Slate EV truck starts at $24,950 | Hacker News Reader

Slate EV truck starts at $24,950

slate.auto

311 pointscobri512 comments

https://www.edmunds.com/car-news/2027-slate-truck-price-expl...

The color options are a much bigger deal than I think many people realize. It's been too many years since I saw the studies so I have no hope of being able to cite it, but in a marketing class in college I remember reading about how much people value picking a color they really like, that they feel matches their personality. It increases satisfaction, significantly reduces the cognitive dissonance (aka "buyers remorse") that usually accompanies a major purchase, and increases identity sharing (where the vehicle feels like part of your identity, which is good for brand loyalty and total ownership satisfaction). I've been surprised how limited the color palette usually is for vehicles given all that. It will be interesting to see how Slate does!

I noticed recently it’s cool to match the color of your vehicle to your house

Anything beats https://blog.iseecars.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Graysca...

I've got a feeling this approaches 100% at airports

And Swiss architecture - birthplace of Le Corbusier, and the very definition of dull gray chunks.

Why is this? I find it hard to imagine the appeal of so much grey. Half of them look like cheap plastic.

Supposedly it holds/people think it holds more resale value to not have loud colors.

I think it's less about the value. Special cars do well in loud colors. World rally Blue on Subaru, Tahitian Green and Barbados yellow on Honda, sunburst yellow on Miatas, all demand a higher price for the color. Loud colors reduce the pool of buyers. A yellow Rav 4 isn't desirable outside of a few people but they're not going to pay more for it. A yellow crx is a rare car and someone is looking for it willing to spend more for that cursed paint code than the same spec in white.

Or clothes, if you really want to do it right, like Madeline Khan's character in High Anxiety.

AFAIK there's actually only one color and you can wrap it. The wrap kits are supposed to be DIY friendly so you can change it yourself when you want a new color.

This is great if you have a garage to do it in. This is terrible if you’re an apartment dweller and have no workshop space!

Parking garage, a friend's house etc.. You make it work.

Sounds like the vinyls will feel like "Hooray my own kinda car!" but will end up in the storage room with "I'll stick these on later" note in the buyers' heads.

You can order a wrapped professionally from the factory. Depending upon which segment of the body panels it's as cheap as a few hundred bucks all the way up to something like 800 bucks for a full wrap.

I don't think I've ever gone shopping for a car and had the dealer present me with the exact same trim options but color selection was only going to change the MSRP by $800 at most...

Too late to edit parent but I might be wrong about wrap from the factory. (up to) $800 just for the materials is still reasonable but even with experience doing wraps, I would probably still bring it to a shop. DIY wrap is a bit like baking cookies; you don't need much in terms of skill or tools to do it but you absolutely can tell the difference between cookies made in your average kitchen using the recipe on the back of the box versus cookies made by people that earn a living making cookies.

> I don't think I've ever gone shopping for a car and had the dealer present me with the exact same trim options but color selection was only going to change the MSRP by $800 at most...

Am I misunderstanding here? I bought a new vehicle last year, and for a given trim there were a half-dozen colour options available at no extra cost, with the upscale options either a $600 or $800 upcharge.

Toyota runs dealers on allocation. Subaru allow you to order a car to spec. They make the "twins", gr86 and brz. You cannot order the Toyota. You have to try to find what you want being built or on a lot already and contact the targeted dealer to buy it. You can order the Subaru and wait 6 months for it to be built to spec.

Sure, but Toyota's one manufacturer, it's not like factory orders where you spec the colour are an industry-wide uncommon thing.

It's about 50/50 based on some quick research of Toyota, Honda, Kia/Hyundai, gm/chevy, Ford, Nissan. The first 3 are almost entirely allocation and don't allow custom orders. The last 3 support custom orders on their "regular traffic" models but not as much for their halo cars .

Or take it to a vinyl shop and pay to have it done properly in an afternoon.

Thousands of dollars tho right?

I don't know but probably. A good wrap job isn't actually much cheaper than a decent paint job, the undersurface still has to be prepped as any dents or chips will show through (less of a concern with a new car though). Applying vinyl without any wrinkles and cutting it perfectly is a skill. Guys need to pay the rent on the shop, pay for tools, and make a living.

Ya not discounting the labor. But as a consumer I really dislike bland and universal car colors, but I can’t justify spending thousands for a custom color.

The body panels are some sort of composite polycarbonate plastic. They offered a number of colors in the UI for the pre-order system. It basically allows you to configure options that are available and see what it looks like. The wraps are (offered) DIY and they claim it will take two people 14-16 hours. They offer a number of colors that cost $500 right now.

Pretty interesting as far as cars go. I think all of the customization options are really smart, but we will see if that is enough for the average consumer. The number of relatively inexpensive options and ability to customize various details rivals some high end car configuration systems, Porsche is famous for letting you customize every detail.

The way Slate has designed their vehicles, they are making it very easy to change just about anything with the vehicle. I can see this being very popular with young people who cannot afford a lot of car, but still want a highly customized and personalized vehicle that they identify with. We will see if all of the other factors work out in Slate's favor.

> The wraps are DIY and they claim it will take two people 14-16 hours.

Oh man, that is ... a lot labor. I can't imagine many people are going to want to do it

and it will look terrible if you don’t do it properly

Presumably that's assuming no prior experience. That seems pretty reasonable to me. I would be rather annoyed if I brought it to a professional wrapping shop and they quoted me 15 hours of labor though

In the FAQ it says you can also order it pre-wrapped.

They designed the vehicle to be "easy" to wrap. Meaning you don't have to remove trim or anything like that. It is still non-trivial and you would want to do it inside of a garage IMO.

With DIY and no experience I can't help but imagine a vehicle where the entire exterior looks like the really bad DIY window tinting I frequently see in the wild.

Why not? This is an easy version of bribe your friends with a case of beer while you work on your POS project car.

I feel like this truck really appeals to the more moderate project car folks who want something both reliable and personal to them

> I feel like this truck really appeals to the more moderate project car folks

It also appeals to anyone that wants a new vehicle but has been priced out their entire lives - especially for an EV.

This vehicle is likely to be highly customizable for almost any interior or cosmetic element. People love customizing vehicles. The number of people who get super into the most inane customization details in the Porsche world cracks me up. "Oh yeah, I got mine PTS (Paint to Sample) color Pacific Northwest Green Pine in Late Fall, but with a hint of sunshine.... and check this out I got custom deviated stitching in this place you literally cannot see once the door closes, no one else really has that!" Same thing here. This level of customization gives people a connection to the vehicle at a very affordable price. It is an EV. It is practical. It can be upgraded after purchase. I dunno, it has a lot going for it.

It does not take 36 man-hours to wrap a vehicle. I think that 16 hours is the "SLA"/drop-off-to-pick-up time.

A big part of the wrap is cleaning the paint first. At least it was when I got mine clear wrapped (ppf). You want it clean so the contaminates don't mess up the paint under the wrap. I left it with them for 3 days because there's also process time to dry or sit. Maybe it's different with a textured polycarbonate panel though

I don't think there is any paint.

First time or experienced

That sounds a bit like one of Saturn's (1985-2010) original ideas from the 80s. The plastic paneling was easy to take off so that people could DIY change the colors or add their own panels (and Saturn engineers could quickly revise styles). I am not sure very many people ever did, however. Or even if the cars were all that customizable in the end.

Notably truck people love customizing their trucks. Less so for economy sedan people.

yeah but this is an economy truck, not the demonstrative Ford 150 Fat Scrotum Offroad Edition

I think you’ll find even people with 20 year old Toyotas are more attached to their trucks and more likely to put money in them for accessories and rims etc than your average Chevy Sonic owner.

Smart also used to advertised one of their early cars (maybe fortwo in the early 2000s?) emphasising how easy it was to swap the plastic panels. I just realised, I've not seen any adverts like that for many years, googled and found an article [1] describing how it was never as easy as they claimed.

[1] https://www.hagerty.co.uk/articles/maintenance-and-gear/it-l...

And then they pick black or white.

Wraps are nice because they're not permanent and don't affect resale value. Having a car without a wrap might soon be as unusual as a phone without a case.

ime for many models colors are sufficiently rarely ordered from the factory that they ironically have higher resale values than the standard grey/white/black ones.

I thought only poor people used phone cases. Otherwise, what’s the point of having an iPhone Air or any other premium built phone at all?

How many people have an iPhone Air?

That’s exactly why I added “or any other premium.” Why buy a sleek phone made of premium materials just to bury it in the cheapest, ugliest, chunkiest plastic case you can find?

I don't think the super cheap and chunky phone cases are analogous to a wrap here.

I know more than a few people with very expensive phones covered in thin carbon fiber style cases which are there purely to protect the glass and metal from egregious scratches, though.

Plenty of people buy expensive phones for the specs and features, yet either have no interest in jewelry or see it as a negative status symbol.

And by plenty you mean minority.

Obviously, but the question I was responding to was, "Why buy a sleek phone made of premium materials just to bury it in the cheapest, ugliest, chunkiest plastic case you can find?"

Its not adamantium, its still just plastics, glass, metals, and electronics.

I would never sit hours somewhere waiting to get my phone fixed, I value my time.

Because the hardware and os updates matter more than how it looks and you only get the good stuff in a fragile "glass sandwich". So if you want it to survive a fall, you spend $25 and leave it in a case until it's cooked 3 years later but still the original screen and hasn't needed anything fixed.

