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This Is A Tesla Model 3 Pickup Truck, And It’s Called Truckla

A year ago, Simone Giertz came up with the idea of turning the Model 3 into a pickup truck. Lo and behold, the Truckla is real and it’s awesome in every single way. Except for the missing headliner and interior panels of the A-pillars.
Tesla Model 3 Truckla pickup truck 11 photos
Photo: screenshot from Facebook
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In order to make room for the cargo area, the rear seats had to go along with the trunk lid. A good ol’ tailgate will have to make do, but the Truckla also features a roof rack that extends into the bed. To bring the point home, front-facing LED auxiliary lights were also fitted to the roof rack.

Rich Rebuilds, a company that’s specialized in Tesla conversions, morphed the Model 3 into the Truckla. But the project also includes Marcos Ramirez of Bridge Service Motors and tons of other people who made the impossible happen. Jaquelyn Marker is responsible for the 1:25 commercial at the end of this story, which looks professional thanks to a tip-top team of editors.

The description of the commercial also includes a lot of humor, including two fake reviews. Simone’s parents would go like “it look great sweetie” while the verdict from Road & Smack is “in a class of its own. Not a great class, but definitely its own.”

You know what the Truckla would need? Two rear-facing jumpseats in the cargo area as a tribute to the Subaru BRAT. A suspension lift would also be interesting, but that’s also sacrilege by most accounts. KW Variant 3 coilover suspension is another possibility, but that would defeat the purpose of turning the Model 3 into a pickup truck.

If Elon Musk sees this commercial, he would definitely like the do-it-yourself approach of Simone and the gang. But Tesla is thinking big with the soon-to-be-revealed pickup. Musk promised better truck-like functionality than the Ford F-150 and better performance than the Porsche 911, ambitious goals given the competition from Rivian.

The R1T has four motors driving every wheel, a thumpin’ great battery with a capacity of 180 kWh, and up to 750 horsepower. Even the entry-level specification is impressive, but better still, the starting price of $69,000 makes the R1T an interesting alternative to a well-equipped conventional pickup.

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About the author: Mircea Panait
Mircea Panait profile photo

After a 1:43 scale model of a Ferrari 250 GTO sparked Mircea's interest for cars when he was a kid, an early internship at Top Gear sealed his career path. He's most interested in muscle cars and American trucks, but he takes a passing interest in quirky kei cars as well.
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