Nissan's little electric pickup

Finally, an electric vehicle with room to carry spare batteries. A lot of them.

Engineers at Nissan’s Technical Center in Arizona have created the company’s first Leaf-based pickup.

The folks at the test site needed a little shop truck to haul stuff around, and got to thinking that turning the electric compact into one might be the ticket.

Lock it up: Texas leads U.S. in pickup truck thefts

So they cut the roof in half, removed the back seats and hatchback, sealed the rear doors and dropped in the bed from a Nissan Frontier that was the right length, but needed to be narrowed and trimmed in height to fit.

They added three wood slats on the floor give it a retro look, a power drop down rear window, and dubbed it Sparky, of course.

The finished product looks almost production ready, not that Nissan has any plans to put it on sale.

Then again, the last time a few of its engineers got crazy and stuffed the twin-turbo all-wheel-drive powertrain from the GT-R into a Juke, it ended up being so popular that they offered a limited run for $590,000 a pop.

And just think, Sparky would qualify for a $7,500 federal tax credit, so it’d almost be a bargain.