When I first coined the Awesomely Weird Alibaba Electric Vehicle of the Week column nearly three years ago, this was precisely the type of thing I had in mind. Searching for all of the coolest and wildest electric vehicles from China’s largest online shopping site has finally landed me on the one I think I want the most right now: a chair that also happens to be an electric tank.
Sure, there’s no main cannon. But that’s not really the coolest part of a tank, now is it?
The coolest part of any main battle tank is the fact that it can just roll over a Camry without noticing.
I’m not sure how well this electric tank chair would do against a mid-sized Toyota, but I’d be willing to hop in the driver’s seat (errr, only seat?) to find out!
You may only be cruising along at 5 km/h (3 mph), but you’ll be doing it over anything. This bad boy can traverse sand, snow, mud, gravel, logs, or just about any other obstacle short of a compact car.
At just 200 kg (440 lb), this is the lightest electric tank you can find for off-road adventures. It may not look as olive drab as some other electric tanks we’ve found, but it sure looks ready for some serious shenanigans.
It even sounds fairly well made, including tank treads that are made out of “High molecular weight polyethylene”. I’m not about to bust out my pocket periodic table to fact-check them on that, so we’ll just take it at face value.
The operating parameters include a max climbing slope of 15º, though it is limited to just 10º lateral crawling on slopes. That seems kind of low, but when your head acts as the roll hoop, you’d be best advised not to push the limits.
As far as tech specs, we can see that it runs on a 48V system and includes 2 kW of power. The only thing I can truly compare this vehicle against are electric wheelchairs, which usually come with 250 watts of power. At 2,500 watts, that means this is a veritable monster truck next to a typical wheelchair.
At US $4,900 for an electric tank chair, this is starting to feel a bit rich for my blood. To be honest, my lack of familiarity with the tank chair market means I don’t really know if that’s a good price or not. But I can already see the look my wife is going to give me when she sees the credit card bill, so I’m thinking I should sit this one out… and not on a tank chair.
I’m also not recommending anyone else buy one of these. In fact, I’m explicitly saying you shouldn’t do it.
But if you end up like several of my other readers and ignore my warnings not to buy the weird stuff I dredge up from the corners of the Chinese internet, be sure to let me know how it rides!