I don't know anyone who rocks a naked phone anymore except people like my brother, who only does it because he likes to boldly claim how rarely he drops his phone. Which is funny because he has cracked way more screens/glass backs than I have with my thin minimal cases.

I have shorts that I love. They've been repaired many times by my partner. Its pockets developed a hole in a way that sometimes my phone just goes straight to the ground and my rawdog iPhone has a cracked screen and back as a result. Terrible way to save.

> what’s the point of having an iPhone Air or any other premium built phone at all?

The ecosystem?

Its a phone, not a tank.

People not using cases on their phone are insane to me. I can't even sit these spaceships down on a non-flat surface without them sliding off. They're the thickness of playing cards.

Similar to: "I bought my phone for identity, for style, for a feeling if being on the technology edge."

Yeah, I bought a phone with a web browser in an ecosystem I like.

From what I hear, wraps need to be replaced periodically or they become permanent. Too many days in the sun makes them hard to remove without damaging the paint. It's also time consuming and expensive to install and remove.

The four most common vehicle colours in the US are white, black, grey and silver. I believe this covers like 80%+ of vehicles. Canada is worse still (so much so that many makers basically just offer the shades of grey, sometimes with a special-order red or something for the rebels), and a few days ago I was on a walk and saw a light turn red and a dozen cars that pulled up to stop and every single one was white.

People have other colour choices, but they're constantly choosing the most spectacularly boring, neutral colours possible.

The colour thing is neat, but I'm not sure it's going to be a big deal. It might actually lead to the paradox of choice where people basically feel even worse about their options.

Going by what I hear talking to friends and family, they often don't want to choose outside of those range of bland colors as they're worried about resale value. Its probably easier to find a buyer who is OK with a black car than someone who would want metallic purple and gold car or a bright pink car.

Wraps are typically pretty easy to remove. Far easier than removing a paint job.

I could have sworn there was actually some kind of study that proved this. Cars are sufficiently expensive and longer lived these days that resale value is actually something buyers at least think they need to take into account.

It's actually a little depressing if you're sitting in traffic, just watch the cars go by and see how few of them actually have a unique color. And most of the exceptions are something like an almost gray blue.

For my part I've found new car styling hideous with little difference between brands my entire adult life. Probably for nostalgic reasons I like the sharp geometric shapes of cars from the 1980s which largely disappeared with a focus aerodynamics for gas mileage. So I'm usually satisfied with whatever color is on the lot since I hate the look by default anyway.

If you’re that worried about resale value, I’d think that buying a 2-4 year old used car is a way better proposition.

It also just so happens grey scale is almost always cheaper. Car color historically correlates with prosperity in the US

https://magazine.northeast.aaa.com/daily/life/cars-trucks/au...

https://www.ppg.com/en-US/autocoatings/color/history-of-colo...

I really don't think that's a big factor in this, at least in modern times. Maybe it was once the case where colour was difficult or something.

I mean I see the inverse as true, and entry level vehicles seem to have the most colour diversity in their sales. It is cars like the Nissan Versa where you see real colour variations.

That strikes me as a forced correlation. Something along the lines of "some people are willing to pay more for British racing green, so let's charge $X for it".

> It might actually lead to the paradox of choice where people basically feel even worse about their options.

Very good point, that will be interesting to see

> The color options are a much bigger deal than I think many people realize.

Any mass-market car has practically the same color options. Wraps have existed for a looong time.

Wraps exist for folks who pursue it, which is always going to be a subset of those who only look at dealer / manufacturer options. Being able to get a wrapped vehicle off the line is a new option for most buyers.

Slate does not wrap the vehicle at manufacturing time. You do it or a service center does it for you.

Is that confirmed?

I was under the impression that you could order wrap from factory and it would come wrapped and not in a kit ready for you to apply.

The featured website here directly states you need to either install the wrap yourself or hire someone else to do it.

Untrue.

Slate can wrap before delivery.

> It will operate as the central shop where the modular two-door, two-passenger pickups will be wrapped in custom colors and finishes chosen by customers, with more than 100 color options available.

https://news.dealershipguy.com/p/slate-auto-bets-on-customiz...

https://www.courier-journal.com/story/money/companies/2026/0...

Their current ordering website says otherwise. It directly states that customers will need to wrap their own cars or hire someone to do it.

I'm also not entirely sure about this facility. Some places are saying this is a facility to produce wraps, as in they manufacture the wraps for others to install. Others suggest this will be a place to get the car wrapped. Is it both? Who knows. I haven't seen any official correspondence from the company directly clearing up what all this facility will actually do.

According to the filing they did with The Kentucky Economic Development Finance Authority (KEDFA), the facility is to be a "vinyl wrap kit manufacturing and fulfillment facility." Usually a "fulfillment facility" is a logistics hub. It sounds more like a place where they'll manufacture the wraps and ship them out than a place where it'll be installed, but it isn't completely clear either way. See page 94-95 of the first PDF and page 14 of the second:

https://cedky.com/cdn/140_KEDFA_Board_Book-_Mar_26_26.pdf?4-...

https://cedky.com/cdn/140__Mar_26_2026_KEDFA_Min.pdf

Maybe there was more said in the meeting, I don't know. But if they said it was for installation as well, it wasn't reflected in the meeting minutes. It would probably really change the scale of the operation though. About forty people for manufacturing, logistics, and installation of wraps for tons of cars? And you're going to need a facility to get a lot of cars through, quite a bit larger than some commercial printers and packaging machines. It would also seem strange to me to build the cars, ship them 200 miles, then wrap them, then ship them out to customers. Why not just wrap them in the Warsaw Indiana facility? Maybe they will eventually wrap them in the Indiana facility, who knows.

But as it stands right now, if you order one of these Slates with a wrap, you better be ready to install it yourself or hire someone to do it. That's Slate's official stance on it currently.

From their website:

"Want the SUV kit, or a wrap? We’ll install them for you before we deliver your vehicle, for a little extra."

https://www.slate.auto/en/personalization

Ah, and I do see now on their website faq's it does list:

> Order pre-installed: Pick your wrap when you purchase your Slate and have it arrive, wrapped and ready.

Ok then! Strange they don't directly mention it on their build page.

Would have probably been a better source to start with instead of an article about an article about a meeting with the KEDF.

> Would have probably been a better source to start with instead of an article about an article about a meeting with the KEDF.

Or you could have Google searched the website like I did for the same info and saved us all a lot of time ;)

> Being able to get a wrapped vehicle off the line is a new option for most buyers

It isn't an option here. When you go to pick a wrap it directly states:

> 2 people required. 12-16 hours. A big commitment for a DIYer. We'd recommend professional installation if you're not sure you can tackle it.

The only difference is you're shopping around at wraps at purchase time, you still need to either put it on yourself or find your own shop to install it post-delivery. No different than you driving any other car off the lot and going to the body shop down the street and having them wrap it for you.

the difference is manufacturers don't advertise them, so most customers go with what they see at the dealer or on the website

Most people cannot afford a new car, therefore they do not get to choose the color options. Fearures and colors are reserved for first buyers or those lease people.

Features and colors are often not even reserved for the actual first buyers. Trying to get a dealership to actually order you what you want is like pulling teeth. You get what the dealerships around you ordered, if you don't like it tough luck!

> Trying to get a dealership to actually order you what you want is like pulling teeth.

Order from the manufacturer, they will deliver it to the in-network dealer of your choice.

That was my first thought as well. I can't articulate why, but if the company and product survive a few years, it feels to me like it might become a modern "cult" car.

Definitely!

Gen Z & A value uniqueness and authenticity. I think the customization options will resonate a lot with them.

I heard cars with zany colors get stuck on the sales lot for much longer than boring colors. If that is true, customizations lower the value on the secondary market relative to factory restrained factory options, and the owners may get lowballed when trading in their cars, or will invest more time of selling as a 1st party.

If car colors were not mired in paperwork, I imagine dealers would respray them some shade of Millennial-gray, similar to realtors' M.O. when prepping homes for sale.

> If car colors were not mired in paperwork, I imagine dealers would respray them some shade of Millennial-gray, similar to realtors' M.O. when prepping homes for sale.

It is far more difficult to properly paint a vehicle than it is to paint a house.

I think this is starting to change, fortunately, with things like the yellow Renault 5s.

Mind you, when ordering a lease car for the first time recently, I did notice that I was paying a premium for non-bland colours. I suspect the weird financial structure of new cars has - they're often not bought to hold, but leased - has a lot to do with the blandness.

There's a large segment of population that will only buy white/black/gray. The paint lines are geared toward those that sell well and special colors are relegated to shorter runs with more expense for changeovers.

I'm not sure they are. I don't think most people give two shits about the color of a vehicle, that's why most of them today are white or silver.

I think people care more than you think and it's mostly an effect of the limited options setting the tone/culture for most of society so when "exciting" colors randomly come out, nobody wants to stand out amongst the sea of silver/black/white. I bet if cars became more funky on average, people would exercise a lot more freedom in selecting wilder colors. An example of a culture of fun selection is snow sports. Colors rule the landscape, and yes sometimes for safety, but it's also because it highlights personality.

Agreed. I care about the color, but not enough to wait for "special order" so I end up taking whatever is in stock at the dealership, which is always the bland colors. I love a green car, but there's almost never an option (or the green is hideous)

I agree, this is a very smart move.

