DIY Electric Cybercar — Long Lost Tesla Cybertruck Ancestor?
Credit to Author: Zachary Shahan| Date: Thu, 26 Dec 2019 04:01:00 +0000
Published on December 25th, 2019 | by Zachary Shahan
December 25th, 2019 by Zachary Shahan
A little while after the Tesla Cybertruck came out, I remembered an electric car from much earlier that I had ridden in once. It was a handmade, DIY electric car that was clearly unique, but it now seems like a long lost ancestor of Tesla’s Cybertruck.
Photos by Zach Shahan | CleanTechnica ()
In fact, this was one of the first electric cars I ever rode in. The pictures and video below are from 2012. Though, as you can see from the car’s name, Electra 2, it wasn’t the creator’s first car. The creator of the car was 75 years old at the time and had been driving DIY electric cars around Ukraine for years. He had apparently been an accomplished engineer in the aviation industry. Fitting, since the car looks to me like something that could be out of a Star Wars film.
For some historical perspective, Tesla delivered a worldwide total of 5,500 cars in the quarter in which I rode in this “Cybercar.” This was around the time Tesla delivery specialists were trying to build their own DIY car trailers, with little relevant experience, to get cars to customers, and Florida was still a new, virgin, nearly unexplored Tesla market. The Tesla Fremont factory was mostly empty. There was no such thing as Tesla Autopilot and certainly no Cybertruck on the horizon. My, how things change in 7 years!
Learn a little more about this Ukrainian handmade electric car in the videos below. Special thanks to Alternativa for organizing the test drive event in which I met this car and the man behind it, and special thanks to and , who brought me to Ukraine in 2012 (including Crimea right before it was invaded by Russia).
No, this is no 2020 Cybertruck, but it is certainly a cool, badass electric vehicle.
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Zachary Shahan is tryin’ to help society help itself one word at a time. He spends most of his time here on CleanTechnica as its director and chief editor. He’s also the CEO of Important Media. Zach is recognized globally as an electric vehicle, solar energy, and energy storage expert. He has presented about cleantech at conferences in India, the UAE, Ukraine, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, the USA, Canada, and Curaçao. Zach has long-term investments in Tesla [TSLA] — after years of covering solar and EVs, he simply has a lot of faith in this company and feels like it is a good cleantech company to invest in. But he offers no investment advice and does not recommend investing in Tesla or any other company.