YouTuber Builds World’s First Electric Vehicle Powered by Disposable Vape Batteries
Chris Doel, a 26-year-old electronics engineer, has done what his YouTube audience kept asking him to do: power a road-legal electric vehicle using 500 batteries extracted from disposable vapes.
He charged it with a standard MacBook USB-C charger.
On Feb. 28, he shared the full build and road test in a video on his YouTube channel, where he has 162,000 subscribers.
The project caps a multi-year escalation. Doel started by turning disposable vapes into a fast charge power bank. Then he used the batteries to power an e-bike. Then he powered his entire home with them.
Each build raised the same question from his audience: Can you power a car?
The E-Waste Problem Behind the Project
Doel didn’t treat this as a stunt. At the beginning of his video, he laid out a clear motivation.
“Unfortunately, we seem to live in some crazy dystopia when buying these single-use devices and then chucking them away is completely normalized, despite them having fully-rechargable lithium ion cells inside of them,” he said.
He referenced a 2024 article published by The Guardian suggesting that more than one million vapes are thrown away per day. Those discarded devices contain functional, rechargeable lithium-ion cells.
A 2025 report by the Alaska Environment Research & Policy Center estimated that another 500,000 are thrown out each day in the U.S..
“So, to raise awareness of this ridiculous source of e-waste, I’ve been building increasingly larger things using these extracted cells,” he said in the video.
“And since you all have been asking for it, I have been crunching the numbers. And I’m pretty sure we can power a road-legal electric vehicle from disposable vape cells,” he added.
Why the Math Ruled Out a Tesla
The core constraint was Doel’s existing powerwall: 500 vape batteries combined into a 50V battery pack with a capacity of 2.5 kWh. That powerwall took six months to make and had already powered his house and workshop.
The question was whether 2.5 kWh could move a car.
A standard Tesla has a battery capacity of 60 kWh. Most Teslas produce between 450 hp and 670 hp and weigh approximately 3,500 lbs to over 6,800 lbs.
To build a powerwall big enough for a Tesla, Doel would have needed around 12,000 vape batteries and 12 years to assemble them.
So a Tesla was out — for reasons of both “money” and his “sanity,” as he put it.
Instead, he went with the Reva G-Wiz, one of the world’s first modern, mass-produced electric cars. Doel (and many others) have dubbed it “one of the world’s worst cars.”
But that reputation made it the right fit for this build.
The G-Wiz has a 17 horsepower motor and weighs about 880 pounds without the batteries. It tops out at 50 miles per hour. And it ran off a 48V battery pack — almost perfectly matched to the 50V output of Doel’s vape powerwall.
“Back in the early-2000s, the batteries were crap and electric vehicles were unbelievably simple,” he said in the video.
That simplicity was the key. His existing 500-vape powerwall would suffice. No need to build a second pack. No need to spend another six months extracting and testing cells. The math dictated the car choice, and the math worked.
Keeping 500 Lithium-Ion Cells From Catching Fire
Before hooking up the vape powerwall to the car, Doel had to address the three main reasons it might go up in flames: physical punctures, overvoltage and overheating.
He built an aluminum enclosure to ensure the cells don’t get physically damaged. For a battery pack going into a vehicle driven on public roads, containment wasn’t optional.
The powerwall already had a battery management system to monitor the voltages — the same kind of BMS found in commercial battery packs, keeping watch over cell-level voltage to prevent overvoltage conditions that can lead to thermal runaway.
He installed fuses on each cell to protect against overheating, and added temperature probes to monitor temperature in real time.
That layered approach — physical barrier, electronic voltage monitoring, per-cell fusing, and real-time thermal sensing — addresses each failure mode with its own mitigation and creates redundancy across the system.
The DC-DC Converter and a USB-C First
The G-Wiz already had most of the electrical components needed to run. The only thing Doel needed to install was a DC-DC converter to output 12 volts to power the headlights, wipers, horn and other auxiliary systems.
The main drive motor was already designed for a 48V pack, so the 50V powerwall slotted in with minimal integration work.
Charging is where Doel added something new. To charge the battery pack, he used another one of his inventions, which allows him to charge e-bikes and e-scooters using a standard USB-C fast charger.
Using a standard MacBook charger, he hooked it up to the battery pack and it worked.
That made this not only the first disposable vape powered car, but the first USB-C charged car: a road-legal vehicle charged with the same cable used for a laptop.
35 MPH, Rain adn 18 Miles on Vape Power
After plugging the powerwall in, Doel started with basics. He tested the horn and hazard lights, and they worked. Then came the real test.
He put it in gear and moved a few feet forward. It worked.
All that was left was taking it to the street.
He took it up to 35 mph, drove around the city on a rainy day, drove with the headlights on, and got around 18 miles before the car powered off.
18 miles from 500 extracted vape batteries and a USB-C MacBook charger, on a vehicle that weighs 880 pounds and was designed two decades ago.
What Chris Doel Wants People to Take From This
The project carried a broader message about disposable electronics and the resources inside them.
“I think we all need a big think as to what we actually classify as waste because, sadly, planned obsolescence is becoming more and more common,” he said at the end of the video.
Every one of those 500 cells was destined for a landfill. Each one contained a fully rechargeable lithium-ion battery. Combined with six months of careful extraction, testing and assembly — plus the layered safety engineering — they moved a car 18 miles through city streets in the rain.
Doel’s progression from power bank to e-bike to home power to road-legal vehicle keeps pushing the same question: how far can salvaged cells actually go?
The idea for the car project came from one of his subscribers. Based on what he’s demonstrated so far, the answer keeps getting bigger.
You can watch the video in full here.
Production of this article included the use of AI. It was reviewed and edited by a team of content specialists.
