Enterprising Model Y driver strapped an ICE generator to the back of his SUV for a journey into Tibet
May 19, 2025 at 21:11
- Video from China shows a Tesla Model Y modified to be a hybrid.
- A gasoline generator fed the SUV’s battery pack in emergencies.
- The owner wanted range security while travelling to Mount Everest.
Even today, when most populated areas of the US and Europe provide access to at least some EV charging points, it’s all too easy to succumb to the panic of range anxiety when the remaining charge indicator lights up red. Now imagine you’re trying to explore rural Asia and you’ll understand why one EV owner came up with an unusual method of keeping range anxiety at bay.
Related: Cybertruck’s $16K Range Booster Is Dead And Tesla Isn’t Saying Why
The Chinese Tesla owner, who wanted to visit the Mount Everest viewing platform in Lazi County before road-tripping through uninhabited areas of Tibet, decided to turn his fully-electric Model Y into a kind of range-extender hybrid.
A Gasoline-Powered Back-Up Plan
To do it he mounted a gasoline generator to the rear of his SUV, complete with its own license plate to stay within the bounds of the law. The idea wasn’t to rely solely on the ICE power station and to avoid real static EV charging stations, but to help keep the Tesla going in remote areas where those chargers were few and far between.
While hardly capable of cranking out DC fast charging levels of power, the owner found it was still able to produce 3 kW even at the 17,400 ft (5,300 m) of the Everest viewing platform. That was enough to add 12 miles (19 km) of range per hour, though as Car News China points out, it’s not a true range extender because it can’t charge the Model Y on the move,
The owner, who’s known as @Xiaomo, reportedly paid ¥2,800 ($390) for the generator, which swallowed around 22 US cents’ worth of gas for every mile (1.6 km) covered. That makes running on gas more expensive than running on electricity piped in from a cheap mains supply in China, but it’s certainly preferable to finding yourself stranded in the middle of nowhere with a dead EV.
Tesla doesn’t seem interested in offering range extenders for its cars, but we’ve come across plenty more owners who’ve had the same idea, including one who added a turbo-diesel engine to the trunk of his Model S.
Images: @Xiaomo
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