Unboxing & Testing My Chinese "$2,000" ELECTRIC Truck!

hey everyone mikey here with ebikeschool.com and today is the day that many people including myself have been waiting for i have received my mini electric truck from china and we're going to unbox it now you guys might have seen my last video if you didn't i'll put a link up here somewhere where i covered how i bought this electric truck from china video chatted with the factory got to see everything it packaged up and then later in this video i'll go over how the shipping process went i don't want to delay the unboxing too long i just want to show you real quick some of the things that i didn't expect the cage here they built around it is pretty beat up whatever they loaded on top of this in the container really crushed the cage down all these bars are really bent and as you come around you can just see there's a lot of you know damage to the cage in the back here it was pretty beaten up whatever was loaded on top of this thing pretty much crushed the cage but it seems like it didn't quite reach the top level of the truck so i think it'll be all right so without any further ado let's grab some tools and start unboxing this thing and see what the heck i bought [Music] so i've got a slight feeling this is going to be tetanus city i haven't seen better days [Music] we're getting there [Music] here's a mostly exposed truck [Music] all right you ready for this oh here it comes she's the beauty i think it's unlocked here's the roof rack there's the bed rack here's the front bumper i wasn't expecting a bed liner that's gotten pretty chewed up from uh all the pieces that were in here i don't know how long that's gonna last maybe a day the battery's shipped turned off so they told me i have to lift up the bed here and then push a button to turn on the battery so let's see how that goes this is not light also i think i'm going against that hydraulic lift all right actually would you mind coming here superior and just pushing that button you see next to the red and the black wire there's a button i pushed it okay yeah i'm just seeing if it turns on nothing happened yet let me check with robert so it looks like turning the battery on at least got the hydraulic ram working [Music] so that's a good first step so here's a little voice over from future mica at this point i solved one problem and ran into another robert texted me back and let me know there was another switch under the seat so i got the master power turned on but then i couldn't actually drive the thing off of the cage because there was a frame member that had been bent up into the way it looks like at some point someone picked it up with a forklift incorrectly so i had to cut that out to be able to roll this off i think now it's going to clear the rest of the cage and not rip out any brake cables or the motor or anything like that but we'll find out let's give it a try here goes nothing [Music] i don't know if it's not powerful enough to overcome the so at that point i tried pushing the truck off and had my dad help but we couldn't get it off because it couldn't actually climb over the cage itself so instead i had my dad get in and floor it while i pushed and we managed to finally get it off of that cage of course my wife was swapping batteries in the camera at the time which i didn't notice in my excitement to get the truck out so she missed that but i caught it on the drone and in the time lapse all right so successfully gotten it off of the cage let's give it a little twirl here at low speed and see how it goes [Music] so the suspension leaves a little something to be desired but it seems to drive pretty well it's a little quieter and of course at this point the whole family wants to give it a whirl so my dad was up next yep it works and then of course my wife has to give it a go [Music] yeah we can buckle it down let's have a bad feeling that's as low as the wiper goes you know there are other things that would concern me more does ford know they took the explorer name i think they'd have a problem if they did it's good parking all right so then after playing around with it for a while went in and had lunch came back out put all of the accessories on it the luggage rack on top the bars in the back of the bed the bumpers uh the hubcaps everything went on it and then i could actually test it out the way it's meant to be driven fully assembled [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so i've been playing with the truck now for a few hours i'm starting to get to know it pretty well and overall i am really impressed i would say it's probably 85 to 90 awesome and then there's about uh 10 to 15 of things i would like to see improved but there's so much here to love this is so much better than any golf cart right i mean first of all you've got this giant utility bed it is fully enclosed it's got electric windows you roll up the windows it's got electric locks you can lock the thing you've got seat belts you know this is not a uh just a little utility cart it's not a buggy it's not a golf cart this is a small truck it's very small but it's a truck it's even got this hydraulic dump bed there's a button right here behind the passenger seat [Music] this also gives you a chance to check out the frame now i will say one of the things that could be improved is the welding is not great i mean it's pretty porous uh it just doesn't look like a great weld job the other thing is there are many places like on the cage up here where they just sort of did some tack welds and then they didn't go around and actually weld the entire tube so the welding could definitely be improved another little quirk about this hydraulic jumping bed is when you go to put it down you got to kind of help it a little bit and then it'll start to go on its own and then part way down it sometimes will catch again and you got to give it a little more of a push to go all the way down so you hear it stop so if i push a little more it'll it'll keep going so it needs a little bit of help but overall it's a pretty cool feature i also like that it's got the utility rack up here it's got the rack back here the only problem is these uh bolts that they gave me to screw it in aren't even bolts they're just self-tapping screws so i'm probably going to replace this with some real bolts make this thing a little sturdier you can already feel it's rocking a little bit so you know some improvements that can be made here but overall i mean for a little truck it's pretty nice you even got these little tie-down areas where you can you know strap your uh ropes tie-down straps and hold things in i like the little fuel door here that covers the charger spot um just kind of a nice little touch looks like an actual fuel door the thing has mirrors both sides the funny thing is it's so small you can sit in the driver's seat and adjust your passenger mirror you also get windshield wipers or a wiper which you know works great the only problem is that it stops about halfway up that's as low as it goes so i don't know if i'll be able to adjust this down a bit so then it won't go all the way over in general the lights i really like as well so we've got lights both sort of daytime running lights and you can turn on the headlights and then there are these spotlights up here so you can turn those on as well and the funny thing is these used to say jeep and they've cut out the little jeep logo here and so you don't have the the jeep there anymore but that was another one of these funny trademark things just like up here we've got the explorer which obviously is a ford trademark so i don't know how they get away with that let me pop the hood here for you so under the hood you'd think you'd have a frunk but not really it's mostly taken up by the air conditioning the compressor