How An Engineer Built A Homemade Tesla Pickup Truck

This is the truck and it's technically the first Tesla pickup truck except it's not made by Tesla youtuber and engineer Simone modified a model three into this fully functioning pick up .

Here's how she did it .

The inspiration behind Tesla was that I've , I've like made a personal promise to myself to try to avoid having a gas car .

Like I've never owned a gas vehicle and really need a pickup truck for the type of work I'm doing .

So I decided to make my own .

Simone chose to build her custom pickup from a standard range model three .

Not just because it's the cheapest Tesla on the market .

The model three features a steel chassis , unlike the model S and model X that both use aluminum , aluminum is softer and has a lower melting point than steel , making it tougher to cut cleanly and weld smoothly .

So there was a lot of planning to win in before we even went to go and get the car .

There was almost a year of like looking at other pickup trucks .

What parts of it do we like ?

What parts do we not like ?

Uh and playing around with different sketches Simone even recruited some of her engineer friends like youtubers , Laura Camp and rich rebuilds to help .

Once they had a design in place and their measurements made , they were ready to begin .

The team's plan was to cut out the entire top half of the car's back row and trunk to turn into a truck bed .

They had to start by stripping out the car completely from the front seat back .

They also used the heat gun and wire to remove the model three's enormous rear windshield .

Unfortunately , we started cutting a little bit sooner than we should have because we wanted to put in a bunch of reinforcements to make sure that once we removed the back part of the car that it wouldn't sag .

But we had to kind of fast track that because I was gonna about to travel out of town .

And if we hadn't cut the car before that , like all work would be to freeze while I was gone .

Luckily , for Simone's crew electric vehicles like Tesla are built on a very rigid platform that's more like a skateboard .

Even the battery pack that lies underneath the car has a lot of structural integrity .

Both of these things prevented the walls of the car from caving in when they began cutting the top half off .

They also use jack stands to take the weight off the car's wheels which would only increase its likelihood to fold .

We used pretty much every tool I have in my workshop and , and more tools on top of that for the cutting .

It was like we were really using like porta bands and angle grinder and saw and jigsaws like every metal cutting tool you could imagine because each section of the car and cutting out the rear end was , was , was so different once the cutting was done .

And Simone was back from her trip .

The team finished welding in the support beams that would prevent the folding .

They were afraid of this included bars underneath what would become the truck bed and a roll bar at the very back of what would become the cabin .

The bed was from my friends wrecked Ford F 1 50 and it was really challenging to find a rear window that would work for truck because she's so much more narrow than a normal truck and smaller and , and most of the rear windows are just way too big for her , but it ended up being from a Chevy color .

Unfortunately , the truck's most narrow section was only three ft by 11 inches wide .

The average pickup truck's bed is at least four ft wide because of this .

They decided to give the vehicle a permanent roof rack in order to create a dual cargo space .

The roof rack was bought off Craigslist , but because it was built for a normal size pickup , Simone had to cut it apart and build it back herself in order for it to fit the truck one .

The team finished truckload just in time for the car commercial .

They scheduled to shoot with a professional film crew .

The rest is history .

The thing is since we were a group of friends , people were very much like charging friend rates , which was really , really sweet .

Like people were just excited about this project .

I think if they hadn't , it would have ended up being like 100 $50,000 or something crazy .

She is my daily driver .

I use her on a regular basis , which is great and also a little bit annoying sometimes because driving her , you pretty much always get , like , have an audience .

But I mean , I use her to haul lumber .

Definitely putting the truck parts over her to use .