This life-sized Hot Wheels looking thing is the Hainan Xiaohuohua. It may not be as fast as it looks, but some dude and his dad knocked this thing out with about a year of work and $5,000 of parts. And hey, it drives!

Our friends over at tell us this machine is the brainchild of 27-year-old Chen Yinxi. The name apparently translates to “Hainan Young Flower.” Hainan is the province where Yinxi lives in the city of Haikou.

Yinxi is a college student “but plans to drop out soon to focus completely and solely on car design.” His father runs a fiber reenforced plastics company which is where the car’s materials came from, but apparently young Chen did the molding himself.

CarNewsChina reports that Yinxi spent about a year and $4,700 to put the car together, ordering parts and the Low Speed Electric Vehicle platform on which it’s based, on the internet.

It’s not perfect. I mean, the wheelgaps are wide as canyons and I bet we’d find more blemishes if we could get some decent resolution on these images. And of course that “low speed” car it’s all built around is exactly that; top speed is rated at 30 KPH with what I imagine is a pretty short range.

But for a home-built and self-designed amateur automotive project? Heaps of respect to Yinxi, his old man, and the Hainan Xiaohuohua. There’s obviously a lot of talent here, with any luck the design will catch an investor’s eye and Yinxi’s dream of putting a more powerful motor in his car might come true.

For now, he’s renting it out for store openings and photo shoots. But he’s already working on a much more practical looking electric hatchback. With a little more money and education behind him, this Yinxi kid could be going toe-to-toe with Elon Musk someday. I’m seeing some solid Iron Man 2 parallels already...

Hat tip to Tycho!

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