I just wish they had also released a smaller body, so you could build something close to a regular hatchback (like a Golf or Mazda 3)

then buy a chevy volt, mate

they’re selling a diy wrap. in other words, you get a large flat colored sticker (maybe pre-cut if you’re lucky, but these actually fit worse). wrapping your car and making it look good is NOT diy friendly, it’s a pain in the ass. you need special equipment, space to do it, etc.

it’s actually incredibly disappointing, because 99% of people are just gonna get the gray, and will be unhappy because it’s super boring.

real manufactures like porsche or bmw offer a ton of shades too, it just costs a lot, but they are very popular.

The way I see it, you buy the kit and take it to a professional who is going to charge somewhere between $1000 and $3000 to install it. That's a lot more onerous than the buying a pre-colored car right off the lot, but many people already opt to have their car wrapped anyway. It's a wait and see game to see what installers like that would want - the pre-cut package or just buy the material directly from them.

The real downside to wraps from my perspective is that they don't last as long as a regular paint job. After 4 or 5 years you'll see damage and need to get it re-done if you care about the look. And if the underlying plastic is scuffed up, the plastic panel will need to be repaired before the new wrap will go on smoothly.

don't believe those marketing research

Just built a "hatchback" Slate with what I guess will be common options (speakers, wheel upgrade, spare wheel carrier, and a few other odds and ends) and it came to $35k. So, still pretty inexpensive, but also getting close to some existing EV sedans that are known entities and have pretty decent interiors. So, I'm not totally sold on these, but not not sold either. Need to see one in person, I think.

Presumably you could reconfigure it easily later. Which seems like a plus

Yeah, you could buy a basic one and add the rear seats and roof later.

But, is that likely? Most people buy cars on credit and won't have $10k cash to spend on those bits later. I guess they could put it on Visa, but that's a terrible financial choice.

It's possible they will offer financing for that. From a business strategy perspective it would be almost unimaginable that they wouldn't.

If these become popular it should be reasonable to expect the aftermarket to provide less expensive options. These are clearly where Slate's margin will live right now.

They'll end up being worth a ton of money in the future like those roofs from the original mazda miatas.

I'm simultaneously not interested in an electric truck & amazed the price is still reasonable if you want to turn it the truck into a hatchback instead. The range is also meh.

Same conclusion: interesting, but not necessarily interested. Hope they go places though.

I see lots of tradesmen in Ford Mavericks or Transit Connects. The Slate could work well for some of them - basic truck model, with the ladder rack for long stuff (like ladders or pieces of wood). Saves them some money up front, and gas and maintenance (in theory).

Ford Maverick is a hybrid for about the same price and I could definitely lean more easily towards that kind combo at the moment.

The Transit Connect is discontinued in North America and was only ever a plug in hybrid here (outside a 500 unit collaboration in the early 2010s) but maybe one of the newer electric variants of the Transit lines will make its way over some time (e.g. looks like the Ford E-Tourneo Courier is an all electric in Europe).

Yes and no. I'd think residential plumber or HVAC service tech can easily drive more than the stated range just going from job to job during a day. They're going to want to be sure that they don't have to stop to charge between jobs; time is money for those guys, and especially if the fast charging infrastructure is not well built out in their area it could be a showstopper.

A fast charge over lunch would be acceptable. However there are not near enough fast chargers. Every fast food place needs to have 1/2 of their parking spots equipped with a faster charger (1/4 if there is a way to limit them to people charging)

Yeah this is another concern I have. When I have time to fast-charge, it's likely the same time that a lot of other people want to fast-charge, such as during lunch. So you'd have to overbuild fast-chargers to meet peak demand.

Gas stations have this problem too but it's not as bad, because filling up a fuel tank takes maybe 5 minutes not 20-30.

City Vans have completely died in America for the last few years until the Promaster City's recent resurrection. Something like this is a dire need for in city tradesmen in the US.

My boss's have been asking me how life is with my Ford E-Transit, but it doesn't have enough range for most of our site technicians which end up driving 200-300 miles a day.

I hear the Kia PV5 is pretty much sold-out world-wide and delivery is now 2027 in most markets.

A reasonably priced cargo van with decent range was a large untapped market for far too long.

I really hope it gets a US market release. So far only Ford (e-transit) and VW (id.BUZZ) have attempted EV vans in the US and they both cost extreme amounts of money new.

I bought an E-Transit anyway to setup as a Home/Office on wheels. Really hoping that in the future we see aftermarket long range batteries for these first two decades of mass market EV's being produced.

There's also Mercedes (eSprinter).

Electric vans will remain ecpensive until the eSUV market has been saturated: the cost to make either is similar, and using the limited inputs and lines to make more of the lower-margin vehicle model makes no sense when the market can absorb more of the higher-margin ones.

I see Rivian vans all the time.

Amazon is a Rivian investor and ordered a bunch of them.

Rivian vans start at $80k, which is in the same ballpark as the R1S starting price of $83. Rivian axed the cheapest SUV trim in its line-up, so we're even less likely to see cheaper Rivian vans now.

Ah yeah I forgot the eSprinter and Rivian Van because they are both $80k-100K depending on how you outfit them.

Similarly the GM BrightSpot Vans (which are now dead as a platform).

Although if you get lucky you can find used GM Bright Spots for $40k, and used E-Transits for $20k. Haven't seen any used eSprinters yet on the market.

> wheel upgrade

At the same size (17"), going from steel to alloy improves performance but reduces durability. Larger wheels (20") are generally a downgrade for performance and ride quality.

Engineering Explained has a video on this topic: NYvKxsYFqO8

Yeah, I kept 17", but went to alloy (I think).

Downgrade in ride quality for sure, but that’s the first I’ve heard of it being a performance downgrade. Will check out the video later to learn more.

Maybe just due to lift. Thinner wheels and lower car is better aerodynamics

Typically larger wheels come with lower profile tires, such that the total diameter of the tire stays about the same.

That means, for a given spindle height, the car ride height is the same regardless of wheel diameter.

I believe the smaller wheels accelerate better because they are lighter, but corner worse. The smaller wheels also get better efficiency.

tldw:

- wider wheels are marginally less efficient but almost negligible

- rims with larger diameter have larger air resistance. Probably because the rim patterns intersects the air in weird ways but it's not explained. Tire walls are relatively smooth, so tires with higher aspect are way more aero-efficient despite having more marginally lower rolling resistance.

> still pretty inexpensive

Can we stop being so out of touch and/or deluding ourselves to believe $35k is “pretty inexpensive” for people not living in a bubble; whether that is the Americas bubble or the tech bubble within the bubble or the urban bubble within that; let alone for a tiny two seater electric truck that has a 200 mile range.

The 45th percentile, i.e., the bottom 90% have a median income of roughly $40,000. $35,000 for a enclosed covered or even hatchback type mini SUV is not reasonable and you know very well when they come out with that, it’s going to be at least $40,000. None of that is inexpensive or even pretty inexpensive. That’s just rationalization and coping, trying to convince ourselves and others of things that are incongruent.

“Pretty inexpensive” would be an enclosed bed version that cost $22,000 maybe.

For additional context; the industry standard measure of income to cost ratio has risen from 9.3 weeks of household income gross pay for a baseline vehicle, i.e., civic, in 1973 to, 16.5 weeks of gross pay in 2024; and that’s based on the fraudulent official inflation numbers.

Yet more context, a civic can seat 5 people and still has a range of 450 miles on a tank of gasoline that you can find all over the place, even in far off rural places OSD puppy can carry gasoline with you if need be.

There is no sense in rationalizing and deluding ourselves about the real limitations that still exists that are real and are why adoption is not matching imaginations.

> tank of gasoline that you can find all over the place

I can find electricity in far more places than I can gasoline. It even comes out of my walls. Do you have gasoline piping throughout your home?

Lots of people only have street parking or their apartment complex has detached parking where they can't realistically charge overnight.

But otherwise... Yeah, That's absolutely amazing to wake up every morning to a full tank/charge

My mom has an EV, and when my parents bought their condo they got a promise in writing that they could install a charger at their parking spot. Condo board reneged on that agreement and so she's selling her EV to buy a hybrid. If gas prices return to pre-Iran-war it will be cheaper than paying to use an L3 charger, and even if they don't it will be far more convenient.

Sorry to hear that the HOA is earning their reputation :(.

> If gas prices return to pre-Iran-war it will be cheaper than paying to use an L3 charger, and even if they don't it will be far more convenient.

Yeah, that's Toyota's main argument for not diving head-first into EVs. Yes, merging the two technologies means you have the complexity of both... but after a decade+ of experience, they've gotten it down to be pretty reliable.

For a lot of people, that's still the best choice assuming you don't mind the budget for wear-items / oil changes ... etc. When my current econobox is _done_, I will probably go straight to EV just so I don't have wear-items to deal with and because I either drive a few hundred miles per week or fly. I don't need to account for family road trips or anything else that make the ubiquitous fuel station network worth it.

> merging the two technologies means you have the complexity of both

I (and many others) would actually argue many common hybrid drivetrains are actually simpler than many ICE-only drivetrains.

Things like transmissions and complicated AWD setups are incredibly complex. Planetary gear sets and using an electric motor for the rear axle to add AWD can make things vastly simpler mechanically than a regular pure-ICE. You need a computer to get it to all play nice, but in terms of moving parts and things rubbing it can be a lot simpler.

