How my love of weird electric vehicles landed me on 100 million Chinese TVs
A fascination with electric vehicles isn’t anything new. These days, everyone and their brother seems to have an EV. But I’m not one of the “normal” electric vehicle enthusiasts. I’m drawn to the more oddball designs. And that zeal has seen me end up in some weird places. Most recently, it had me end up on a hundred million TV screens across China.
In addition to my day job/passion of being one of the most prolific propagators of electric bike news and reviews on the internet, I moonlight as a broader lover of weird Chinese electric vehicles. You may have even seen my weekly column, the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week.
It mostly started as a lark, the inevitable result of my publisher and I trying to best each other at who could find the weirdest cars on China’s massive shopping website, Alibaba.
Inevitably, they’re almost all electric due to the simple fact that China has quietly led the world in the development and adoption of EVs. Their range of EVs, both the realistic and the fanciful, is nothing short of awe-inspiring. Norway may lead the world in adopting electric vehicles, but frankly, anyone can buy an EV. It’s China that leads the world in designing and producing them.
So there we were, my publisher and I chuckling at just how many fun and sometimes bizarre EVs we could find that were produced in China.
I’d toss him an electric replica of a horseless carriage that looked like it belonged in a live-action Cinderella movie. He’d follow up with an electric mini-truck with fold-out solar panel wings. I’d try to top it with a food truck built on the back of an electric bicycle.
After discovering just how deep the rabbit hole to China went, I was hooked. And I had a sneaky suspicion that the rest of the world just might be as interested in the madness as me.
It became a recurring theme each week in the column. And having our talented graphics guy Michael Bower magically transplant me into every vehicle each week certainly helped.
Over the last few years of hunting down the weirdest electric vehicles in the world, I’ve come across some real doozies. The three-wheeled electric RV was a top contender for a while, though who could pass up your own fully functional electric submarine for exploring the ocean’s depths? And where would we be as a society without the world’s tiniest electric police car?
But I also soon discovered something interesting. In addition to super-weird offerings on Alibaba, I was also finding electric vehicles that I actually wished I could own.
How could I resist a bare-bones electric snowmobile or a one-seater speedboat?
When I eventually came across a $2,000 electric mini-truck that looked like a knock-off Ford F-150 that took an unintended trip through the washing machine and dryer, that’s when things changed. It went from “Man, it’d be funny to buy one of these…” to “Uh oh, I think I need to buy this thing.”
I spent months working out the details with the Chinese factory, finding the right customs brokers, getting the paperwork done, and then eventually getting the mini-truck on a boat and headed to the US.
After what felt like an eternity, it finally arrived. And I was immediately in love. What was unobtainable in the US was suddenly driving around my parent’s ranch in Florida. I had an electric mini-truck, complete with air-conditioning and a hydraulic dump bed, that had traveled halfway around the world from China to my fingertips. I was giddy.
And as it would turn out, I wasn’t done. In fact, I was just getting started.
The more I found weird electric vehicles from China, the more I wanted to add to my collection.
Unfortunately, a little thing called economics (or more colloquially known as convincing one’s wife that purchasing something stupid is actually a great idea) made this endeavor more difficult. There was a lot of weird stuff out there, but I had to be picky. I couldn’t afford not to. So I focused on the stuff that seemed the most useful to me.
That’s how just a year later I wound up with a five-seater electric boat slowly puttering its way around the local lake. And more recently, I became the proud new owner of electric construction equipment, including an electric mini-excavator and an electric loader.
Along the way, people started to take notice. I made videos of my escapades, and they began going viral. That electric boat found over 3 million views on YouTube. And remember my electric mini-truck from above? Over 10 million views. I wasn’t the only one enjoying these things anymore.
In fact, the news had gone full circle, landing back in China. A maker of electric micro-cars in China (known locally as “happy grandpas” based on their typical users) wanted me to check out their newest model and sent one to me for an unboxing.
A few months later there was a massive wooden crate in my family’s driveway. It was wild.
The word continued to spread. One morning, I awoke to an email from someone saying they represented a news channel in China, something called “CCTV”, and asked if they could do a story on me. The name didn’t mean much to me, so I asked a Chinese friend of mine if they had heard of the news station. “That’s… the biggest channel in the country,” he said. “You should do it.”
As it turns out based on what Wikipedia told me, China Central Television, or CCTV, claims to have a regular viewership of over 500 million people. Those are the figures from their own survey, but I believe it. Why? Because all local news stations in China are required to run CCTV’s daily news broadcasts in addition to their own programming. That’s state media, for you.
