YouTuber transforms a Tesla Model 3 into a Pickup Truck she calls ‘Truckla’

Talk about YouTubers that take their projects to a serious next-level, Simone Giertz has just done that, buying a brand new Tesla Model 3 and turning it into the world’s first unofficial Tesla Pickup Truck she has named ‘Truckla’, the fusion of a Truck+Tesla.

The motivation behind undertaking this project came from the late-comings of the official Tesla Pickup Truck unveil date announcement by Elon Musk and his design team at Tesla, if you’re looking for a modified Tesla Model 3 pickup truck, it’s not up for sale.

Simone undertook this herculean task that can break a Tesla owner’s heart with acts such as cutting the rear half of the car, removing the parts and before all that keying the trunk intentionally because this part of the body would remain mostly unuseful after the transformation.

Simone released two videos on her YouTube channel, one featuring the finished product in a short TV commercial type video and the other detailing how the entire team turned a Tesla Model 3 into a pickup truck.

A strong engineering and design team took on this project including the famous YouTuber named ‘Rich Rebuilds‘ known for rebuilding salvaged Tesla vehicles and featuring them in his videos.

This fake commercial of the Tesla Model 3 modified pickup truck aka Turckla is both funny and interesting as the modified electric vehicle is shown off-roading, drifting and used as a power source for woodworking and welding tools mimicking Elon Musk’s statements from the past about the upcoming Tesla Pickup Truck.

The above video from Simone Giertz also ends in a funny way saying, ‘The 2019 Truckla, available nowhere’, however, it is brilliantly shot and with some retro visuals and elements the video has already received 338k+ views as of this writing along with 1.7k+ upvotes on the Tesla Subreddit within a few hours of being published, pretty much viral, the hard work is paying the dividends.

According to Simone she and her team had this idea about a year ago and chose the Tesla Model 3 for two reasons, the cheaper $35k Standard Range variant and a steel chassis that is easier to fabricate than a Tesla Model S or X’s aluminum chassis.

The Challenges

Tesla’s electric vehicles are the most advanced cars of this day and age, each vehicle in the fleet is connected to the Tesla HQ via the onboard supercomputer and an LTE connection which can transmit various data to Tesla Inc. indicating a possible damage/accident, etc. Any damage to the car’s sensitive electronics could have resulted in a total shut down of the vehicle and how could a warranty be claimed? No way!

Keeping the Tesla Model 3s tech intact might have been the biggest challenge in this project, the car started showing errors and suggested to contact Tesla Service only after removing the rear seats, because the safety restraints/seat belts had been removed from the car.

Tesla Model 3 besides being a small car is super heavy (SR = 3,552 lb / 1,611 kg), mainly due to the rigid structure and a large battery-pack embedded in the floor of the vehicle, so the final product coming out of this project should have a well-defined balance of weight to be a practical on-road car — putting the car on weighing scale showed (before modifications) showed the weight distribution as 1,780 lb across the front and 1,884 lb across the rear.

Removing the rear window glass was a tough job requiring multiple persons for the job, the case would have been different if this was a Tesla Model Y with a full panoramic glass roof, Model 3s glass roof is in two pieces from the front windshield to the B-pillars/center roof beam and the one extending from here to the rear windshield/trunk.

Video: Building ‘Truckla’, the modified Tesla Model 3 Pickup Truck

The Results

More than three weeks of hard work and engineering efforts resulted in a unique looking electric pickup truck that was ready to shoot its first video commercial, an impressive feat achieved by Simone, Marcos and the rest of the team.

The only issue with this truck’s practicality would be the lower ground clearance as compared to the purpose-built pickup trucks we see from various manufacturers, but this is just a fun project and Simone won the challenge she gave Elon Musk by delivering a pickup truck faster than him.

Show us your passion and enthusiasm by posting your thoughts in the comments section below.

Related:

• Tesla fan draws a Tesla Pickup Truck sketch that might be close to what we expect
• Tesla Pickup truck’s latest teaser image sparks a new era of fan buzz
• Rivian’s electric R1T pickup truck and R1S SUV on display at Aspen, Colorado — CEO gives an interview
• Meet the Rivian R1T Camper Pickup Truck with a mobile kitchen
• Tesla Model X vs Jaguar I-Pace spec to spec comparison data
• First-look and specs of the Rivian R1T Pickup Truck