I can find 1000 watts of electric anyplace. However to get any reasonable range from that means my car has to sit there 3-4 days! This works for me because I only make the long trips on weekends (I ride my bike to work when the weather allows).

For practical EV purposes there is not electric everywhere. If there isn't enough at home chargers are hard to find. Sure they are all over - but they are not advertised and not at every exit: you need an app to find them. Using an app is not safe when you are driving so you better have someone else with you to figure out how to find them or plan ahead.

Batteries are good at averaging out usage. Anybody who averages under 40 miles a day can do almost all of their charging overnight on a 120V outlet. As long as most nights you charge more than you use eventually it hits a full charge and is ready for your next long trip.

This is just fundamentally not true, literally every single home in the USA is capable of level 2 charging, the question is just do they have a 240v outlet somewhere nearby to a garage or parking spot.

Using apps like ABRP you can easily schedule your drip to have the optimal stops for route planning based on your battery technology, if you are doing a drive long enough to have multiple stops that should be part of your travel planning even with a gas car alongside a pre-trip check.

You can easily circumnavigate the entire USA with an EV that supports NACS!

> every single home in the USA is capable of level 2 charging

Agreed

> the question is just do they have a 240v outlet somewhere nearby to a garage or parking spot.

They almost never do. This is the key thing you are not understanding about my reply. We can get level 2 anywhere, but most of the time it means you have to have an electrician.

> Using apps like ABRP

That is my objection. When I drive a gas car don't need an app. I drive until my gauge gets "low" and then find the next gas station - I can be assured that almost anywhere I will make it to a gas station if I start looking when the gauge reaches 1/8 (though I refuse to let it go below 1/4 for safety reasons). No app needed for gas, there are big signs everywhere that alert me where I can fill up. Last road trip I looked for those signs wondering if I could have used the EV and there wasn't 1 in 300 miles: then I pulled up the app, and there were plenty - but none where in places you could see from the main road and none advertised (they were also a lot less common than gas stations)

> They almost never do. This is the key thing you are not understanding about my reply. We can get level 2 anywhere, but most of the time it means you have to have an electrician.

In my personal experience most, homes have a dryer outlet in the washroom connected to the garage at least in TX. It's no bother running a cable from the washroom to the garage.

> That is my objection. When I drive a gas car don't need an app

Any time I am making a long drive I always use a GPS app such as Waze or Apple Maps, I don't know what's on the road ahead traffic, accidents and closures the app will re-route me appropriately and optimally. If you made a drive so regularly you felt like you didn't need an app then you would already know on that route where charging stations are.

I do agree they are less common than gas stations because of a few reasons but that's set to change with time and market adoption.

TX is the key. Where I live nobody would put a washroom in an unheated space - the pipes would freeze and break. Thus no easy to get at dryer outlet. I'm not sure how far north things change, but my impression is not very. Rest areas in TX often don't put doors on the restrooms (thus heat is not possible), but OK does - implying that it gets cold enough to need them (but this was also very different ages of building so not a fair comparison)

I use a GPS when I don't know the route, but I've been to parents in a different state several times - I don't need a GPS interrupting my music to get there.

I agree EV chargers are being installed and will be installed more and more.

FWIW, placing a climate-controlled laundry room or mud room between the house and the garage is pretty common here in VA. It might not have the dryer (washer/dryer have mostly moved upstairs to bedroom level for new builds), but there's a good chance it won't be hard to pull that 240 circuit into the garage.

That's assuming you have a garage and the breaker box isn't already in it, which is also common.

Of course, I have neither, so installing a car charger would be expensive. Thus my continued use of ICE vehicles.

I do have my laundry room right next to the garage. However, I would not consider it a useful place to plug in a car, except maybe as an extreme emergency. It requires moving the dryer out of the way since the outlet is near the floor behind it. While this is certainly possible to do, it's not exactly easy. Also, your typical dryer plug is built to remain plugged in for years on end and so even if you would try this, it will wear out the socket really quick.

You can get a "Dryer Buddy" or similar transfer switch and plug both the car and dryer into it.

Depending on how far your commute is. Level 1 charging may be appropriate for you.

Overnight charging will give you approx. 30 miles of range (depending on the car and state of charge). It's really hard to know without having an electric car for some time if it's going to be annoying for you.

We do get below freezing weather here. The washroom is conditioned space that leads to the garage. This is pretty common in most slab-on-grade homes since they do not have a basement

Also, who the hell still uses GPS instruction its annoying. I always have my gps muted

Tell me about this "garage" it sounds magical. ;)

For me, installing a 240V outlet for charging would entail...

Running a new circuit from the breaker box (back wall of basement) to the front facade (40' forward, 1 level up) with whatever drywall patching/paint comes with that.

That gets the outlet. But, I don't have a driveway, so I'd need to trench my front yard and the public sidewalk in front of my house, so I can pull the charge line through to the front edge of the curbing adjacent to my parking space.

I figure all-in, that's a $10k buy-in that only serves one of my two cars, so I'm stuck rotating cars every few days (not a big deal, just not ideal). Only one of my parking spaces is assigned - the other is "guest parking" open to anybody.

And I fully realize my situation might not be the norm, but it's not far off for many TH or condo residents.

It isn't legal to have multiple receptacles on 20A+ circuits. New work has to connect to a panel directly.

> That is my objection. When I drive a gas car don't need an app. I drive until my gauge gets "low" and then find the next gas station

You may use your phones maps app while driving to show you the nearest gas station, or even the cheapest. You might also do the same with EV charging.

> This is just fundamentally not true, literally every single home in the USA is capable of level 2 charging, the question is just do they have a 240v outlet somewhere nearby to a garage or parking spot.

Technically true, but if you've only got 60 amp service to your home because it was built in 1955 and the cost to run a new service line is greater than the cost of a new car, it's pretty difficult to get any useful amperage to your level 2 charger.

The price of a 200-amp service upgrade should not cost more than $25,000. Even in the most extreme examples it shouldn't come anywhere near to that cost.

$25k would be on the low end for what my the electric provider charges for houses located like mine. That's just the cost of horizontal drilling and installing conduit.

Pulling the service wire, upgrading the panel, etc. are all normally priced.

See https://www.titam.ca/2021/05/cost-to-upgrade-underground-ele...

The transformer for my house is two lots away and under a pathway.

Would be less expensive to install a natural gas generator and connect an EV directly to that whenever I need to charge it.

My argument for pricing is based on the USA. A large majority of homes are connected via overhead hookup and often do not require a transformer replacement since they are oversized a reasonable margin and have been for decades, it only usually requires fairly minimal work.

Also, your price is in CAD not USD

Also also, for the case that you already have power unless it was installed a long time ago its probably already in conduit and doesn't require any horizontal drilling

There are lots of vehicles available for $22K. On the used market. Buying new is a privilege.

A $35K vehicle will reach $22K on the used market a lot faster than a $60K vehicle will.

There are new hybrids available for $30k. There are new vehicles available for $22k. There are reasonable used vehicles available for $10k.

The problem with the Slate isn't that cheaper vehicles exist. The problem with the Slate is that you can buy nicer, better equipped vehicles for the same price.

...that use gasoline, and come from a dealership that is actively hostile. I'd rather take my chances on the Slate to replace my 13 year old car.

I completely agree. A base Prius is $30k. A base Kia Niro is $27k. Those are hybrids and not EV's, but 50+mpg is not bad. Those also come with power windows and many other features and creature comforts that the Slate doesn't.

$35k is not outrageous for a new car, but the Slate is supposed to be affordable basic transportation. Slate is selling barebones, stripped down basic transportation for the price of a middle class family car.

On the flip side, if you want a car that doesn't try to track you and record you, and doesn't upsell you on a subscription for seatwarmers, and doesn't use gas, Slate looks pretty attractive.

I'd be interested in what they could do for a competitor to my Geo Metro/Chevy Aveo, esp. w/ a convertible option.

The center console touchscreen is just a self contained vestigial free entertainment, not the "core" of the car by any means. They're exactly what airplane seatback monitors are.

The trackers aren't in the infotainment. Removing the infotainment do not solve the tracker problem.

But what problem would keeping the infotainment system solve?

Most people don't buy new cars, they buy used cars. Particularly in the bottom 45%, they know they can't afford a new car - they might look at them but they know they know it is a dream (or the car they will buy in 5 years). Car makers know they can only charge this price for a new car because in 3 years it will still have a lot of value left - most new car buyers never pay the full price: they only pay the difference between the cost and the value in 3 years (plus interest).

Time was, CAFE forced Detroit to build affordable cars which folks could buy new --- rather miss that --- that said, I'm never going to buy an all-electronic vehicle w/ multiple screens (still annoyed about the radio on my current vehicle going out) GPS tracking and built-in monitoring by way of a backup camera and so forth.

Even at the height of that, most people were buying used cars. However the cheap CAFE cars did bring in a few people who would be on the fence of affording a new car. Those cheap cars also got people who could afford a bigger car, but the price was compelling anyway.

I made $225k last year, still have never bought a new car. Closest I got was a 9 month old car with 29k miles on it for $15k off list price.

Seriously tempted with the Slate though. I have the $50 pre-registration down from a few years ago, so I could have it in July-August of next year.

A new Honda Civic is $25k, so the same as the Slate. The average new car price in the US is $50k, so double the Slate base price and still significantly more than the upgraded Slate I built. As far as I can tell, the US market has only one sub-$20k car - the base Nissan Versa.

The versa is dead now. The Hyundai Venue is now the cheapest base model vehicle in America at nearly $22k.