Any potential issues with that aside (and there are many), I was curious to see what Chinese state media would think of me, a Westerner who has a weird fixation with procuring odd Chinese vehicles.
As someone who has once or twice been referred to as a journalist himself, I figured there’d soon be an interview. They’d ask me a few questions. Maybe I’d share some fun stories. We’d all crack a fortune cookie and laugh about my quirky antics.
Nope.
Apparently, they had all they needed from my YouTube videos. The exact story wasn’t important, not when they could read between the lines.
A week or so later, there was my goofy face smiling out to half a billion charmingly confused Chinese people.
The news show had basically just taken several of my YouTube videos, cut out a few select clips of me showing off the features of my electric boat, then added some voiceover.
With the help of a translator app and a friend who speaks Mandarin, I was able to piece the story together.
Basically, they made a cute little puff piece about Chinese products being bought by randos on the internet. Case-in-point was me and my electric boat, to which the adorable presenter directed the audience’s attention.
They showed me unboxing my boat, followed by demonstrating its features and testing it out along with my dad in the local lake.
It was a surreal experience, watching myself show off my electric boat and other electric mini-vehicles on Chinese state media. To be fair, they actually put me on CCTV2, a more business/economics-focused sub-channel. But it’s not like we’re talking ESPN8 “The Ocho” here – I still got some prime-time placement.
And while part of me feels like I was a bit useful for borderline propaganda, there’s no denying the fact that everything I said about these products, and especially that boat, was true. I’d never be able to find a $1,000 fiberglass electric boat like this in the US, and the one I received was quite well manufactured. So if Chinese state media is going to use me to show their own citizens that a local factory built a good boat, then… they’re basically correct.
I even had the chance to video chat with the nice guy who runs the factory and who showed me my boat during the production process. As much as the naysayers would like to imagine a child labor sweatshop, that just wasn’t the case. I was watching skilled boatbuilders building fiberglass and aluminum boats. In fact, on one day that I chatted with him, he explained that the factory was mostly empty because it was so hot that day that he sent the workers home. It was the literal antithesis of a sweatshop.
That’s not to ignore a long list of other problems in the country, but building electric boats isn’t one of them.
So in a nutshell, that’s how I ended up on Chinese state TV. I enjoy strange electric vehicles, and I’ve since followed several of them all the way to the source. That strange journey resulted in me ending up with a weird collection of EVs that eventually caught the attention of the national TV station in China.
Ever since, I take it day by day. I try not to let my newfound 1 minute and 46 seconds of fame and glory go to my head. But some days it’s difficult not to. I imagine by this time next year, I’ll surely be plastered all over kids’ lunch boxes in China, second in popularity only to the great panda. There are rumors that I’ll be included at the next five-year congress meeting. They may even make a national holiday for me.
And it’s true, they may not truly get me or my weird vehicles back here in the West. But I at least hope that somewhere, when someone worriedly asks “What’s the deal with that guy?”, the response will be something to the effect of “I don’t know. I guess he’s big in China?”
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HAWESVILLE, KY – May 10
Plant workers drive along an aluminum potline at Century Aluminum Company’s Hawesville plant in Hawesville, Ky. on Wednesday, May 10, 2017. (Photo by Luke Sharrett /For The Washington Post via Getty Images)
Aluminum
The Washington Post | The Washington Post | Getty Images
Sweeping tariffs on imported aluminum imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump are succeeding in reshaping global trade flows and inflating costs for American consumers, but are falling short of their primary goal: to revive domestic aluminum production.
Instead, rising costs, particularly skyrocketing electricity prices in the U.S. relative to global competitors, are leading to smelter closures rather than restarts.
The impact of aluminum tariffs at 25% is starkly visible in the physical aluminum market. While benchmark aluminum prices on the London Metal Exchange provide a global reference, the actual cost of acquiring the metal involves regional delivery premiums.
This premium now largely reflects the tariff cost itself.
In stark contrast, European premiums were noted by JPMorgan analysts as being over 30% lower year-to-date, creating a significant divergence driven directly by U.S. trade policy.
This cost will ultimately be borne by downstream users, according to Trond Olaf Christophersen, the chief financial officer of Norway-based Hydro, one of the world’s largest aluminum producers. The company was formerly known as Norsk Hydro.
“It’s very likely that this will end up as higher prices for U.S. consumers,” Christophersen told CNBC, noting the tariff cost is a “pass-through.” Shares of Hydro have collapsed by around 17% since tariffs were imposed.
