Weird Alibaba: You can buy your own electric school bus from China
In yet another entry of the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week that takes us into new territory, this week it’s time to grab your backpack and lunch money for your first day of school. Or at least your first day out and about on a new electric school bus. That’s right, this awesome electric school bus could be yours… if you want to bring it over from China.
Electric school buses aren’t unique; we’re starting to see more and more of them in North America. But normally you have to be a kid to ride in one, which just seems unfair to me.
Fortunately the friendly engineers behind the fun electric vehicles we often dredge up from the depths of Alibaba’s online shopping catalog have found a solution: selling electric school buses directly to commoners like you and me!
While this isn’t your typical stretched-out Blue Bird school bus, this stubbier model is no slouch, either. It can reach a top speed of between 111 to 130 km/h (69 to 81 mph)! If it’s fast enough to take a bunch of glue eaters on the highway to the local science museum field trip, it’s fast enough for pretty much anything we could want to do with it.
At this point you may be wondering just what I would do with my own electric school bus. Well, not pick up snot-nosed kids for school, that’s for sure! Instead, think of all the cool things this bus could be turned into. You could have your own party bus, or convert it into an awesome electric RV or camper van. At $50,000, it’s not exactly an impulse purchase. But then again, electric buses typically cost several times as much, so maybe it is a deal after all!
School buses actually offer a unique and cost-effective opportunity for transformation into fully functional campers. It takes solid construction to get parents to trust these vehicles with their precious little crumb crunchers. The rugged design, spacious interiors, and sturdy frames of school buses make them great for retrofitting to create comfortable and personalized mobile living spaces.
You can rip out the original seating previously used by all those little ankle biters and then creatively repurpose the generous square footage. The sky is the limit when it comes to designing custom layouts for sleeping quarters, kitchens, bathrooms, and lounging areas. And since this bus starts life as an electric vehicle, it’s even better for a green conversion with a roof full of solar panels and a hidden composting toilet in a cabinet.
With all of the electric school buses starting to enter operation with actual crib lizards en route to school, a couple decades from now there will surely be a cottage industry of repurposing used electric school buses. But if you don’t want to wait that long, and don’t mind a hood full of Mandarin characters, then perhaps ordering a Chinese electric school bus is for you!
Okay, let’s end on a serious note: Please don’t buy this thing. It’s fun to imagine getting a bargain basement electric bus, but this ordeal is surely rife with problems.
As I’ve learned from my own Chinese EV imports, you often don’t get exactly what you expect and it will always cost significantly more than you budgeted. So don’t imitate my fellow foolish readers and buy weird things from halfway around the world. Let’s just all enjoy the magic of Alibaba window shopping!
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If you’ve ever wondered what happens when you combine a fruit cart, a cargo bike, and a Piaggio Ape all in one vehicle, now you’ve got your answer. I submit, for your approval, this week’s feature for the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column – and it’s a beautiful doozie.
Feast your eyes on this salad slinging, coleslaw cruising, tuber taxiing produce chariot!
I think this electric vegetable trike might finally scratch the itch long felt by many of my readers. It seems every time I cover an electric trike, even the really cool ones, I always get commenters poo-poo-ing it for having two wheels in the rear instead of two wheels in the front. Well, here you go, folks!
Designed with two front wheels for maximum stability, this trike keeps your cucumbers in check through every corner. Because trust me, you don’t want to hit a pothole and suddenly be juggling peaches like you’re in Cirque du Soleil: Farmers Market Edition.
To avoid the extra cost of designing a linked steering system for a pair of front wheels, the engineers who brought this salad shuttle to life simply side-stepped that complexity altogether by steering the entire fixed front end. I’ve got articulating electric tractors that steer like this, and so if it works for a several-ton work machine, it should work for a couple hundred pounds of cargo bike.
Featuring a giant cargo bed up front with four cascading fruit baskets set up for roadside sales, this cargo bike is something of a blank slate. Sure, you could monetize grandma’s vegetable garden, or you could fill it with your own ideas and concoctions. Our exceedingly talented graphics wizard sees it as the perfect coffee and pastry e-bike for my new startup, The Handlebarista, and I’m not one to argue. Basically, the sky is the limit with a blank slate bike like this!
