There's a reason the Ford F-150 is the best-selling vehicle in the country year after year: Anyone who doesn’t have a pickup needs a friend with one. The design’s utility is timeless, as is our occasional need to haul cargo. Even Tesla sees their brilliance.

We're still waiting for Elon to build an electric pickup, but in the meantime here's Sparky, a converted Nissan Leaf. Engineers Roland Schellenberg and Arnold Moulinet, eager to do a little team-building and create a cool way of moving stuff around Nissan's Stanfield, Arizona testing facility, led the project. Some of you may be wondering, "WTF? Why not just get a Frontier and be done with it." Well, what's the fun in that? Besides—there is a long and awesome tradition of automakers doing crazy things like building a BMW M3 pickup and Porsche-powered Volkswagen Vanagon.

Now, the Leaf is a highly capable, thoroughly funky EV that we love. And it makes a surprisingly attractive, if somewhat stunted, pickup truck. The team kept the drivetrain as-is, chopped off the roof and added the top from a Titan pickup and the (shortened) bed from a Frontier. Cool details include wood bed slats, sharp wheels and the Leaf's rounded rear. It all comes together in a thoroughly futuristic riff on the venerable pickup.

Sparky is tooling around the 3,050-acre test facility, which includes a 5.7-mile high-speed oval that the little electric p'up probably won't ever see. We don't expect to see a contractor rocking one of these anytime soon, but we wouldn't rule out seeing something like this in the future. After all, Nissan's already stuffed the GT-R's drivetrain into the Juke, sent a Leaf clambering up Pikes Peak and built a race-ready Leaf that looks utterly insane. (We drove it. It was fun.) This is definitely a company that isn't afraid to get a little weird.