We Bought the Cheapest Truck from China

inside this box is the cheapest brand new vehicle you can buy today and we got it off Alibaba for two thousand dollars it took us four months for this thing to come to our offices here at donut and today's the day that we unbox it we're going to talk about what it takes to import a car from across the globe then we're going to take it for a test drive and figure out whether or not this thing was worth all that time and money welcome to Donut so I found out about these little Japanese K trucks that farmers use that are really popular in America now they're pretty cool and I kind of want one but here's the thing those things are like 25 years old now and they're pretty expensive so instead of spending about ten thousand dollars for one I can buy one of these on alibaba.com for 2 000 bucks so this is the changley clzkc-010 so you can option this out a bunch of different ways you can get a four-door you can get a two-door the two-door you can get with a hydraulic dump bed that's pretty cool these are ridiculously funny looking little trucks listen two thousand bucks for this thing it's got a pretty good amount of options so let's buy this sucker right now contact supplier chat now hi there I'd like to buy this truck with American dollars interested in selling me it send [Music] a response with an emoji okay we'll see how this goes nice emoji here's mine eggplant now this is the start of what ended up being a months long process to get this truck I didn't know anything about importing cars from overseas especially from China and there's barely any information about the best way to actually do this so here's a walkthrough of what I went through to import this tiny truck and every dollar I spent along the way first of all I don't know who this is that I'm talking to does this person work for Chang Li do they work for Alibaba is it some company in the middle I don't know is it an automated response could be I have no idea but after a week of going back and forth with her I was finally able to put in an order with this company and right off the bat I found out this vehicle doesn't actually cost two thousand dollars what a shocker it costs two thousand eighty dollars for the body only now if you want a battery that's going to be another 300 but that's just for the standard lead acid battery if you want a better battery you can opt for the 1345 lithium ion battery which is what I did I also sprung for the hydraulic dump bed option which costs another 250 bucks so we're already up to 3675 bucks for a 2 000 car still that's not bad for a brand new truck but after submitting the order I ran into my first real roadblock a couple days later when I got this message oh what's that Customs cleared agent no what's that you need Freight forward before buy I need Freight forward before buy yes you need Freight forward before buy I already buy without Freight forward am I in trouble no you just need to get Freight forward before Buy [Music] now if you're going to ship a car around the world whether it's from China or Japan or anywhere else a freight forwarder and a clearance agent are two people you're gonna have to hire that's because your forwarder is in charge of things like the negotiation of freight Chargers booking the cargo space cargo consolidation and the preparation of shipping documents which there are a ton of you need a relationship with the government ports and Border agencies to get any of this done in a timely fashion basically there's a reason there are huge Freight forwarding agencies that do this work for you luckily for me the Port of Los Angeles has a website with a bunch of forwarders on there that you can hire which makes it a little bit easier [Music] hello uh hi yeah I am looking for a freight forwarder okay um well okay thanks you think the DMV is bad try to talk to someone who deals with ships so I decided to send a message to my homegirl Aaron to see if she had any leads on getting us a forwarder and thankfully she was able to hire a forwarder for me and this is a service that most auction sites are probably going to offer you I recommend just forking over the money and save yourself a headache it took us about a week going back and forth between a bunch of different people for us to finally just decide to use an internal one and we should have just done that in the first place and they only ended up charging us 455 dollars which isn't bad to ship a car from China so our two thousand dollar truck is now 4130 bucks and with that we wired a bunch of money to a random person that I've been messaging on a Chinese website and officially bought our first Chinese truck but we're not done yet because we still need to get a customs clearance agent now Joby you might be wondering what is a customs clearance agent not really okay glad you asked now it's a middleman who works with your Freight forwarder files all the paperwork for you at the Port that way you can actually release your cargo oh and to find one I went back to the port of LA's website and with some persistence I finally found one willing to work with us for the price of 600 what the heck I don't want to pay another 600 well thanks for all the help I'm gonna do it myself anyways you son of a so I decided to do some more research and in fact found a website called easy import you submit some information for them online and they act as a clearance agent for you now here's the thing you got to fill out some of the paperwork yourself but in the end it saves you some money now the first form I had to fill out was an ISF this notifies the port of arrival that you got cargo coming in and what that cargo is if you don't fill this out you can get fined up to five thousand dollars so you got to fill this out now in addition to this form you also have to purchase a bond when filing why do you have to do this I don't know just one of those things that they make you do so we did that and then our chain Glee was free to set sail to America ah our truck's coming into the good old USFA baby a week went by and while our tiny truck was sailing across the Pacific I received a pre-arrival notice from our final destination forwarder what the hell is a final destination forwarder I've never even heard of those words before in my entire life try to do a little bit of research and essentially this person is yet another middleman that works with your customs broker to help you get cargo off the ship once