My new favorite thing in EVs? This Citroen Ami that's been made to look like a 1950s H-Van

• Caselani’s Type-Ami adds retro charm to one of the smallest EVs on sale
• Complete vehicle costs $13,400, or DIY kits come in at $5,200
• Nine different color options are available

For all of the Citroen Ami’s many charms, striking good looks don’t exactly rank top of the list. But one Italian coach builder has a solution for the awkward little quadricycle.

Based in the tiny town of Sospiro, Italy, coach builder and fabricator Caselani takes modern Citroen products and clads them in fiberglass so they look just like the iconic Type-H Van panel vans of the late 1940s.

The corrugated metal outer body panels and angular lines will forever go down in the history books as a classic piece of industrial design, but the plucky panel vans have recently enjoyed a resurgence thanks to swathes of hipster coffee and food trucks that have used them as a base for tasty operations.

Caselani will fabricate a modern interpretation of one of those (based on Citroen Berlingo, Relay and Dispatch vans) but it is the Ami project that really stands out from the crowd.

For a start, it takes a brave soul to use an Ami as a food truck, which means the Type-Ami is purely designed to raise smiles.

For €13,900 (around $13,400 / £11,600 / AU$21,300), Caselani will sell you a complete vehicle, including the option to swap the plastic seats and steering wheel trim for diamond-quilted faux leather.

That’s about $3k more than the standard Ami, but customers can choose from six classic 1950s colors, or opt for one of three more modern metallic hues. Oh, and you get jazzy 'steelie' style wheels thrown in, too.

If you already own one of the diminutive 8bhp, 28mph top speed city-slickers, you can option the DIY body kit for €4,440 (around $4,500 / £3,700 / AU$7,200), which adds the corrugated side panels, gloriously pug-nosed front end and a rear with ‘Type-Ami’ stamped in period correct white lettering.

It all comes with the right screws and brackets to self install, if you fancy many scraped thumbs and lots of swearing.

The lovable Ami gets even more appealing

As a reminder, the Citroen Ami is classed as a heavy quadricycle in France and, thanks to its 8hp electric motor and limited top speed, it can legally be driven by 14-year-olds... for around 46 miles before the 5.5-kWh lithium-ion battery dies or mom texts to warn that dinner is on the table.

But far from simply being a young teenager’s ticket to freedom, the Ami has gained popularity in Europe as cheap urban mobility, featuring on a number of inner-city car sharing schemes and finding homes with private buyers that want a fuss-free way to get to the shops and back.

The H-Van project is clearly a bit of fun that started as a one-off for the company’s founder, Fabrizio Caselani, but was soon made publicly available when the customer enquiries started flooding in.

Is the H-Van body kit completely pointless? Probably. But has that stopped me from wanting one? Absolutely not.

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