A Tennessee-based YouTuber named Michael Pick bought a BMW i3, cut up the carbon fiber body, and turned the vehicle into a miniature pickup truck. The video and social clips are getting lots of attention, largely because of how absurd and fun this whole idea is. As a journalist and car geek, I appreciate Pick’s creativity and his entertaining content; as an engineer and BMW i3 superfan, I feel a little weird.
I’ve been getting messages all weekend about a YouTube video titled “Gas Prices Are Insane, So I Built My Own Electric Truck.” Hosted by a former Lockheed Martin software engineer, the video shows Pick using a sawzall and (mostly) wood to turn a BMW i3 Rex into a small pickup truck.
Have a look (click here if the embed gives you trouble):
Many have wondered what I, perhaps the internet’s biggest celebrator of BMW i3s, think about this video, so let’s break down my thoughts, because they’re complicated.
The i3 Truck Looks Awesome
Just look at these pictures of the finished product. A BMW i3 pickup truck looks cool. And though I think the size of the bed and the lack of payload capacity means this isn’t the most useful truck ever, it does have its plusses: there is no limit to the cargo’s Z-dimension, you can spray this bed out with a hose, there are lots of tie-downs, and access from the sides has been much improved; clearly, there are some legitimate practical benefits.
Doing fun things with cars is what The Autopian is all about, so I’ve got to champion it here. Pick spent lots of time on this project, using lasers to cut a straight line for the bedsides, 3-D printing tidy little caps for the jagged roof where he cut it with a Sawzall, and generally just making this i3 look so cool that everyone on the internet has emailed it my way. Also, check out these amazing donuts:
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I often say that media is an “ideas business.” It’s less important that you can execute an idea (by writing an article or hosting or editing a video) and more important that you come up with it in the first place. The idea for this video was brilliant, and required tremendous creativity. Beyond that, the way Pick has hosted and presented his work is top-notch. It’s clear, fun, and educational. Do I think it being couched as a practical way to get past high fuel prices is a little bit of a stretch? Sure. But it connects the video with what people are currently talking about, and newspeg-based media is just smart.
Beyond that, yes, Pick cut up an i3, but we’ve damaged a Nissan Murano Crosscabriolet on purpose in order to fulfill obligations to a brand sponsor. We know how hard media is, and sometimes it involves doing things to cars that not everyone will love. Speaking of …
But The i3 Nut/Engineer In Me Is Struggling A Bit
OK, this next part is coming from someone who lives and breathes BMW i3s, so in no way is any of this remotely coming from an unbiased source. I am the most biased, and therefore borderline unqualified to write the “right take” on this build. But you asked!
The starting point for this build appears to have been a fairly nice BMW i3 with just 100,000 miles on the clock; yes, it needed a 12-volt battery and a cleaning, but overall the 2017 BMW i3 looks good. The plastic Capparis white body panels look straight and shiny, the coveted “430-style” 20-inch wheels seem to glisten in the sun, and the “Mega World” tan interior cleans up great (even though it’s one of the more basic interiors, especially with the small screen and lack of a Harman Kardon speaker system).
Having owned two 2014 BMW i3s with over 100,000 miles on the clock, I can tell you that i3s hold up remarkably well. 2017s and newer, which received upgraded Samsung SDI batteries rated for at least 4,600 discharge cycles (this could be up to 500,000 miles before reaching 80% state-of-health), do even better.
Anyway, there is part of me that believes this i3 was a fine machine that should be coveted as the Marvel Of Engineering that it is. (“The Carbon Fiber Wonder From Leipzig,” as I like to call it). It could have lived a long life acting as some family’s affordable, efficient, excellent commuter, but instead it received a Sawzall straight through its carbon fiber “Life Module”:
Then some thin steel tubing was bolted and structural-adhesive-d to the high-strength steel roof and to the aluminum floor:
To that steel frame, Pick screwed a large piece of plywood to act as the back of the cab:
Then a wood brace was attached to that board; the brace is meant to hold up the front of the bed:
You can see that, where the rear bench once was, there are a bunch of electronics (infotainment modules, among others). Since those are now outside the cabin instead of in it, Pick wrapped them in plastic:
The image above shows bedliner on the back of the cab. That was also rolled onto the bed itself. Here’s the bed being finished:
And here it is installed onto the truck. You can see the RV rear window and the 3-D printed caps for the back of the roof rails. You can also see the custom taillights that use the i3’s original taillight guts:
It’s a ton of fun, though from an engineering standpoint, a compromise to a brilliant carbon fiber body structure. Luckily, the i3 features a “Drive Module” to which that carbon fiber “Life Module” is attached; this is essentially an aluminum skateboard/frame that should be able to handle a lot of the driving loads. My only concerns, really, are the bending and torsional loads, which a flat skateboard doesn’t really have the moment of inertia to resist, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, under normal conditions, this i3 truck drove just fine.