In '73 a Chevy Nova just under $2500, which CPI is just under $20k. Median household income was around $12k

$25k is about right for a cheap new car today (you can get a few base models for less than that, but good luck finding one). Median household income is around $83k. So a cheap new car cost went up by 10x but income only went up by less than 5x. Inflation implies it should cost 8x as much, but it costs 10x as much.

Of course the Chevy Nova didn't have ABS, airbags, a touch screen, an automatic transmission, power steering, or retractable seat belts. Car companies could make models without some of these (though most are required by law; can't even have a car without a screen since RVC is mandated). But now they would be competing with used cars that have most, if not all, of these things and cost less.

> Can we stop being so out of touch and/or deluding ourselves to believe $35k is “pretty inexpensive” [...] let alone for a tiny two seater electric truck that has a 200 mile range.

It suppose is "pretty inexpensive" compared to other new trucks you can buy right now. However, my much more equipped, full size truck cost less, inflation adjusted even, than this thing when it was new. Today's truck market baffles me.

Compared to gas cars: Kia K4 hatchback is $26k with a lot more creature-comforts. Gets 34mpg, so if $6/gal gas is here to stay that's $0.17 per mile of fuel costs. My EV gets almost exactly 4miles/kW average and I pay $0.21 per kW so that's about $0.05 per mile.

So $0.12 per mile saved in fuel costs implies about 80k miles for break-even.

This excludes costs of servicing, which should be higher on the gas car.

[edit typo'd an extra 0 it's 80k miles for break-even]

[edit2]

After looking up my energy bill I pay $0.27 so it's between 10 and 11 cents per mile saved. Break-even is still under 100k miles.

I think you meant 80k not 800k, $0.12 * 80,000 = $9,600

I think you've got an extra zero in there somewhere

$35k - $26k = $9k

$9k / $0.12/mile savings ~= 75,000 miles breakeven

And that is completely ignoring maintenance cost which tends to be a lot cheaper on EVs.

Somewhat cheaper anyway (30% according to https://www.thecarexpert.co.uk/petrol-vs-electric-servicing-... ), but I wouldn't be surprised if that is wiped out by the increased insurance costs.

I definitely wouldn't buy an EV based on lower service costs.

That's based on the manufacturer's "lets not upset our dealers" maintenance schedule and is completely unnecessary. In reality you can probably bring your EV to the dealer once every 4 years or so. On that schedule you should:

- check the brake fluid for water - change the cabin air filter - change the gearbox oil - check/change the battery coolant

If you're going in more frequent than that you're getting a very expensive windshield wiper replacement.

The real kicker is going to be repair costs. An EV has about 10% of the moving parts of an ICE car, so in theory repairs should be much less frequent. But if the ICE is a Toyota and the EV is a Tesla, YMMV.

You'll probably have to replace the battery at around 250,000 miles but at that point the car is worth pretty much scrap value anyways.

4 years for replacing the cabin air-filter? Do you live somewhere with no pollen or smoke?

I replace mine annually, but it's easy enough to do myself (right behind the glovebox, needs zero tools)

FWIW, my 10+ year spreadsheet of the maintenance costs on my last ICE lined up pretty well with that - about 1/3 of the costs were ICE-specific issues, 2/3 were for parts that would have been common to an EV.

> In reality you can probably bring your EV to the dealer once every 4 years or so.

Not really, I need twice-yearly seasonal tire changes/rotations.

How much of that 2/3 was brakes? In 100,000 miles on our ICE we replaced brakes twice and they likely need replacing soon again. On our EV at 100,000 miles they look like they'll last another 100,000.

Brakes were ~8.5% of the total, or ~17% of the 2/3. Some combination of being light on brake use (manual + efficient driving) and the road salt used here means I replaced the brakes from corrosion before they wore down from use.

I could budget for yearly service (rather than the never-service-until-required plan I went with) that would presumably lengthen the lives of my brakes as far as corrosion is concerned, but at current shop rates that would cost more than what my brake replacements cost.

>Not really, I need twice-yearly seasonal tire changes/rotations.

Are you somewhere where you actually need dedicated winter tires or have you just convinced yourself that rocking all weathers all year isn't feasible?

That feels like a bit of a trick question - as big as I am on dedicated winter tires, I think a lot of people are sleeping on modern all weathers.

So, living in Alberta, and spending significant time in the AB/BC rockies in the winter, I still think all weathers would be feasible, but I'm more comfortable with dedicated winters. (For that matter, when I'm buying winters, I'm always borderline on whether I should get studded or not.) (And as a parallel effect, with dedicated winters I can also run higher performance all-season tires during the summer.)

And if I ran all-weathers with my driving patterns, I'd still want to be rotating them yearly, so that would cut my dealer visits by half, but definitely not to once every 4 years.

And tying back to my last ICE vehicle - for the first 4 years of its life it would have been okay without a dealer visit if you took tires/oil changes out of the equation, but not for any 4-year period after that. There are just too many random little things that break down in cars over time. (e.g. after 12 years or so the cruise control buttons were getting really mushy - I replaced them myself for the cost of the $65 part, but YMMV on whether you feel a service visit is warranted when removing your steering wheel air bag.)

Op is in a salt state (road salt, snowy winters). Dedicated snow tires are much better than all seasons to the degree I will take a 2wd Civic (with lsd) on snow tires over 4wd 4Runner on all seasons.

Also rotating tires every 10-20k miles is good because most cars run higher camber in the rear (inner shoulder wear) than front and the fronts wear the outside shoulder more because of turning. Swapping them extends tire life by spreading the wear.

The OP was asking about all weather tires which are rated for winter use in places like Quebec which require winter tires.

Not about all seasons, which are not rated for winter use.

$.21/kw seems high for home charging... im at $.12, before the extra savings that gets me closer to $.10

Varies widely by state and other factors. I'm at around $0.18 for 1kWh when you look at the overall bill including generation, supply, and all other fees.

(My car averages 3.3 miles / kWh, so ~$0.055 / mile assuming 100% charge efficiency... I'm using a 120V outlet so it's probably 75-80% charge efficiency, pushing the cost to ~$0.068 / mile.)

Is using a 120V charger really only 80% charge efficiency? That would add another penny or two per mile to my cost.

https://insideevs.com/features/711659/ev-charger-efficiency-...

Suggests up to 25% loss if your just plugging into an outlet, but a wallbox improves that considerably.

I was at $0.12 3 years ago, but rates have jumped (and there's two more years of planned rate increases coming up)

$0.21 was from memory, so I pulled up my bill and it was actually low:

Southern California Edison on the time-of-use plan, charging during "Super off peak." Note that nowhere on the bill do they show one number for how much you pay per kWh. These numbers will change next month as we go from "Winter" to "Summer"

Delivery charges: $0.17664

CCA Cost responsibility surcharge: $0.02007

Nonbypassable charges: $0.00644 + $0.00591

Fixed recovery charge: $0.00619

Generation charge: $0.05958

Unless I typoed something again (oops 800k) that works out to $0.27 for the cheapest I can pay in winter. I compared last fall and this was by far the cheapest plan offered to me for overnight charging.

Just got my first summer bill, it's about $0.02 more per kWh, so $0.29

And yet half what they charge in some areas of California

California (and many other states) also charges you an additional annual EV registration fee of $121 in lieu of gas taxes. There was some noise earlier this year about a federal EV tax too.

I wish they'd just tax the tires. Bigger vehicles, more tires, more wear.

That might have the unintended consequence of people running tires bald and getting in more accidents?

Then we'll tax the accidents.

Not sure if I'm out of touch, but this looks like such a minor difference in cost that I'd expect people to not even take cost into consideration while making the EV vs gas decision.

Factors like the (perceived) environment friendliness, comfort and (in)convenience are likely to be much more important.

There isn’t a hatchback option. Did you mean fastback?

Yeah, whatever the 4-seater with a notchback style is called.

A base trim Hyundai Ioniq 5 is now $35K in the US. The Slate looks very cool, I'd take 3, but it doesn't seem a good value as basic transportation, not including the perceived value of no telemetry, etc.

I don’t care that it’s EV. I’m just stoked that they’re making an actually modular system like this. I don’t know why it’s not possible with other cars.

The modularity is there with classic manufacturers too, just not "exposed" to the buyer. Cars use a common platform and you can still buy the classic or fastback, different styling packages, but you won't be able to self service them after the sale. I don't really know how much Slate is the Framework of the auto world, and how much it's just customization options at purchase time.

Most people who buy a car would never be bothered to "tweak" it later, upgrade, add stuff. Modularity also constrains the design and could add some reliability issues.

The biggest benefit would be home repairability so I think that's a big driver for why other manufacturers don't do it. EVs already require less maintenance so that's lost revenue.

P.S. Looking at the options on the site, other than the body style everything else is just as easy to have on any other car. Most of the customization is purely esthetic (wraps, decals, rim options, light plates) and even the practical options like light bars or roof racks are common in the OEM world for any classic brand.

The difference is that with a slate you’re not limited to buying one of the versions of the modular platform - you can swap them out yourself.

Want an open air 5 seater in the summer and an enclosed pickup the rest of the year, except for November when you really want an SUV? Sure, no problem.

This concept makes a lot of sense for first time car buyers. Having never owned a car, maybe being fresh out of college, a car can be a big leap. What will it need, what will it do? Commute? Car pool? Camping? Moving? Boating?