Sure, the quality doesn’t quite match something like a fancy Tern cargo bike. The rim brakes aren’t exactly confidence-inspiring, but at least there are three of them. And if they should all give out, or just not quite slow you down enough to avoid that quickly approaching brick wall, then at least you’ve got a couple hundred pounds of tomatoes as a tasty crumple zone.
The electrical system does seem a bit underpowered. With a 36V battery and a 250W motor, I don’t know if one-third of a horsepower is enough to haul a full load to the local farmer’s market. But I guess if the weight is a bit much for the little motor, you could always do some snacking along the way. On the other hand, all the pictures seem to show a non-electric version. So if this cart is presumably mobile on pedal power alone, then that extra motor assist, however small, is going to feel like a very welcome guest.
The $950 price is presumably for the electric version, since that’s what’s in the title of the listing, though I wouldn’t get too excited just yet. I’ve bought a LOT of stuff on Alibaba, including many electric vehicles, and the too-good-to-be-true price is always exactly that. In my experience, you can multiply the Alibaba price by 3-4x to get the actual landed price for things like these. Even so, $3,000-$4,000 wouldn’t be a terrible price, considering a lot of electric trikes stateside already cost that much and don’t even come with a quad-set of vegetable baskets on board!
I should also put my normal caveat in here about not actually buying one of these. Please, please don’t try to buy one of these awesome cargo e-trikes. This is a silly, tongue-in-cheek weekend column where I scour the ever-entertaining underbelly of China’s massive e-commerce site Alibaba in search of fun, quirky, and just plain awesomely weird electric vehicles. While I’ve successfully bought several fun things on the platform, I’ve also gotten scammed more than once, so this is not for the timid or the tight-budgeted among us.
That isn’t to say that some of my more stubborn readers haven’t followed in my footsteps before, ignoring my advice and setting out on their own wild journey. But please don’t be the one who risks it all and gets nothing in return. Don’t say I didn’t warn you; this is the warning.
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Environment
Podcast: Trump/GOP go after EV/solar, Tesla, Ford, GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more
In the Electrek Podcast, we discuss the most popular news in the world of sustainable transport and energy. In this week’s episode, we discuss Trump’s Big Beautiful bill becoming law and going after EVs and solar, Tesla, Ford, and GM EV sales, Electrek Formula Sun, and more
Today’s episode is brought to you by Bosch Mobility Aftermarket—A global leader and trusted provider of automotive aftermarket parts. To celebrate Amazon Prime Day July 8th through 11th, Bosch Mobility is offering exclusive savings on must-have auto parts and tools. Learn more here.
The show is live every Friday at 4 p.m. ET on Electrek’s YouTube channel.
As a reminder, we’ll have an accompanying post, like this one, on the site with an embedded link to the live stream. Head to the YouTube channel to get your questions and comments in.
After the show ends at around 5 p.m. ET, the video will be archived on YouTube and the audio on all your favorite podcast apps:
We now have a Patreon if you want to help us avoid more ads and invest more in our content. We have some awesome gifts for our Patreons and more coming.
Here are a few of the articles that we will discuss during the podcast:
- Electrek FSGP 2025: New teams, new cars, same solar spirit
- Congress votes to send 2 million US jobs to China, increase deficit, energy costs
- Tesla (TSLA) confirms 384,000 deliveries in Q2 2025, right on expectations
- Tesla prototype sparks speculation: a Model Y, maybe slightly smaller
- Tesla launches Oasis Supercharger with solar farm and off-grid batteries
- Tesla unveils its LFP battery factory, claims it’s almost ready
- Here’s why Ford’s electric vehicle sales crashed by nearly a third in Q2
- The Chevy Equinox EV is GM’s breakout star, but that’s not the only surprise
- Xpeng launches G7, a new Tesla Model Y competitor for just $27,000
Here’s the live stream for today’s episode starting at 4:00 p.m. ET (or the video after 5 p.m. ET:
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