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

Electric surfboards aren’t anything new. I’ve enjoyed covering modern electric surfboards for at least half a decade on Electrek and they’ve been around in more primitive forms since the early 2000s. But one common thread that has run through nearly all e-boards so far is the astronomically high price they carry. Well, at least until today’s find: a cheap Chinese electric surfboard that has earned it the dubious honor of becoming this week’s Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week.

When it comes to the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column, we don’t discriminate based on wheel number. We’ve covered plenty of two- and four-wheelers, but three-wheelers need some love too. As long as a product is weird and wild, and comes from the seemingly endless Alibaba shopping catalog, it has a chance of earning this coveted weekly title. And that’s just what this awesome little electric trike has achieved today.

In yet another entry of the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week that takes us into new territory, this week it’s time to grab your backpack and lunch money for your first day of school. Or at least your first day out and about on a new electric school bus. That’s right, this awesome electric school bus could be yours… if you want to bring it over from China.

Box trucks are convenient when you have to move a large amount of cargo around. But what if only you need to lug around a small amount of cargo yet don’t want to give up your U-Haul vibes? That’s when you’ll want to call on the world’s smallest box truck, which just happens to be perfect for this week’s edition of the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week.

It’s time for a fancy pants edition of the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week. In today’s column, we’ve got a beautiful specimen of an antique-style roadster, complete with the tried-and-true guts of an electric microcar from China.

What could go wrong?!

I like to say that this weekly column finds the coolest and most fun electric vehicles from China that either drive, float, or fly. But with this entry into the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week, I might need to update that list to include things that locomote by rail.

As usual for entries in this Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column, the fun EVs we dredge up tend to bridge the gap between fun-looking and palm-sweat-inducing. Would you take a cheap inflatable electric jet ski out into the bay or off the coast? What if I told you that you had to build it yourself?

What happens when you plunk down a pile of cash on Alibaba for an electric food truck from China, then have it shipped half way around the world to the US? That’s exactly what one of my readers decided to find out, and fortunately he shared his experience with us.

I’m not sure I’ve ever wanted a vehicle more than the latest entry in the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column. That’s because this week we’re checking out a Chinese knock-off of an iconic little open-air buggy: the Mini Moke!

It may be small, but this 100 km/h (62 mph) fun-mobile would be a blast around the city or cruising to the beach.

When it comes to four-wheeled electric vehicles, Alibaba is known to have some doozies in the low price department. But this model might take the cake for cheapest electric vehicle yet. I’m not sure what I’d use it for, but at least the $600 price tag wouldn’t be nearly as hard to justify to my wife as my $2,000 truck was.

And as some nice bonus points, it works perfectly for this week’s edition of the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week!

Uh oh, I’ve done it again. I’ve fallen in love with another one of the victims subjects of my Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week series. It’s an odd mashup of a quad and a pickup truck, complete with a dumping bed. It’s the opposite of a mullet: party in the front, business in the back!

One of the many hallmarks of bizarre vehicles I often find for the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column is a strange combination of parts. And rarely is that trait so perfectly exemplified than in this cute little two-seater electric car… with tank tracks.

OK, I get it – it’s not a helicopter. It’s a multirotor. A quadcopter, perhaps? A drone? VTOL? Whatever it is, it’s a piloted flying machine, and you can actually buy one from China. It’s scary. It’s wild. And it’s this week’s entry in the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week.

If you’ve followed my writings for any period of time, you’ll know there are two things I love: electric motorcycles and finding weird EVs on Alibaba. And when those two things overlap, well, then you’ve found my happy place.

Sometimes the result is weirder than others, and that’s the case with this four-wheeled electric motorcycle that has earned the dubious title of Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week.

In this week’s dive into the deep end of the Alibaba pool, we’ve floated back to the surface with an interesting looking electric UTV designed for flying fast over rugged terrain. It may not compete with the best offerings currently found in the industry, but neither do most of the vehicles we dredge up for the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column.

Regular readers of my Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column will know that I usually dig around Chinese shopping sites to find the wackiest and coolest little EVs in the world. That’s resulted in finding everything from electric submarines to mini electric Jeeps. But this time, I’d say that today’s vehicles are less weird and more awesome, especially if you’ve been looking for your own electric-powered construction equipment for your property or work site. These little electric mini loaders could be the perfect size for hobby farms and small ranches. And they’re pretty darn affordable too!

It’s not everyday that the odd little EVs I find for the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week are so cool that I’m tempted to buy them myself. But this week it’s going to be hard to pass up on this three-seater electric pedicab that you can own for a song!

It would give a whole new meaning to the term “small business” if you became the owner and operator of a towing company using this electric tow truck. That’s because, despite getting with the times and swapping in an electric drivetrain, this tow truck is a bit on the diminutive side, though there’s a good reason for that — mostly because it’s built for children.

But it’s just too awesome for me to pass up wanting to take my own ride in it! So fortunately for all of us, this little electric tow truck has won a highly coveted prize that it didn’t even know it was in the running for: a spot as this week’s Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week.

One of the coolest things about all the weird electric vehicles we find on Alibaba is that many of them seemingly come from objects you’d never expect to see on the road. Take a tiger-shaped bus or a house on wheels. Other times, you get things that are technically vehicles but that still should never be near an actual road. And that makes me want to do exactly that – by getting one of these electric bumper cars for cruising my neighborhood’s streets.

Welcome to the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week, bumper car edition!

When we find electric vehicles for this weekly column on China’s bottomless pit of a shopping megasite Alibaba, we generally look for something that looks weird, fun, or at least remotely useful. This week, I’d say we nailed the first two. I’m not quite sure what to call this thing, so I guess I’ll have to go with the name given to it by its creators: the Happy Car.

Unless you have a stomach of steel, though, you might not be the happiest rider after a few revolutions in one of these.

You might be wondering why food trucks play such a big role in my Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column. After all, they tend to pop up fairly frequently in these weekly entries. A big part of their allure seems to be the fact that Alibaba’s engineers love taking the simple concept of a food truck and making it as complicated as possible by adding as many weird things as they can. Or sometimes by subtracting, like in this case where they subtracted the truck. In its place is a bicycle-powered food truck cart.