Solar-Powered Hoverboard Go-Kart Looks Like Sketchy Fun

It’s not exactly a road-tripping machine, but it is free transportation.

Photo by: Smith Off-Grid / YouTube

Iulian Dnistran

By: Iulian Dnistran

May 8, 2025 at 9:07am ET

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A broken hoverboard was turned into a solar-powered go-kart.
A single solar panel was enough to get the hoverboard moving.
Unfortunately, no sun means no power.

Here’s a fun little video I came across on YouTube earlier today. Someone got a broken hoverboard for free on Facebook Marketplace and decided to turn it into something useful rather than just throwing it in the trash.

It turned out that the hoverboard’s battery was completely dead, so the next order of business was finding a way to power the thing without a battery. A solar panel and a charge controller were hooked up to the old battery cables, and the thing started up without skipping a beat—as long as the sun was shining on the solar panel, anyway.

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This led to a sketchy build where YouTuber Smith Off-Grid zip-tied the solar panel onto a backpack so that he could wear it while going down the street. That failed, so he came up with a more clever solution: using a cheap go-kart seat, a more powerful and lighter solar panel, and some PVC pipes to create a makeshift three-wheeler where his hands could control the hoverboard’s direction.

It looks silly, yes. But it’s also the kind of thing that I would have loved to build when I was a kid. And the best part is that it worked much better than the first iteration, with the big caveat being that there’s no voltage going to the hoverboard if the sun isn’t shining. But as a prototype, it looks really fun. You can think of it as the poor man’s Aptera—just don’t expect to take it on a road trip anytime soon.