Crash safety is a whole other thing; in the front and rear, the i3 has these nice big extrusions and castings that help with crash, and from the sides, Pick did keep the B-pillar in place. But chopping off the back of the Life Module definitely led to some safety compromises, as one might have guessed.
There is part of me that thinks perhaps a great hatchback has been turned into a not-great pickup truck, but in any case, you can do whatever you want to a car while it’s under your ownership. Hack it up, jump it, bolt huge turbos to it — there are no rules. Personally, as someone who has bought and sold dozens of cars, I’ve felt that I am just a custodian until the next person comes along to enjoy the experience. Hopefully the compromises associated with turning this i3 into a pickup truck only enhance that experience, long term, and won’t be the beginning of this car’s trip to a junkyard.
i3s these days are in the “danger zone” of their life cycle. I’ve talked about this in the context of Jeep XJs — vehicles get to a point where they’re so cheap that they are abused or used for all sorts of projects (XJs were hacked up and turned into off-road buggies, Nissan S13 became drifters, etc.). This lasts for a good while until the stock of nice, original ones is depleted, and then values increase. It happened with the XJ, and it will eventually happen with i3s. Until then, we all get fun content like this, and like another crazy i3 build that I’m going to write about soon.
Top graphic image: screenshot, Michael Pick/ YouTube
The execution looks fucking terrible
I’m all for this. But I tend to take a more holistic approach. Buy a crash / tree damaged one . It’s cheaper and works already half done. People always say it’s hard because blah blah blah. You are cutting and changing the structure of a vehicle. You don’t have to be bound by much. As long as the frame is straight and lower parts are generally ok or can be fixed with bolt on parts it will be fine. I find my vehicles I’m going to cut from salvage auctions or people selling crashed dramged private party. Trees fall on cars all the time. A lot of times its in the back. It’s totaled good for no one but you can cut that part out and have a truck.
I can see just like anything if you can get a deal on a non crashed damaged ones or they run out then sure. So many people were taking older generally fine maybe Escalades and Yukons cutting them down to make pickups because they were so much cheaper and no one wanted them. Maybe the i3 is there they are in a weird space not easy to sell. Egolfs seem to have cult status. I3, volt, just weird cars to most people.
The “Danger Zone” comes for all cars for sure. The “Redemption Arc” does not; or at least, it’s much flatter for some cars than others. The XJ’s and S13’s of the world were hacked up because they were pretty good performers for relatively cheap, and easy to modify to be even better. Once scarcity started to push prices up and they became icons of their worlds, they’re now desirable as “classics”.
Maybe the
I3i3 will become an icon of the EV commuting world (I have no experience with them), and but I’m fairly sure that world isn’t big enough (or buys highly depreciated cars enough) to change values much in the future.Is that tubing even steel? It looks like aluminum, with self tapping aluminum corners holding it all together. With 2×4’s and plywood.
No way someone survives behind rear ended in this thing.
I watched that guy yesterday. I was unimpressed.
First, I’ll skip to the end. It seems to me that he absolutely has to include some kind of a holdout gun feature in every car video. You get the feeling that he’s lowkey dying for the opportunity to kill someone.
Second, the bed is unimpressive. The woodworking is worse – pocket screws? In a loadbearing construction? Yeah: no. Take it from this woodworker: no.
Gotta remove the entire bed to change the oil. I’m sure there are better ways to go about this thing. Kei trucks give you a little hatch in the bed.
Points for getting around the CANbus BS flipping out when the lights aren’t right. Solution: the original lights are actually there. I’m not a fan of the relatively undifferentiated appearance post-project, but they’re there and they work so: points.
Were it up to me – and my budget, which has its own opinion on what I can and cannot do – I’d sacrifice another REX to provide its entire opera door section. Leave the original opera door section complete, and don’t damage the glass above it. Cut the second REX apart and de-roof it to graft on immediately behind the original opera door. The resulting bed is materially longer, you retain the rear side windows and, indeed, the back doors and who knows, maybe you gain room to shove the battery from the second REX into the newly enlarged under-bed space to yield a mini-truck with hugely increased range in addition to the range extender feature.
And leave the gun off.
Not going to watch anything with an AI thumbnail (the “before” pic), even though he seems to have his cap on the right way around some of the time, and he might not even say “whatsupguys” (not going to find out…)
He doesn’t. He ain’t Chrisfix.
Nice to know it’s not just me when it comes to AI thumbnail videos. My default move now is to mark each as “don’t recommend channel” any time I see one.