is actually on the inside so in here we've got the radiator for the air conditioning and then we've got our little reservoir for the window washer fluid but if you didn't have the ac you could probably put like a tub or something in here and then you'd actually have a frunk space now i will say some of this looks like they've done a decent job of wire management in here it's all mostly tied down in the back there are some places especially underneath the bed in the back where they could have done a better job tying down some of those wires things like for the reverse camera the wire's just kind of dangling there and that's going to get ripped off if you don't tuck it up and zip tie it to something speaking of which though there's actually a backup camera in this thing which is kind of crazy let me show you the inside so in here you've got a backup camera if i put it in reverse by the way the gear shift is this little spinning switch here i don't know why they went with the rotary switch but that's what you get there's a reverse camera it does seem like it's angled down pretty low so i want to play with the camera lens and see if i can point it back up but you do get that reverse camera which is cool when you're not in reverse you've got an infotainment system here if i go to like movies or music i don't have anything in there right now so it'll tell me there's no file i could put a usb flash drive or a little trans flash card and if you go to bluetooth you can actually connect it to your phone and i was playing music in it earlier and then up here we have controls for the air conditioning i actually added the air conditioning it doesn't come standard in this model so you turn it on it is quite loud it's got three settings and it actually works i was surprised you know you can feel the cold air coming out now you can see a voltage dip go ahead and turn it off because it's very loud you can see the voltage actually sag on the dash when you look at the voltage when you turn on the ac so it's using a good bit of power i need to look up exactly how much it's using or measure it i expect this truck with a huge battery it's a 60 volt and 100 amp hour lithium ion battery that's 6 000 watt hours way more than anyone should really need that's probably 50 to 75 miles of range obviously i'm not going to go that far but i wanted to put a pretty big battery in there just in case and it allows me to do things like run that ac without worrying about the range like i mentioned before there are electric windows so right over here you've got your switch they actually go up really fast [Music] so that's kind of a nice feature you know again this is like a real small vehicle you don't have these little crank windows you have electric windows i mean this is all a real vehicle the seats move forward and backwards we've got a little glove box we've got a parking brake now i will say the parking brake here it only works like a slight hill even on the driveway over there where there's more of a hill you start to roll back a bit so the second parking brake is down here you push the brake pedal with your foot and then you push this red ball and that locks the brake pedal so it's kind of an odd parking brake but it works a little bit better than the actual hand brake here because you can just push harder on the brake pedal when you lock it now i am a little bit worried about rusting i will say that there's already some spots on this truck that are rusting there are some things like if you look over here on these mounts you know the paint is peeling off and it's rusting a bit uh and it's it's kind of interesting because if i you know bought this in the u.s and i had pieces of paint coming off i'd be pretty upset about it but this was a cheap truck that i bought on alibaba so these are the kind of things that you kind of have to to deal with you know obviously you can't just like return this to china and say i want one without a little bit of paint peeling on the mount so it's one of the risks of of purchasing something like this from alibaba i will say though that for the most part the truck arrives in great condition i've got you know a few small nicks in the paint that sort of thing though overall the paint is quite nice but there aren't any real big dents or anything i've seen a lot of people that have unboxed these alibaba trucks and they've just been beat up during shipping so i'm really actually quite fortunate that the truck arrived in you know one major piece and without any significant damage to it one of the things i'm thinking of doing is putting in a bed liner so if you come back here and look in the bed they actually gave you this sort of cheap tarp thing here but underneath i'm already there's some dings there's a bit of rust here so i'm thinking of doing some sort of spray-in liner or something in the back here just to give it a little more longevity and not have this whole thing start rusting out immediately because i do think that's going to be a concern now i've spent a while telling you guys all the things that i think are so great about this truck a few of the things that are a bit problematic you might be able to notice is that the suspension is not great in fact it's almost non-existent um i'm driving around on grass here it's actually pretty rutted out so it's not the smoothest surface but you're really bouncing around here and the seats there's not much padding in them either so i would say that the suspension is probably the worst part about this entire truck and if that's the worst part then that's pretty good because you know you go into this knowing it's not a luxury vehicle so i'm not gonna complain too hard about that another thing is i've got a few mystery clunks in here that i can't figure out where they're coming from the bed does have some straps to like uh lock it down and that helps but there's some clunking coming from up front that i'm not sure if that's a suspension or what i've looked around there's nothing loose so i can't really tell where it's coming from but there's some mystery noises here that are a little bit disconcerting uh but other than the the mystery clunking and the suspension that could use some uh existence i would say that i am really quite excited about this truck i'm pleasantly surprised with how well it works and just how much of a real vehicle it is okay i think your viewers are gonna throw up [Music] now you'll notice that i'm riding around off-road in all of this this is my parents property here and that's what i basically got the truck for they've got a lot of land and this is basically serving like a mule or a buggy or an atv for them with the advantage that when it rains as it always does here in florida it's enclosed in the hot air we've got air conditioning there's a dump bed you know all the things that golf carts can't offer so the reason i'm doing all this off-road is because and this is the answer to everyone who asked is it street legal it is not street legal to be very clear here no changly vehicle is street legal and anyone who says otherwise is sadly mistaken so this is what is considered a neighborhood electric vehicle style vehicle it only goes up to 25 miles an hour you know it's got lights blinkers ac belt in the driver's seat not in the passenger seat but that does not make it street legal unfortunately there are federal motor vehicle safety standards that apply to these vehicles at the federal level and in order to be street legal you basically have to have dot compliant parts throughout the vehicle and so this obviously doesn't because it came from china so nothing is d.o.t compliant has a seatbelt it's not dod approved you know it's got blinkers it's got headlights you know but none of these are dot parts it doesn't even have a vin that's registered with the national