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Michael Pick Cut Apart a High-Mileage BMW i3's Carbon-Fiber Body to Build the Small Electric Pickup Nobody Sells, on a Budget of Under $10,000
A YouTuber bought a 2017 BMW i3 with over 100,000 miles sight unseen at an online auction, then rebuilt its back half into a pickup bed with a new rear cab, a 12.3-inch CarPlay screen and a running total of every dollar.
The question Pick put at the top of his video description is blunt: “Do you really need to spend $40,000 on an electric pickup truck?” His answer started with a 2017 i3 REx with over 100,000 miles on it, bought “sight unseen.”
Then came the saw. The i3 was never a normal car to cut into. BMW built it as “a drive module as an aluminium chassis” with “a passenger cell made of carbon fibre-reinforced plastic (CFRP) called the life module,” the company said when production ended in 2022. Take the back off a tub like that and something has to hold the rest together, so Pick designed and reinforced a custom rear cab structure, built the bed from scratch, added a rear window and weatherproofed the cab.
The cab got upgrades a 2017 i3 never had: a 12.3-inch Apple CarPlay screen in place of the factory infotainment, 3D-printed custom parts, repairs to what the previous owner neglected, and modified controls for the range extender. He also promises “a few features BMW would NEVER offer from the factory.”
Play the video on YouTubeThe whole build runs 42 minutes and went up on October 24. “Instead of waiting for manufacturers to build something affordable, I decided to take matters into my own hands,” he writes. His channel’s own pitch is “builds, engineering projects, and questionable financial decisions,” and the open item is whether the running total really stays under five digits once the truck starts doing truck jobs.
The cheap electric truck is shaping up to come from two directions at once. A startup can sell a stripped-down two-seater for twenty-five grand, and a person with a saw, a resin printer and a used i3 can try to build one for under ten. If the second number holds up, expect more of the roughly 250,000 i3s out there to lose their back seats, and expect the people who buy them to ask carmakers why the small electric pickup had to be homemade. What the first winter of road salt and rain does to a hand-sealed cab is the next test, and nobody has filmed that yet.