The Driven/Bridie Schmidt: Engineer turns her Model 3 into world’s first Tesla electric ute

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Engineer turns her Model 3 into world’s first Tesla electric ute
Posted on June 19, 20192 minute read         Bridie Schmidt

Source: Twitter/Simone Giertz
Source: Twitter/Simone Giertz

Sick of waiting for an all-electric ute to “save the weekend”? Why not just make your own!

Well, that’s what engineer Simone Giertz and her team decided to do, creating what is now the world’s first Tesla ute (or pick-up truck, in the US).

Giertz couldn’t wait for Tesla CEO and founder to finish his own pet project – a “cyberpunk” electric pickup that Musk has said will be unveiled later this year – so the self-proclaimed “Queen of Shitty Robots” went ahead and gathered a team of friends to make “Truckla”.

“I really want an electric pickup truck,” Giertz says in a half hour video come tutorial posted on Youtube.

“But more specifically, I really want a Tesla pickup truck – but they haven’t released one yet,” she said.

“So I’m just going to have to make my own … Elon Musk, this is me challenging you by making the world’s first functional electric pickup truck.”

And so she does, and with no small amount of style. Instead of taking the easy option and basically cutting the Model 3 in half and sticking a flat bed on the back half, Giertz and her team decide to cut into the back half of the Model 3 to make a true full Tesla pickup.

It’s recycling at its best – using parts commandeered from the dead bodies of friend’s pickups and wreckers, the team cobble together a flat bed, rear window and lumber rack.

The final product is actually pretty impressive – with front headlights stacked on top of the cabin and a pretty much seamless tray inserted in the back, Giertz and her team have come up with a classic pick-up.

We haven’t heard yet what Musk thinks of Giertz’s Tesla truck effort – having told the world on Monday (Australian time) that he was deleting his Twitter account (while not actually deleting it – and that tweet itself has been deleted since), he has been seen tweeting again, but not yet about Truckla.

Meanwhile, both YouTube videos have gone completely wild – there have been over half a million views of the advert and nearly 800,000 of the “tutorial,” so far – and counting.

It just goes to show that if you really, really need an electric ute, and you have an angle grinder, a welder and a swathe of mates ready to help, why not just do it yourself!


Bridie Schmidt
Bridie Schmidt

Bridie Schmidt is staff writer for The Driven, and Renew Economy. She specialises in writing about new technology, as well as using her technical skills in managing our websites.
Check out our Models pages for news and analysis, reviews and road trips on this and all EV models currently or soon to be available in Australia.
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