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 (CC BY-SA license)
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 greencubator and Activ Solar, 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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