If the customization can be done after the fact it lowers the risk of buying.

Makes sense to me.

Have you tried to get an EV part independent of a dealership?

It makes sense for a utility truck to be modular. I cant say the same for vans and sedans.

Tesla made some progress with this, but it’s the dealer network. The existing manufacturers are beholden to it and $200 oil changes.

$200 oil change?! I pay $85 for a 5.7L V8 with a 7.5 quart capacity. Who is paying $200???

If you go to a BMW or Mercedes dealership with no coupons or anything it'll be about that.

It's less that the oil change costs that much and more that they don't want you to show up with a car they've never seen for an oil change when they can make more doing other work in that bay. So it's priced to keep people out rather than to draw people in.

My stealership wanted $158 for the 10k mile maintenance for my EV. That maintenance is a visual inspection, tire rotation and "high voltage battery test" (meaning they plug it into their charger for 5 minutes and see if it charges).

I can charge it at home. The tire discounters by me charges $15 for a rotation if they didn't sell you the tires, and they do the inspection to see if there's anything they can sell you.

Oil changes aren't the best example. They're pretty easy to do at home for basically everything and filters are pretty standardized.

But car batteries, brake pads, tire pressure sensors are all becoming increasingly software-locked in. We're lacking open standards for this stuff.

GMC made a modular system for like 50 years, it's called the SBC.

Web search found the "small-block crate" engine as what GM's SBC is. You're saying an engine makes a vehicle modular?

https://kagi.com/search?q=gmc+sbc

Small Block Chevy.

You're saying an engine makes a vehicle modular?

https://www.andysautowreckers.ca they have a field of junk cars that people come in & harvest parts from

I decided I hate their website. If I'm looking for a part, sometimes the part applies to multiple model years and I'm not convinced that they've organized it with that taken into account. Also, I don't necessarily want to search for a specific part -- I may just want to know if they have certain vehicles. Why can't I just search by make/model/year and give me a list of all parts. If that's too taxing on the database add in classifiers like "electrical" "interior" or whatever the hell else. And the initial search form is enraging because it "tries to help" by automatically selecting the subsequent dropdown when I'm already clicking it and it sends me into the wrong section.

They're not organized: you go into the yard, find the vehicle you're looking for, take the part out yourself, & they weigh it on the way out

Then why do they use the complex part search?

The tradeoff is creaks and rattles.

Is it modular enough for creaks and rattles to be a concern?

I blame the dealers, at least somewhat. In the early days of the Scion brand, the idea was something like, all of the cars are shipped to the dealer as base models, customers could choose from a menu of add-ons, and the dealer would install them. Want just the basic car? Fine. Want to add keyless entry and mood lighting and a CD changer and chrome alloy wheels? They'll add those for you.

But (at least in my experience), that made for a worse product than having factory installation and QA. I bought a brand-new car from a Scion dealer in 2005 and indicated I wanted to add keyless entry. I paid the dealer, they did the install, and I left ... with a car that would intermittently fail to lock some doors with the key fob. I realized shortly thereafter that the dealer had installed an aftermarket system to save money rather than the offical Scion keyless entry system. I complained and eventually got them to install the right system, but jeez, that did not enhance my experience compared to just finding a car that was built in a factory with the options I wanted.

I'm not saying the modular Slate pickup isn't cool. I'm kind of tempted by it. But I wouldn't be surprised if people find themselves with leaky roofs, electrical gremlins and random squeaks and rattles compared to if they just bought some other truck/SUV and left it alone.

Also assembly lines can achieve the scale factors needed to pay for all the jigs needed. A dealer doesn't sell enough cars to afford those expensive jigs. Making your cars in the factory is nearly always going to be cheaper the dealer customization. The dealer can do minor things that are quick and easy, but putting a different back on the bed on is something the factory should be able to do better and cheaper.

Ideally you would design it perfectly self centering, fool prove install and so on. So that the cost at the dealer would be small and quality high. But that's easier said then done, specially if you move deeper into the available features.

I vaguely remember that from the Scion days. I wonder what that does to liability? Like if it's something that impacts the safety of the vehicle - like a roll bar? - who takes on the liability if it's a dealer option?

Probably depends on who made the mistake. If the design is faulty the designer, if the part itself is faulty factory, if the installation was wrong even though the instructions were reasonable, the person doing the installation.

They are significantly simpler than something that needs to burn fuel and have a transmission system.

it kinda is with old defenders. with a bit of work I can turn mine into a pickup or whatever

Does the modularity make it easy to steal the accessories? I'd be sad if my new customized truck were downgraded to the base model while parked on the street overnight.

Third-party mods might be the trick here.

Does Apple use encryption to ensure hardware is matched and is harder to repurpose? Lol

My favorite part about this vehicle is no stupid center console touch screen. Hopefully aftermarket dash kits for a DIN radio become available and we can put proper audio and control back into our vehicles and remove the tyrannical center console screens.

I love the lack of a center console touch screen precisely so I can add one I made myself with a raspberry pi and some cool shit from adafruit

Entertainment, telemetry, weapons systems?

I was moreso thinking music, gps, and control of the cars ac/heating. Maybe also the control of some LED strips for decoration. Also, random sensor readouts would be cool. Sure, most cars have thermometers but how many cars have geiger counters?

Weapons systems do sound pretty sick though

https://youtu.be/9nJtXiK7bPk?si=rPyR3FpOIVRfa3mG

I'm surprised I haven't seen a generic "turn a raspi into carplay" firmware or anything of that sort.

There have been attempts but most of them kinda suck. One of them is a webapp and another requires you to install android

I love that there are physical buttons for all of the car functions (fuck trying to adjust the temperature/audio/car settings on a touchscreen while driving) but I do feel like having an optional component for a large 1st party screen which sits in the dash with Android Auto/Apple CarPlay would be nice instead of only having the phone mount option.

I have a 2022 CR-V and thankfully has knobs for the volume, and temperature controls with a few buttons. The touch screen actually crashed on me the other day while driving. I had to pull over to turn the car off and wait for the power module to kill the power to the screen as it didn't shut off (WTF happened to off being off!) I HATE these things with a passion.

I suppose the alternative would be not having a screen to pull over and bother trying to restart. Either way, having it as a modular option wouldn't force anyone to get it the same as the options for speakers or paint don't force those choices either.

Many people will be pleased to have a vehicle with no communication, sensor, or surveillance systems.

It's hard to estimate how important that might be now that all other cars force them on everyone.

It’s going to be very interesting. Has Slate identified an under-served market? Will they see mainstream success?

Or is this another iPhone Mini / Framework / sports wagon where a small, passionate minority ends up disappointed and angry that their priorities are not shared by the mainstream?

I sincerely hope for the former. We need lower-cost vehicles, I like diverse product offerings, and this is a purist’s take on a small truck. But then I like small phones, (the idea of) repairable laptops, and sports wagons.

Strange to put Framework in this category... They seem reasonably successful and even the company I work at is switching to them.

The iPhone mini was reasonably successful; it shipped more units than Framework has in the life of the company (about 15m iPhone minis based on reports of if being ~4% of iPhone 12 and 13 sales, vs hard to find estimates of Framework but none over 1m).

Framework is making a go of being a niche provider, which is great. But they are currently estimated to have less than 0.1% of the laptop market.

> a vehicle with no communication, sensor, or surveillance systems

Do we know that? The website seems silent on the topic, unless I've missed something.

As we used to say in the car business, "it comes with a heater and paint."

In this case, not even paint, but you can buy decals and wraps.

It's most likely will have comms. And it will make 0 difference for most people. Having your most expensive asset NOT have basic tracking is insanity. That said I'm all in for all of this to be easily disabled even tho I struggle to find a valid reason (in actual dictatorships you are fucked multiple ways anyway and in democratic ones you are about to do crime).

Gotta get a GPS for my house lol

Smoke alarm is already a legal requirement. HomePod already sends notifications to your phone when it triggers. Mine of course had false alarms while I was abroad, so I verified using air quality monitor I got for co2 that also does particles.

You must be very naive to think that this app that you would need for this vehicle won’t do all that.

It doesn't require an app, hell if you even want a modem in it you need to pay extra.

Edit: it only needs an app for updates, which isn't notably different than taking you older pre-modem cars into the dealer for updates. Also I can't find any evidence that the base model even has a GPS built in.

Interesting. Well hope this is what lands. Tracking all metrics and location is a bit out of control

Saw this on Jay Leno's youtube channel: https://youtu.be/L6_9_HHLOSY

Everything about modularity seems awesome, but you can see panel misalignment in several shots. Are the component tolerances really going to be that low?

I believe all of these previews are using pre-production units. Production units should be better built with better tolerances since it becomes all factory done, but that's definitely something you'd have to wait and see when it actually begins shipping.

That said, given the price point and the new-ness of the manufacturer, there's all but certainly going to be fit & finish issues.

Tesla normalized bad panel gaps in production EVs. I don't really think they matter that much as say suspension creaks, performance and reliability and general useability

Not a strictly recent thing --- I am still baffled that my father took possession of a new Ford Escort station wagon in 1981 where the front fascia was offset to the passenger side by a quite visible 1/8".

... in Teslas. Not in "production EVs."

I wish the design was more function over form. Why is the grill so large? A lower front end would improve efficiency (and thus probably give another 10-20 miles of range), improve visibility, and kill fewer pedestrians.

