Sign me up! The weird and wacky world of Chinese electric vehicles just got even more interesting. That’s because it turns out you can order yourself a fancy-shmancy new electric food truck in the shape of a school bus straight from the other side of the world.
And that makes it a perfect addition to our Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column!
Ok, I’ll be honest. At first I thought this was an actual school bus and that was even cooler, but even as a food truck in the shape of a knowledge-mobile, there’s a lot to love here.
I’m not exactly sure what I’d do with it, but I’ve got a few ideas.
Maybe I could open up my own private food truck and call it “School Lunches.”
Maybe I’ll bolt in some benches and offer the local city my private services of snot-nosed munchkin transportation.
Maybe I’ll find an orange wig, a blue dress, and clip-on earrings to start my own one-man live action reboot of The Magic School Bus as a crossdressing Mrs. Frizzle.
The world is my oyster with an electric school bus at my command.
At just $2,000 for one of these bad boys, it’d almost be silly not to order it. Especially since it looks like the factory can hotrod it for you with a motor rated for up to 10 kW (13.5 hp).
It’s not going to win any tractor pulls, but it’s also not going to struggle up a slight hill, either.
I’m not sure if I should take it as a warning sign that the manufacturer doesn’t list any top speed on the product page. Maybe that just means that I’m limited only by my own imagination… and the floorboard when I put that pedal to the metal.
And yes, this might be a bit of a silly purchase. But it sure beats the electric battle tank from a couple weeks ago when it comes to utility!
In all seriousness, someone could actually make a fun food truck out of this thing. A mere $2,000 is chump change for a vehicle like this. It’s surely not street legal in the US, but if you aren’t going far (or you’re basically parking it permanently and just moving it around fair grounds) then that’s probably not a concern, and you could always trailer it to a location and use the electric drive for getting around a venue.
A reader of mine once told me he bought an electric food truck from Alibaba and parked it in a warehouse three blocks from where he operated it during the daily lunch rush. It technically wasn’t street legal, but he only had to go a few hundred feet twice a day and never got hassled by the fuzz.
The $2,000 base price of this glorious bus of course doesn’t include all the kitchen equipment you’d need to actually prepare food, but the company seems to offer that stuff as well. So you could basically get a fully equipped food truck built custom for you, with your name on it, sent from halfway around the world.
Shipping is going to be one hell of a doozy, and in my experience, can often be more than the purchase price of the actual vehicle.
I’m not recommending anyone actually embark on this wild journey. But if you did, be sure to shoot me a message, and show me what landed stateside. A few of my readers have done just that, and it’s always fun to see what shows up in a crate from the world’s largest and weirdest online shopping platform.
Subscribe to Electrek on YouTube for exclusive videos and subscribe to the podcast.