If you haven’t been able to scrounge up a few hundred dollars to improve your daily commute with an electric scooter, there might be an alternative hiding in your parents’ basement. This electric go-kart is made entirely from Lego, so if you’ve got bins and bins of plastic bricks left over from your childhood, it might be time to dust them all off and get building.
It took about three weeks and over 7,000 pieces to build this go-kart, which is mostly assembled from Lego Technic pieces including 32 tiny electric motors (eight in every wheel) that propel it to a top speed of almost two-and-a-half miles per hour—depending on the weight of the rider who needs to be under 150 pounds. You’re not going to be winning any races on this thing, but there’s a chance you’ll still be rolling faster than the slowly crawling traffic you usually have to deal with on the way to work.
The go-kart is controlled using an app on a smartphone that can be mounted to its steering wheel, and is powered by eight BuWizz bricks; a third-party alternative to the boxes Lego includes to power and control the electric motors and sensors you can incorporate into your creations. The standard Lego control bricks could have certainly been used for this build, but the go-kart’s performance would have been even worse as the BuWizz bricks offer significantly more power and better battery life.
There’s no braking system so far as we can tell, the electric motors can just be used to bring the go-kart from its snail’s pace to a full stop. But it’s not like you’ll have to worry about losing control and hitting something or someone at these speeds. If you do, any damages should be cheap to repair—or you can just use all the pieces to build something else.