highway traffic safety administration even though it technically does have a fin it's a chinese vin so it means nothing in the u.s so unfortunately no you're not allowed to drive it on the street did i yeah all right so i did like a little bit of street riding just to see how it went to make sure it could get up to its top speed which with the tailwind it did barely get up to 25 miles an hour but this is obviously not something that i could try and take to the dmv and get a license plate for or that i could just you know drive around town in if it was street legal that would be a different thing because there are neighborhood electric vehicles that can do that but because this came from china and it is not at all street legal unfortunately i cannot here in florida there is another alternative which is a golf cart conversion process that actually makes golf carts into street legal neighborhood electric vehicles so you got to replace you know windshield with dot windshield all the parts basically have to be replaced to be dot-compliant and then you get it inspected by the state and they issue you a vin number so i might go through that process so i actually can take it out on the street because that would be a lot of fun but for now this is unfortunately an off-road only vehicle that being said it is super useful in that purpose like i said i got it from my parents property here and in the first day i mean we're already driving around we're picking up fallen limbs branches palm fronds bringing them to the burn pile we're using it for all sorts of utility jobs out here which is exactly the kind of thing that these little trucks are great for you know it seats two people it's got that dumping bed it's decently powerful it's got a 3000 watt motor now that's not going to climb up any huge hills and it does have a low speed gear if you do any hill climbing the only problem with the two-speed gear system is that the gear lever is down here by the side of the seat and when i push it into the low gear setting the door doesn't close because it impacts the little door pocket thing so unfortunately you can't actually use the low gear in this model of truck because the door won't close or i guess you can use it you just need to leave your door open otherwise you know it's got a lot of that utility it's just not a street legal vehicle unfortunately all right so next up everyone's asking how much did this thing cost well when you find these trucks on alibaba you'll see that they're usually listed for about two thousand dollars or so but that's not the complete picture when you see that it says two thousand dollars that's just the price of the bear truck it doesn't even have batteries so the truck itself cost me two thousand dollars but immediately i had to pay another thousand dollars to get a battery put in it now i got the best battery i could instead of getting lead acid i got lithium and instead of the you know cheap 50 amp hour lithium battery i doubled it for 100 amp hours next i spent another 500 on other upgrades i added the air conditioning and i added the dump bed in the back both of those things i think are just going to be super useful next i had the biggest expense yet this was the single largest expense was actually getting it out of china and to me here it was two hundred dollars just to put it on a boat and bring it to the port of miami from there i had to pay another eleven hundred dollars when it came into the port of miami and that covered uh all of the customs and duties and the uh broker fee because i had to use an import broker on top of that i had to pay another eight hundred dollars which are the arrival charges which is basically a ransom that the shipping company or i guess is technically the logistics company that receives it from the shipping company charges you there's no way to get around that and it's all like just nonsense charges because they can and you know you gotta pay it if you want your truck you just gotta pay him unfortunately but that wasn't the end of it that just got my truck released in the port of miami but my parents don't live in miami so to get it several hours to their property i had to find someone on craigslist to truck it and that was another 500 bucks so all told i am about 7 950 into this if i did my math correctly and that is definitely more than i intended to spend going in but that being said if you look at what i got i mean a golf cart costs easily 8 000 and you could spend 10 12 000 on a golf cart and this is so much better than that so i still think it's a pretty good deal even though it's definitely more expensive than i intended for it to be from here on out i plan to do a lot of modifications to it there's all sorts of interesting things you can do my dad already wants to build something on the bed so he can pick up the trash cans using the hydraulic dump and then carry them down to the road where they get picked up they've got a really long driveway so it's great that you know you can use a vehicle like this even just going and get in the mail you know instead of starting up a car and doing a few minute drive down the long driveway to get to the public road for the mailbox now they can just hop in this thing and head down there i mean it's silly right to start up a 4 000 pound car and run a gas engine just to pick up a half pound of mail so it makes more sense to burn a few electrons and do the same thing a lot more efficiently now would i recommend to someone doing what i did which is to just go on the internet and buy a truck like this from china probably not i mean there's a lot of risk in this the good thing is that i knew that cheng li was a reputable factory because i've seen other people buy their trucks on youtube i was pretty sure i was going to get my truck so i was comfortable risking it but i do not recommend just going out on alibaba and plopping down thousands of dollars on what appears to be a good deal now of course there are some importers that are starting to bring in these chinese mini-electric cars to the us but again i mean these things aren't street legal and like they're not even close to being street legal so you got to be careful there as well like if i was driving this on the road and i got into an accident you know my insurance isn't going to cover it because it's not a legal motor vehicle you know the liabilities on me even if i got pulled over for a traffic stop the police could just take the car and they could confiscate it because you're operating a non-motor vehicle on a public highway so it's something to be considered i think these are definitely better off-road work type vehicles and if you're considering getting one of these for road use i'd be very careful about it for that reason so there we have it unboxing and my first day of testing my new tiny electric pickup from china there's a few improvements that we've talked about that i think could be made but for the price it's a really awesome little truck and there's a lot of utility last but not least before we go it's time to announce the winner of the giveaway for my last video and the randomly selected commenter is scott roder so congratulations just let me know which one of my books you'd like you can choose from my diy lithium batteries diy solar power the ultimate do-it-yourself e-bike guide or my newest book the electric bike manifesto and let me know where to send it and anybody else who wants a chance to win one of my books for free all you have to do is put a comment down below you can say anything you'd like and hopefully you'll be the winner of the giveaway at the end of my next video if you don't want to wait that long you can always find my books on amazon alright thanks for watching everybody i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: EbikeSchool.com