it's here in the US so this forwarder told me to fill out a bunch more paperwork and file it again through easy import great now after all of that was cleared we finally had finished all of our paperwork now this whole process took over a week and our truck had to be moved from the port to a warehouse in Compton a warehouse that I would have to pay to release our vehicle and that is when I got the final bill let's see 1155 for forwarding service okay two thousand seven hundred and thirty dollars to release it from the warehouse I can release people from jail cheaper than that it only cost me 455 dollars to ship this thing here now it's four thousand dollars just to release it from that American soil onto my American soil this is absurd and I just have to pay it and I can't even fight it look guys these are just fees that as far as I can tell is this something you have to pay to get your cargo there's no negotiating there's nothing I could do except just bite my lip and quietly pay this person so in total our two thousand dollar Chinese truck was actually eight thousand two hundred and fifty eight dollars what the heck this truck better be really nice at this point I probably could have bought me a used K truck that had already been imported into the states so eight thousand dollars later it's finally time for our Chinese dump truck to be delivered could this thing possibly be worth all the time and effort at this point I don't know let's unbox it and find out big thanks to carparts.com for 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carparts.com it's the perfect book and all of this could be yours for the low low price of clicking the link in the description of this video get the right parts right now at carparts.com check it out and maintain the love with your car today okay are we done great all right Joby how about we unbox this thing oh nice oh we got our first wheel siding oh look at the wood grains it's like Christmas morning [Music] well that unboxing process was pretty fun that was a lot of fun the quality is um how do I put this not great look at this little thing micro USB we got a welding wire sticking out everywhere oh my God if we like hit a curb this thing's gonna explode yeah it's funny how light this stuff is that is made out of the thinnest steel they could find it's not all about thickness job that's good and sturdy it's a beautiful day to put to put a truck together what's that Jeff gee hey look they used to say Jeep oh look at this look at that we had a donut shirt in there you can get a shirt like this on daughtermedia.com came with our truck that was pretty cool yeah let's check out the inside of this thing oh look at that nice steering feel oh look at this leather man this is like Ford quality 2007. our display here look at this infotainment Center let's see if our wipers work I knew it was gonna have a hard time hitting the window I need my hands cleaned all the interior functionality works yeah now let's see if we can actually drive this thing yeah you're good you're good you're good you're good you're good [Laughter] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] I gotta go off this way I want to see the load capacity of this thing see if we can just Pile in a bunch of boys in the back of the bed see how much it squats it hey Nolan I need your body yeah okay get up in there hit the dump hold on to your butts we got a hot load of dudes jumping off this is Man versus truck three two on go I think two of us could do it no come on Crocs or not get in here put them in sport mode okay ready we got a bunch of strong boys here or this is just really weak I don't know no it's the first one all right well let's go see how fast it goes let's turn it on oh we're in kilometers an hour yeah okay and we're off and we're off and we're on the streets in our two thousand dollar dangly truck steering's nice and light and Nimble let me feel oh you ain't kidding yeah [Laughter] well it's been 30 seconds and the people love it a little bump test not bad not bad at all good doing 58 kilometers an hour yeah that's it it's Tapped Out to the floor really yeah this is high gear yep your suspension isn't super soft you can't really lean back yeah um it's not really meant for tall guys like us and you really get the sense that uh the craftsmanship is a little bit suspect yeah there's all sorts of noises and rattles and things banging around how's the brakes they're not bad but they're not good [Music] foreign we just pulled into the Home Depot what are we getting well I think like any standard pickup truck is always measured by a can it tote a sheet of plywood we need a couple sheets of the office yes and this is our new work truck so let's see if we can get it in okay let's go get some plywood where the are we gonna put this thing oh well we're just gonna strap it down I haven't seen it out in the wild yet perfect dude I put it in low gear and it worked okay now hold that perfect okay step one complete that ain't going nowhere dude what that sounds terrible yeah but I don't know what it would be a little off-road section I'm afraid the plywood is good actually yeah I know well you know when there's traffic yeah dude not a problem this is a real Truck Yeah and we did all that with two sheets of four by eight plywood in the back man you know after A Hard Day's Work picking up plywood I could use a donut oh yeah we should take it through the drive-through yeah yeah that was quick yeah can I get a dozen uh sorted please thank you sir here there you go all right Joby well it did some truck stuff we had a lot more fun than I thought we were gonna have yeah it was fun I don't know if this thing was worth eight thousand bucks though I can't think that it is but here's the thing you still want to do some stuff with it so leave some comments down below let us know what should we do with our Chang Lee truck yeah we're all about that jeep life thank you guys so much for watching this and everything else that donut hit like subscribe all that fun stuff bye

Channel: Donut

Views: 9,957,759

Keywords: donut, donut media, cars, up to speed, moneypit, chang li, electric truck, electric cars, ev, EVS, EV Truck, rivian, tesla truck, chinese ev, chinese cars, chinese trucks, hummer ev, EV trucks, import, chinese import, china, china import, import from china, jeremiah burton

Id: yRG0Wai4sR0

Length: 16min 39sec (999 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 04 2023