8′ sheets of plywood the next minute. Actually, it’s probably best to reverse that order for cleanliness’ sake.

The bed even manually lifts up to dump, which would make quick work of unloading either of those.

You could use this type of vehicle for so many things. The front bench seat could fit one person comfortably or two people uncomfortably. And the possibilities for the rear are endless, limited only to your imagination.

I could run my own alpaca farm service if I wanted to!

The things I make our resident graphics wizard do… tsk tsk

The final surprise here is the price, which is much more reasonable than I was expecting. The base vehicle starts at $985. But that’s without batteries. You’re probably looking at another $300 or so for the big battery option.

$1,300-ish isn’t a bad price, especially since you can barely buy an electric bike for that much these days.

Unfortunately that isn’t the end of the expenses though. We’ve still got to get the dang thing out of China.

For that, shipping LCL (less than container load) is the most cost effective option. Basically, they combine a bunch of people’s smaller goods into one 40′ shipping container and send it all as one unit. That’s how I shipped my mini pickup truck from China, though as you can see in the unboxing video, the cage they built around it got pretty beaten up in that container.

Shopping around from a few options, it seems like I’d be looking at around $1,200 to get this four-wheeled electric farm truck to my closest port of Miami.

Some of the best quotes I could find for shipping it from China

At $2,500 to land it in the US, that still seems like a pretty sweet deal. The only question left would be how many ransoms I’d have to pay along the way and what the customs charges would be. But because this is all academic, I guess I’ll never really know.

Unless you want to get one and tell me about it! It wouldn’t be the first time someone bought one of the crazy Alibaba EVs I found. If you do go all in on one of these awesomely weird electric farm trucks, I’d love to hear how it goes!

And for everyone else that just wants to enjoy the financial comfort of not blowing all your money on crazy Chinese electric vehicles, check out some of these other fun Alibaba EVs I’ve featured in the past:

Lastly, if that wasn’t enough Chinese farm truck for you, here’s one more fancy-pants B-roll video of this awesome thing!