I hate most of the thumbnail stuff for YouTube. The deceptive thumbnails, the ones with a massively overdone reaction shot, and the ones that take the only interesting frame in the whole video were bad enough before AI started making everything worse.
I have such a visceral reaction to the reaction shot thumbnails that I almost skipped this article despite having been waiting for David’s reaction to this build (never watched the video, but saw stills several places). If the Autopian ever starts using AI thumbnails, I’m out.
Been waiting for y’all to pick up on this story. I hadn’t thought about this perspective that you presented here David.
The only thing I wish is that there was a way for the “coach” door openings to still work and somehow give you access to the bed or some storage.
I’m just waiting for the companion piece from the hardest-core Murano Cross Cab enthusiast in the world, bemoaning the damage done in the name of clicks on this site.
More seriously, this project to me is functionally the same as carving up a 1st gen Leaf or an iMiev. A small unpopular EV changed into something mildly interesting. Don’t ban me, DT!
Well, a 1st gen Leaf and iMiev are not useful cars. A 2017 i3 could be someone’s daily for the next 15 years or so. But yeah, I mentioned the Murano in the piece for that reason; stunts are fun, and they bring clicks!
I’m aware I’m stepping further into your turf here, but:
I actually think the compromises required to live with an i3 daily are not much different in kind than living with a short range small EV, and it takes a unique sort of person or a multiple vehicle household to truly own either (probably why they weren’t and aren’t super popular)
It’s not as if the i3 is built for road tripping either. Isn’t the fuel capacity like 2 gallons? I understand that it gives some wiggle room, but you still have to have another vehicle if you’re leaving a large, dense city, if you’re carrying people and cargo regularly, etc.
Like extra 50 kWh worth of battery capacity the average EV owner lugs around, that range extender is all about peace-of-mind, which is why the Rexes are worth more.
My 1st gen leaf is amazing useful. It has about 40 miles of range but the nearest shops are only 7 mile away, so is the tip and the log place/ birdfood place. All downhill, so by the time I get to the huge metropolis the car shows more range than it did when I set off. With the back seats folded it can carry loads of logs and bird seed and people food. When back home it shows twenty four miles. It was very very cheap (£0) and I charge it from an extension lead. The electrons come from the solar panels and the turbines. Very niche but very useful.
DT, I know that you adore the i3, but I genuinely do not see a world in which the i3 becomes a highly valuable collector car, and absolutely not one in which 6-figure mileage examples are worth serious money. As with the i8, BMW dealerships will begin to refuse to service them, critical parts will go NLA, and as the batteries begin to weaken further, nobody will be going out of their way to spend 15-20k on a car with a weak range, strange styling, and a range under 100 miles.
This will be even more true as model 3’s and other much more mass-produced EVs with mid-200s mile ranges become 4-figure used cars. Put another way, and I know this may sound harsh, but the i3 will have the same utility and desirability as many 80’s Malaise cars, where nice ones may be rare, but they’re still worth nearly nothing because they just don’t do anything well enough to justify their price. I think the i3 is this generations V12 Jag XJS, expensive, advanced, intriguing in some way, but ultimately not worth much due to the pitfalls.
Well, the Jaguar XJS was an unreliable heap whereas the i3 is possibly the most reliable BMW ever. In 20 years, when the 2017+ batteries start to bring range below ~60 miles, it’ll be interesting to see what happens with them.
As far as monetary value, I don’t really care too much about that. A car’s price isn’t what gives it value in my eyes.
Sure, it was a rough connection at best, but my point was meant to be more at the general long term values and desirability of the car. They have lots of i3-specific components and BMW is known to abandon parts support for niche models. Not to mention the unique tire size which is far from guaranteed to be available in the future. Couple that with undeniably limited utility due to low range, not particularly sporting intent, and rapid advances in EV tech, and I think comparing it to the XJ isn’t valid.
The XJ has parts support like you wouldn’t believe due to simplicity and longevity, real capability off road or as a daily, etc. To say that the value rise of the i3 “will eventually happen” like with the XJ I think is incorrect. Every funky car will have it’s diehards long term keeping them alive, and I sincerely hope that goes for the i3. But for long term values and support, I think the i3 is more 80’s Charger Shelby Turbo than it is XJ Cherokee or modern Challenger.
All good points, but I think it’s fine to say that the value will rise eventually. As supply of good ones drop, value increases — that applies to lots of cars, especially ones with cult followings. (I saw that with my own Gold i3).
The point with the XJ is that its value was basically zero; the i3 is approaching that, and it’ll go up as they disappear.
The truck definitely looks better than the original i3 did. The “before” photo showed an ugly little car.
You’re entitled to your opinion.