The downstream impact of the tariffs is already being felt by Thule Group, a Hydro customer that makes cargo boxes fitted atop cars. The company said it’ll raise prices by about 10% even though it manufactures the majority of the goods sold in the U.S locally, as prices of raw materials, such as steel and aluminum, have shot up.
But while tariffs are effectively leading to prices rise in the U.S., they haven’t spurred a revival in domestic smelting, the energy-intensive process of producing primary aluminum.
The primary barrier remains the lack of access to competitively priced, long-term power, according to the industry.
“Energy costs are a significant factor in the overall production cost of a smelter,” said Ami Shivkar, principal analyst of aluminum markets at analytics firm Wood Mackenzie. “High energy costs plague the US aluminium industry, forcing cutbacks and closures.”
“Canadian, Norwegian, and Middle Eastern aluminium smelters typically secure long-term energy contracts or operate captive power generation facilities. US smelter capacity, however, largely relies on short-term power contracts, placing it at a disadvantage,” Shivkar added, noting that energy costs for U.S. aluminum smelters were about $550 per tonne compared to $290 per tonne for Canadian smelters.
Recent events involving major U.S. producers underscore this power vulnerability.
In March 2023, Alcoa Corp announced the permanent closure of its 279,000 metric ton Intalco smelter, which had been idle since 2020. Alcoa said that the facility “cannot be competitive for the long-term,” partly because it “lacks access to competitively priced power.”
Similarly, in June 2022, Century Aluminum, the largest U.S. primary aluminum producer, was forced to temporarily idle its massive Hawesville, Kentucky smelter – North America’s largest producer of military-grade aluminum – citing a “direct result of skyrocketing energy costs.”
Century stated the power cost required to run the facility had “more than tripled the historical average in a very short period,” necessitating a curtailment expected to last nine to twelve months until prices normalized.
The industry has also not had a respite as demand for electricity from non-industrial sources has risen in recent years.
Hydro’s Christophersen pointed to the artificial intelligence boom and the proliferation of data centers as new competitors for power. He suggested that new energy production capacity in the U.S., from nuclear, wind or solar, is being rapidly consumed by the tech sector.
“The tech sector, they have a much higher ability to pay than the aluminium industry,” he said, noting the high double-digit margins of the tech sector compared to the often low single-digit margins at aluminum producers. Hydro reported an 8.3% profit margin in the first quarter of 2025, an increase from the 3.5% it reported for the previous quarter, according to Factset data.
“Our view, and for us to build a smelter [in the U.S.], we would need cheap power. We don’t see the possibility in the current market to get that,” the CFO added. “The lack of competitive power is the reason why we don’t think that would be interesting for us.”
While failing to ignite domestic primary production, the tariffs are undeniably causing what Christophersen termed a “reshuffling of trade flows.”
When U.S. market access becomes more costly or restricted, metal flows to other destinations.
Christophersen described a brief period when exceptionally high U.S. tariffs on Canadian aluminum — 25% additional tariffs on top of the aluminum-specific tariffs — made exporting to Europe temporarily more attractive for Canadian producers. Consequently, more European metals would have made their way into the U.S. market to make up for the demand gap vacated by Canadian aluminum.
The price impact has even extended to domestic scrap metal prices, which have adjusted upwards in line with the tariff-inflated Midwest premium.
Hydro, also the world’s largest aluminum extruder, utilizes both domestic scrap and imported Canadian primary metal in its U.S. operations. The company makes products such as window frames and facades in the country through extrusion, which is the process of pushing aluminum through a die to create a specific shape.
“We are buying U.S. scrap [aluminium]. A local raw material. But still, the scrap prices now include, indirectly, the tariff cost,” Christophersen explained. “We pay the tariff cost in reality, because the scrap price adjusts to the Midwest premium.”
“We are paying the tariff cost, but we quickly pass it on, so it’s exactly the same [for us],” he added.
RBC Capital Markets analysts confirmed this pass-through mechanism for Hydro’s extrusions business, saying “typically higher LME prices and premiums will be passed onto the customer.”
This pass-through has occurred amid broader market headwinds, particularly downstream among Hydro’s customers.
RBC highlighted the “weak spot remains the extrusion divisions” in Hydro’s recent results and noted a guidance downgrade, reflecting sluggish demand in sectors like building and construction.
— CNBC’s Greg Kennedy contributed reporting.
Danish energy giant Ørsted has canceled plans for the Hornsea 4 offshore wind farm, dealing a major blow to the UK’s renewable energy ambitions.
Hornsea 4, at a massive 2.4 gigawatts (GW), would have become one of the largest offshore wind farms in the world, generating enough clean electricity to power over 1 million UK homes. But Ørsted announced that it’s abandoning the project “in its current form.”
