It’s pretty tough to come up with unique car builds in the age of the internet. Search YouTube, Reddit, or Instagram, and you’ll almost certainly find dozens of people working on the same “unique” project you’re dreaming up. But this one might actually be pretty unique. I’m not sure anyone before Michael Pick looked at a BMW i3 and thought “That could be a pickup truck.” Thankfully, Pick not only thought it, but did it. In this new video, you get to see how the former Lockheed engineer turned a used, 100,000-mile i3 into a compact electric pickup for under $8000 total.
Building any project car for under $8000 is tough nowadays. Hell, you can barely build a decent gaming PC for that anymore. So the fact that Pick was able to buy a used, electric BMW with a carbon fiber chassis, and a gasoline range extender, all of the equipment to modify it, and turn it into a running pickup truck for $7997.91 is pretty remarkable. Credit absurdly low used i3 prices for much of that value, though.
The project started off with a junkyard i3, but it was in surprisingly good shape all things considered. Sure, it was disgusting. But the only thing “wrong” with it was its 12-volt battery, or lack thereof. That’s why the i3 wouldn’t start at first . So Pick ran to the local auto parts store and bought one, installed it, and the i3 started right up. Easy peasy. Then began the process of cleaning and modifying it.
Obviously, Pick had to chop the top off the rear portion of the car. However, since the i3’s chassis is made from carbon fiber-reinforced plastic (CRFP), I wouldn’t recommend this. Carbon fiber is incredibly strong when it’s bonded together, but once you cut into it, you break those bonds and drastically reduce its strength, thus making this i3 pickup far less safe in a crash than the standard car. That out of the way, though, if you understand the risks and want to do this yourself, it’s a very cool project.
Much was done to cut the back off, keep electronics waterproof, and build a bed out of plywood. However, the finished project is really fun looking and surprisingly practical. Will it ever match the practicality of something like a Telo electric pickup? Of course not, but those are over $40,000 to start, if they even make it to production. A Slate pickup, which is supposed to be the budget electric pickup on the market, starts at more than three times the price of Pick’s i3 project, and his Bimmer has power windows. The video is pretty long, at around 42 minutes, but it’s worth the watch.