I know why, the market is nostalgia and it wouldn't sell well if it looked more like a mini kenworth which has a hood that slopes down and in and less like a pickup truck.

That low range is going to turn off a bunch of buyers. I doubt another 10-20 miles of range would capture more buyers than a non-traditional shape would turn off. But I wish the market was that rational.

They have a lowering kit, but it’s “coming soon” and it costs extra

Yeah 200 miles is pretty much the low end of what I'd consider (and I assume that is an "absolute best case" number, e.g. unloaded at a constant speed on a flat road, not running AC or heat but IDK how those are actually computed).

300-350 miles would be a lot better. That would cover most of my trips (and allow for some payload) with a little bit to spare before I needed to stop to charge.

I guess the price isn't too bad. I still remember something like a Toyota or a Ford Ranger or Chevy S10 selling for under 10K new, but inflation and all... probably not terrible for a compact truck in 2026.

I guess it depends on the person.

200 miles more than covers all of the driving I do on any normal day. Today is an exceptional day, and I'll be driving a total of 120 miles for work. The Slate would cover that just fine with a ton of breathing room.

I do take far longer trips than that for pleasure, but they're rare.

I think if I only had an EV to drive, and that EV could only do 200 miles on a charge, then I'd be able to figure out how to make these <5% events work for me.

(I can use a break after a couple/few hours on the road, anyway.)

Once you reach a reasonable threshold, fast charging is more important than capacity. 200 miles is that threshold IMO, but Slate is "200 miles doing 55 in the summer". I want "200 miles doing 70 in the winter". And the Slate's charging isn't particularly fast: 20-80% in 30 minutes.

Sounds great!

I can live within those limitations.

It does depend on the person for sure. I can see 200 being adequate for many cases. It's even still something I'm considering. I'd like to get a small truck again, they are just so useful if you are a homeowner, but I do a 220 mile drive about once a month and that's often enough that I'd ideally want to have that covered. Stopping for a top-up charge on a bathroom break might be OK, but I haven't ever looked at the locations where that would be possible, and if there are times when a wait would be likely, etc.

I own a Polestar 2 with an effective 75 kWh battery and an average efficiency of 3.3 mi / kWh. So 248 mile range if you charge to 100% and run it down to 0%.

Real world, 99.9% of driving I do is well under 100 miles per day, and my charging between 6pm and 8am on a 120V outlet adds 50-60 miles. You could plug in every night, but in practice I wait until the battery is below 40%, and tend to plug in every 1-2 weeks depending on how much I use it.

It's been driven over 200 miles in a single day twice, and each time the car was charged for 15-20 minutes at a fast charger to top up. shrug

For many people, in real world usage, 205 mile range is great for how you'll actually use the truck.

> average efficiency of 3.3 mi / kWh.

I'm curious, is that your personal average or is that what the company claims?

I've not taken the plunge on an EV yet, but realistically I'm interested in the actual range driving 70-75mph on the highway, with the AC running, as compared to the manufacturer's claims.

A good rule of thumb across most makes is to take the EPA range number and multiply by 0.85, and that’s what you’ll get at a constant 70-75 mph in moderate weather (say, 55-85 degrees) with the climate control on.

Of course, you probably want to arrive at your next charge stop with 5-10%, and the top 10% of the battery charges very slowly in all EVs, so you normally multiply by another 0.80 factor to take that into account.

Probably worth noting that Polestar 2s are not particularly efficient, though lovely to drive. Mine averages about 3.2mi/kWh for most trips, though there are lots of EVs out there getting 4+ miles/kWh.

That's my personal... to get the 260 mile advertised range on 75 kWh battery, it would have to average 3.47 mi / kWh. I sometimes get over 4... but I also often get under 3 (especially in winter, when 2.5 is common.) Highway at those speeds in the summer (with AC) is ~3 or so which gives you ~225 effective road trip range between fill-ups.

Most EVs are owned by people who also have an ICE car. Especially for this vehicle I would expect this to be the case even more so. That makes me wonder if a lower price with an even lower range would actually have been a reasonable tradeoff. That said, range anxiety seems to be a huge thing.

There's still an undisclosed larger battery option, I hope it would be less than $5k additional to unlock a 300 mile range.

I think they increased the base battery range and ditched the extended battery option.

A lower hood would shrink the size of the frunk. Also, this isn't a tall vehicle by any means.

Interested to see how this turns out. I'd like to see a size comparison. Is this actually a reasonably-sized vehicle, like a pre-2000 pickup, or just a cheap modern monster truck? Sadly it's not on carsized.com (yet).

If the company is still around 5 years from now, I could see myself getting one of these to replace our current "compact" (but still enormous) SUV.

https://www.slate.auto/en they have a size comparison if you scroll down about 3 pages.

Oh wow sure enough, I just needed to scroll down. It does look like a human-scale vehicle. Thank you.

Yet it still has a relatively tall, straight hood that tends to drag people underneath the car. These designs are terrible in pedestrian accidents; to a significantly greater degree when children are involved.

The hood is very short and you sit way closer to the ground. I have driven one of their comparison vehicles (the 1985 toyota) with a very similar profile. There is no way you are missing someone in front of you compare to other vehicles. This thing sits lower and gives better visibility than many SUVs people are driving. This truck is small.

It's still square rather than sloped, and higher than massive vehicles like the Pacifica. It might be low enough that it'll bounce an adult off the hood rather than drag them underneath, but it'll still drag kids underneath.

That 1985 Toyota had a radiator in the grill so had a reason for that shape. This truck doesn't.

Compared to that Toyota the sightlines are objectively worse with the longer hood. Using the comparison cars the hood stands at 1.12m before the sloped part; a 6 year old could easily stand in front of that and you'd never see them.

Compared to a Toyota corolla, there's at least a 50% higher fatality risk in pedestrian accidents solely from the higher hood. That's for the general population. Given how these fatalities usually work, the risk to children is exponentially higher. There are dozens of studies on this.

No, this car isn't the worse offender, but lets not forget the important part here: This hood design is exclusively done for aesthetics.

You've got the direction right, but the numbers are inflated in the Slate's disfavor. The 1.12m is an unmeasured estimate of the hood's high point; the figure that actually drives risk is the leading edge, realistically ~40–42" here — the very floor of the "tall" category. The "50%+ solely from the hood" is really IIHS's 45%, and that's a bin average for everything over 40", a group dominated by full-size trucks whose leading edges sit at 46–50"+. A vehicle sitting right at the 40" line doesn't carry that average, and the 45% bundles height with front-end shape, so it was never "solely" the hood. The F-150 and Silverado people are actually buying are a clear tier worse than the truck you're complaining about.

Kids, women, and the elderly do take a disproportionate share, but nobody measured anything "exponential". "Dozens of studies" is fair. "Exclusively for aesthetics" isn't, though: the front houses a 7 cu ft frunk, and more importantly the Slate's short hood and modest height give it a smaller forward blind zone and better sight-lines than a full-size truck, which is the axis that decides whether the driver sees the kid at all, and the one the 45% fatality stat doesn't even cover. The real villains here are taller, longer-nosed, and parked in way more driveways than this thing will ever be.

This vehicle is a step in the right direction, especially for the urban environment. If we really cared, everyone would drive a Honda Acty in urban zones.

Yeah, really enjoyed the size comparison.

These things remind me of my dad's 90's ford ranger. I would love a small functional pickup. I don't need to drive a battle-tank around town. If all works out for these trucks, it's a top contender for my money in the near future.

> my dad's 90's ford ranger

The only reason it takes an EV to get this is CAFE.

The maverick isn't an EV

The Maverick is barley a truck. It's a unibody SUV with a small truck bed. Its built on the Escape/Bronco Sport platform.

The dimensions of the maverick vs a 1990's ford ranger are almost identical. The Maverick is slightly bigger.

So if the maverick is barely a truck, then the 1990's ford ranger is barely a truck too.

Size has nothing to do with it. The Rangers were body on frame.

truck [truhk] / trʌk / noun

> any of various forms of vehicle for carrying goods and materials, usually consisting of a single self-propelled unit but also often composed of a trailer vehicle hauled by a tractor unit.

> any of various wheeled frames used for transporting heavy objects.

> Also called hand truck. a barrowlike frame with low wheels, a ledge at the bottom, and handles at the top, used to move heavy luggage, packages, cartons, etc.

> a low, rectangular frame on which heavy boxes, crates, trunks, etc., are moved; a dolly.

> a tiered framework on casters.

> a group of two or more pairs of wheels in one frame, for supporting one end of a railroad car, locomotive, etc.

> Movies. a dolly on which a camera is mounted.

> British. a freight car having no top.

> a small wooden wheel, cylinder, or roller, as on certain old-style gun carriages.

> Nautical. a circular or square piece of wood fixed on the head of a mast or the top of a flagstaff, usually containing small holes for signal halyards.

I see no mention of "body on frame" as part of what makes a truck a truck.

It's not that complicated. When you buckle your unibody, you'll understand.

Maybe don't do that?

1990 Ranger Regular Cab Short Bed [1] 108in wheel base, 175.6in long, 66.9in wide, 6ft bed.

2025 Ford Maverick 121.1 inch wheel base, 199.7in long, 72.6in wide, 4.5ft bed.

1990 Ford F150 Regular Cab Short Bed 119.9 wheelbase, 202.2in long, 78.4in wide. 6.5ft bed.

Idk how you get "almost identical" out of those numbers, unless you are using the long bed ranger or an extended cab short bed ranger. Even the longest 1990 ranger was shorter than a Maverick by a few inches.