Views: 10,577,352

Keywords: electric bicycle, e-bike, ebikeschool.com, ebike school, CHANGLI, CHANG-LI, CHANG LI, ELECTRIC IMPORT MOTORS, CHINESE NEV, CHINESE LSV, MICAH TOLL, LOW SPEED VEHICLE, NEIGHBORHOOD ELECTRIC VEHICLE, MINI TRUCK, MINITRUCK, MINI-TRUCK, ELECTRIC TRUCK, CYBERTRUCK, TESLA TRUCK, RIVIAN, R1T, FORD F150 LIGHTNING, ELECTRIC MINI TRUCK, TINY TRUCK, SMALL TRUCK, ELECTRIC TRUCKS, ELECTRIC PICKUP, MINI PICKUP TRUCK, CHINESE TRUCK

Id: bixJDOH864U

Length: 24min 34sec (1474 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 19 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/jackospacko]

There’s a 3 month update on this too. They have put it through its paces and it’s holding up quite well. These seem absolutely perfect for smaller farms.

Apparently lots of Chinese villagers use them now for their farms and are quite popular.

[u/Grimalkin]

3-month update

[u/Youstink1990]

This is nice for a task vehicle or for joy ridding on a nice plot of land that you own. No American companies offer similar vehicles?

[u/talon999]

This is no golf cart, this is an actual little truck!

Oh btw, it's not street legal and it only goes up to 25mph

So much for it being the "real vehicle" he made such a big deal about several times. Way to not mention that until nearly 20 minutes in.

[u/TheCheesy]

So much to be desired here. It could be improved without increasing the cost by that much. The "Frunk" AC setup could've been condensed so much more. It wastes a lot of space. The truck bed creaking so much. It needs better pivot points/hinges for the piston so it's not hitching so much.

The vehicle is clearly a small truck designed for city roads. I wonder if he will fix it up.

[u/everythingbagel420]

It’s so cute it’s like a baby Tahoe

[u/Septopuss7]

I want a Kei truck so bad!

[u/thedudeabides-12]

That thing is so damn cool..

[u/Bryllant]

If only he had a power wrench