“The adverse macroeconomic developments, continued supply chain challenges, and increased execution, market, and operational risks have eroded the value creation,” said Rasmus Errboe, group president and CEO of Ørsted.
Reuters reported that Ørsted’s cancellation of Hornsea 4 would result in a projected loss of up to 5.5 billion Danish crowns ($837.85 million) in breakaway fees and asset write-downs. The company’s market value has declined by 80% since its peak in 2021.
The cancellation highlights significant challenges currently facing offshore wind development in Europe, particularly in the UK. The combination of higher material costs, inflation, and global financial instability has made large-scale renewable projects increasingly difficult to finance and complete.
Ørsted’s decision is a significant setback to the UK’s energy transition goals. The UK currently has around 15 GW of offshore wind, and Hornsea 4’s size would have provided almost 7% of the additional capacity needed for the UK’s 50 GW by 2030 target, according to The Times. Losing this immense project off the Yorkshire coast could hamper the UK’s pace of reducing dependency on fossil fuels, especially amid volatile global energy markets.
The UK government reiterated its commitment to renewable energy, promising to work closely with industry leaders to overcome financial and logistical hurdles. Energy Secretary Ed Miliband told reporters in Norway that the UK is “still committed to working with Orsted to seek to make Hornsea 4 happen by 2030.”
Ørsted says it remains committed to its other UK-based projects, including the Hornsea 3 wind farm, which is expected to generate around 2.9 GW once completed at the end of 2027. Despite the challenges, the company emphasized its ongoing commitment to the British renewable market, pointing to the critical need for policy support and economic stability to ensure future developments.
Yet, the cancellation of Hornsea 4 demonstrates that even flagship renewable projects are vulnerable in the face of economic pressures and global uncertainties, which have been heightened under the Trump administration in the US.
Read more: The world’s single-largest wind farm gets the green light
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The Tesla Roadster appears to be quietly disappearing after years of delay. is it ever going to be made?
I may have jinxed it with Betteridge’s Law of Headlines, which suggests any headline ending in a question mark can be answered with “no.”
The prototype for the next-generation Tesla Roadster was first unveiled in 2017, and it was supposed to come into production in 2020, but it has been delayed every year since then.
It was supposed to get 620 miles (1,000 km) of range and accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds.
It has become a sort of running joke, and there are doubts that it will ever come to market despite Tesla’s promise of dozens of free new Roadsters to Tesla owners who participated in its referral program years ago.
Tesla uses the promise of free Roadsters to help generate billions of dollars worth of sales, which Tesla owners delivered, but the automaker never delivered on its part of the agreement.
Furthermore, many people placed deposits ranging from $50,000 to $250,000 to reserve the vehicle, which was supposed to hit the market 5 years ago.
The official timelines from Tesla are pretty useless at this point since they haven’t stuck to any of them, but the latest official one dates back to July 2024 when CEO Elon Musk said this:
“With respect to Roadster, we’ve completed most of the engineering. And I think there’s still some upgrades we want to make to it, but we expect to be in production with Roadster next year. It will be something special.”
He said that Tesla had completed “most of the engineering”, but he initially said the engineering would be done in 2021 and that was already 3 years after the prototype was unveiled and a year after it was supposed to be in production:
Musk commented on the Roadster again in October 2024, but he didn’t reiterate the 2025 timeline. Instead, he called the new Roadster “the cherry on the icing on the cake.”
Tesla’s leadership has been virtually silent about the new Roadster since. Two Tesla executives even had to be reminded about the Roadster by Jay Leno after they “forgot” about it when listing upcoming new Tesla vehicles with tri-motor powertrain.
There was one small update about the Roadster in Tesla’s financial results last month.
The automaker has a table of all its vehicle production, and the Roadster was updated from “in development” to “design development” in the table:
It’s not clear if that’s progress or Tesla is just rephrasing it. Either way, it is not “construction”, which makes it unlikely that the Roadster is going into production this year.
If ever…
Electrek’s Take
It looks like Tesla owes about 80 Tesla Roadsters for free to Tesla owners who referred purchases, and it owes significant discounts on hundreds of units.
It’s hard for me to believe that Tesla is not delivering the new Roadster because the vehicle program would start about $100 million in the red, but at this point, I have no idea. It very well might be the reason.
However, I think it’s more likely that Tesla is just terrible at bringing multiple vehicle programs to market simultaneously. Case in point: it launched a single new vehicle in the last five years.
At this point, I think it’s more likely that the Roadster will never happen. It will join other Tesla products like the Cybertruck Range Extender.
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