the F150 kit looks neat. but it would be nice to have a kit where say if you have a van you want to be a truck you can swap out the cab for a shorter one with a box, and you could convert your sedan to a station wagon or lift it and make it a ute.
Though I suppose it's hard to with current safety standards. unless you're a massive corporation that paid the inspector off you can't get a custom car accepted. Even rebuilt need to have the panel with the original VIN on it even if everything else was replaced.
You sort of could do this in the 90's, although it's kind of a pain in the ass. Having done this once several years ago, I think I didn't need to do much if any modification to drop a Suburban body onto the right length K1500 truck frame (mostly because I was combining parts of wrecked shit -- destroyed K1500 cab and some mongoloid cutting on the frame for the Suburban prior to me owning it). At some point around 08 or so, the Suburban and GM's trucks diverged enough that they no longer rode on the same frame and had much less parts interchange (why they did this I have no idea). I'm pretty sure you can do similar things with S10s and Blazers, 4runners and Tacomas and maybe the Excursions and F150 or F250? and getting a decent body from the junkyard or Copart isn't that hard or expensive.
I kind of understand why the manufacturers have moved away from body on frame for certain applications, but it's extremely niggerlicious to have a truck or SUV without a body on frame setup (and it's part of how I know retards with Honda Ridgelines, Ford Mavericks or Cybertrucks are not serious people), as it's possible and common with real trucks to swap out at least the bed to accommodate different needs. The disappearance of good smaller body on frame chassis like the Panther, Ranger and S10 mean that while you could do what you're suggesting not that long ago, some chicken nugget scoon poindexter engineer and the bean counters have said no more.
That all said, most states will let you (if you look carefully enough) register kit and home built cars without needing to spend a lot of time and money and do insane shit like send a bunch of them for NHSTA destructive testing, even the retarded increasingly communist shithole I currently live in, and will even let you generate a new VIN for your one-off (which is how the factory five kits end up working). I keep thinking about doing this, as for an increasing number of cars (especially the shit boomers like, such as a 32 Ford, Trifive Chevy, old CJs, etc.) you can basically build an entire car with exactly zero original parts, and register it that way, or just do something totally custom. You can still start with an S10 or Blazer chassis (and retain its VIN and title) and build what you want (speaking from experience), it's just a lot of work sometimes. In more lenient states and locales, you would be amazed what sort of shit the right county clerk and sheriff will let you get away with registering, including "rebuilds". A very unscrupulous bunch of eastern Euros (probably gypsies that got lost and wound up in the states) that lived near where I did I swear to god would buy totally burned down vehicles from crash sales, probably steal the same model from somewhere, and then weld a new VIN plate on the stolen vehicle that matched the totally destroyed pile they bought for pennies, and were able to sell and register them and I guess the government just did not give a fat fuck. God knows I used to register a lot of funny looking frankensteined and custom shit for fun that was "rebuilt" from the crash sales, I just had to promise my friends down at the county services that I wasn't going to foist it onto some unsuspecting retard.
And as expected, Chinese EV companies are dropping like flies, with the EV gravy train drying up:
I wonder how in the world NIO and Xpeng haven't imploded yet, since they're making huge losses, and Xiaomi is still losing tons of money with each SU7 sold. The fact that NIO and Xpeng even made deals to get their cars added to Forza Horizon 5 years ago, showed how much money from Chinese subsidies they had to burn.
For as much as a lot of people like jerking off BYD and all of the other chinkshit EV manufacturers, I presume the CCP is going to get tired of bankrolling all of these to dump EVs on every market, and there's going to be a lot of unhappy people with cars that are falling apart and have exactly zero parts availability after the manufacturers fold. I think we'll find that unless someone somewhere is profusely bleeding money and/or using outright slave labor, EVs will never be "cheap."
