That $1,700 Alibaba electric Jeep? Someone bought it, and here’s what showed up
If you haven’t already had the pleasure of discovering it, I write a fun column called the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week. Each week I go spelunking into the caverns of the Alibaba electric vehicle catalog and find something awesome, weird, and usually surprisingly low-cost to share with the world. I’ve wanted to purchase a lot of these myself, and I even did pull the trigger on an electric pickup truck recently. But it turns out that I’m not the only one who has been bitten by the weird Alibaba EV bug – as an Electrek reader shared with us his experience purchasing the $1,700 electric mini-Jeep I found earlier this year.
This isn’t some electric Powerwheels toy – it can fit a couple of adults shoulder to shoulder. It’s more closely comparable to a golf cart in size and power, yet reaches a decent speed of 25 mph (40 km/h).
It’s also much cheaper than golf carts, which cost around $7,000 in the US.
Amazingly, this mini-Jeep is quite affordably priced at a mere $1,280.
But based on my conversations earlier this year with the Chinese factory, the final price shipped to a US port seemed to put it closer to $1,700.
That’s actually pretty close to what Electrek reader Kyle Day found when he set out to order his own electric Jeep.
He originally told me several months ago that he planned to buy one and have it sent to the US. I offered him my customs broker’s contact info (I have a problem and it’s called “buying too much weird stuff from overseas”) and I asked him to keep me updated about how the process went.
The whole exercise was fairly new to Kyle, but ultimately he made it through the purchase, importation, customs clearance, and delivery steps to receive his very own electric mini Jeep. But the adventure wasn’t over there – because it turns out that getting the Jeep assembled was a bit more of a task than any of us had expected.
Read on for my interview with Kyle and to live out his experience vicariously. And also be sure to check out his advice at the end for anyone planning to buy their own electric vehicle from Alibaba.
via electrek.co