The Maverick is actually the size of an F150 from 1990. Similar to how the Colorado/Ranger today is the size of a full size truck in the 2000's

The Maverick is barely a truck because of the bed size. But a lot of modern trucks have comically small useless beds so it is hard to fault it for that.

[1]https://www.therangerstation.com/tech/ford-ranger-dimensions...

> The Maverick is actually the size of an F150 from 1990. Similar to how the Colorado/Ranger today is the size of a full size truck in the 2000's

A 13th gen RCSB F-150 is only modestly larger than a 1990 RCSB by your definition here, but we know that's not practically true because you are only comparing very specific measurements. Anyone that's had an OBS and been around Mavericks would never say the Maverick is the actual size of an OBS F-150.

Trucks are bigger than ever, that's self evident, but saying an OBS and Maverick are the same size is a stretch.

> The Maverick is barely a truck because of the bed size. But a lot of modern trucks have comically small useless beds so it is hard to fault it for that.

Well it fits sheets of 4x8. I finished half my basement with supplies and tools trucked around in my Mav. Wouldn't have been any easier with an F-150. Would have been more difficult with my hatchback.

Sure, but for most potential buyers, that's not a problem, and the ride/handling is better than a body-on-frame compact pickup.

It's pretty big, too

Indeed, it's wider and taller. And more importantly, it's unibody.

I have a 91 Ranger Club Cab, 4.0L RWD sitting around waiting to get used again. The only reason I upgraded (2016 Tacoma) was because of how bad it was in the winter (Western Canada, lots of snow and ice). Couldn’t get good tires for it anymore (15” is so passé) and often got stuck on flat icy surfaces. If it had been 4WD I’d probably still be driving it every day.

I love the Tacoma for a lot of reasons, but that Ranger really had a lot going for it in the summer.

Loved that Ranger my father owned. Rolled it onto the driver's side, totalling it. Still have road rash on my left forearm from when the window broke mid-accident and my left arm dragged a touch.

Really excited to see this one step closer to release! My first car was a 1999 Mazda b2500 (a rebadged ford ranger). I’m sure I have a bit of nostalgia around it but I’ve missed the compact simplicity of that vehicle ever since. It had manual locks, crank windows, a manual transmission, and sat about 2.5 people. I distinctly remember in that truck that I could very comfortably lean over and crank down the passenger window without taking my eyes off of the road.

This feels much more like a spiritual successor to that truck than the actual new Ranger or Maverick. I’m really hoping this succeeds so that they’ll be around to replace our Dakota when it dies!

The b2500 was great. My buddy's dad had one and we would take it to go fishing. This and the 95 or so Ford F-150 are _the_ canonical trucks to me.

It's at the second to last page where it says it's an EV. I didn't know and had to scroll down. Also there is no mention of range on one charge, which I think is a miss. The range (especially for an EV) must be on the landing page.

The modular design is cool though.

Good criticism. It looks like the car's EV tech is average at best; definitely not outstanding. That's probably why they don't advertise it strongly, and also probably a big factor in why it's so cheap.

They list some details on the Specs page[1]. They quote 200 miles of range, which is not great especially for a small car. They list a 20-80 charge time of 30 minutes so it's probably a 400V architecture, which is becoming outdated as 800V architectures and chargers exist now.

Seems like a fine about-town car, but probably not a great one for road trips. I think that probably aligns with the NVH[2] expectations you should have for a car of this price.

[1] https://www.slate.auto/en/specs

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise,_vibration,_and_harshnes...

That range is typical for European mass-market EV cars.

That's cool. This is a US market vehicle. The geography of the US is very, very different from Europe, so I don't think expectations for the European market are terribly useful for a US market vehicle. Have a play around with https://thetruesize.com and https://luminocity3d.org/WorldPopDen .

200mi is definitely acceptable in the US, but it's on the low end of the acceptable spectrum.

Yeah all of us Americans drive 200mi+ each way nine days a week 'cause the average house is on a 2,000 acre ranch.

People often really overestimate their driving habits.

Some Americans would absolutely be heavily impacted by a vehicle with a vehicle with 200mi range on a good day. A ton of Americans would never really be affected.

Americans specifically overestimate driving habits. There is the odd occasion that a requires a very long drive but that drive once or twice a year shouldn't weigh as heavily as it does for most people.

> Yeah all of us Americans drive 200mi+ each way nine days a week 'cause the average house is on a 2,000 acre ranch.

I never claimed that.

> People often really overestimate their driving habits.

I agree, and like I said I think 200mi is acceptable. But people do like driving in the US. I used to go up to Brainerd from the Twin Cities regularly; that's 135 miles each way. This is not uncommon, lots of people here like to do short road trips up north on holiday weekends. Sometimes I even did both directions in a single day. My 300mi Ioniq 5 could probably do that whole trip on a single charge, maybe with a short stop to bump it up, which will be fast thanks to the 800V architecture. But the 200mi range would take at least one full charging stop, possibly two, which will also be slower thanks to the slower architecture.

Like I keep saying, I don't think 200mi is a deal killer, but it's also definitely a con for the US market. But it keeps the price low, which is definitely the focus here and means it slots nicely into the 2nd family car budget. Nothing's perfect; I still think it's a cool product and will be keeping my eye on it.

> I used to go up to Brainerd from the Twin Cities regularly;

But you're going to stop somewhere along that path already, right? You're not driving straight there and immediately turning around and leaving right?

I've done several road trips between DFW, Houston, and Austin in an EV with ~200mi of range and a 400V pack. The DFW<->Houston trip is nearly 300mi. Compared to my average trip time in my gas cars, its about an extra 15-20 minutes on a four and a half hour drive. I was going to stop for lunch on that four and a half hour drive anyways.

Oh no such a massive impact on my life, spending an extra 20 minutes a few times a year.

Meanwhile I spend hours a year going to gas stations and pumping gas for my gas cars that get fewer miles.

> But you're going to stop somewhere along that path already, right?

Honestly, no, I didn't. It's only 2 hours. Having to stop for a 30+ minute charge in each direction would add a significant amount of time to the trip.

I don't really understand why you're being so aggressive about this. We are almost entirely agreeing. 300mi is a selling point for buyers because it means an easier time doing 100+ mile road trips, which are not uncommon in the US. More range is a tick in the "pro" column when comparison shopping, and it could convince someone to buy a car other than this one. That's all I'm saying.

> Having to stop for a 30+ minute charge in each direction would add a significant amount of time to the trip.

Sure it would, but why would you? It would be more like one 20 minute charge in Brainerd. Maybe a half hour if you want some extra buffer. And that's assuming you're unable to charge wherever you're staying.

Well I mean yeah. That's exactly my point, you don't have to do that with the 300mi range. I think 300mi is the "sweet spot" where you're probably going to stop anyway to take a break or whatever, or your trip will be done already, so charging isn't really an issue. 200mi feels on the short side to me, and I think my Brainerd trips are a good example of the difference that 100mi difference makes.

And my point is people will often overestimate their needs, like suggesting for that few times a year road trip they'll need to stop twice for probably an hour or more on their trip when in reality it'd be more like one twenty minute stop.

All this guy has done for 2 days is make bad arguments in car posts. I don't think he is a very happy person.

Lots of places in the USA outside of major metros don't have much in the way of fast-charging infrastructure yet. I'd have to drive nearly 30 minutes outside my "everyday" travel area to get to the closest one. I don't know about Twin Cities - Brainerd but it sounds like a lot of drives in the USA: 100 miles of corn fields between two somewhat interesting end points.

What percentage of US cars will find themselves on those roads?

No one buys for their average daily commute. They buy for the longest drive they'll do in a day, which is typically wherever they go for their summer vacation and/or hobbies on the weekend.

I've gone on lots of 1,000mi+ road trips. I guess I need to focus on buying cars with 1,000+mi range.

And I'm guessing you bought a vehicle with enough space for all the things you'll take on that road trip right? Odds are you didn't buy a Prius and rent an SUV for your road trip...

Range doesn't matter for ICE vehicles because of the speed of refueling and ubiquity of gas stations. And you know this.

I've never owned a Prius, but I've known several Prius owners. Several of them have gone on some quite long road trips, several >1,000mi. I don't get why an SUV is required to go on a road trip for a couple of adults. People often fly for travel, do you really take significantly more stuff in the car than you do when you fly? Do you normally need a thousand pounds of clothes to go away for a week or two?

I've gone on several 1,200mi each way road trips in cars like a Honda Accord and a Ford Focus hatch. A couple of those in that Focus hatch even carried four adults in the car. I just put a little luggage rack on the back.

It's not like you need a giant SUV to drive a few hundred miles. I can assure you smaller cars can make that drive as well!

Range doesn't really matter past a certain point for a ton of people. Few vehicles even go on massive road trips these days. Traveling with my little kids these days, we end up stopping just about as much in our ICE as we do on in our EV on road trips.

As I've mentioned here many times, the amount of time I spend "charging" my ICE dwarfs the amount of time I spend charging my EV, and my EV gets significantly more miles. Even with road trips factored in.

More proof people massively overestimate their vehicle needs. Thinking you need an SUV to go on a road trip, that a Prius just can't possibly be enough.

I've done 2000 mile road trips in an EV. It added 15 minutes to the 3 day trip. Charge overnight or while you're eating or bathrooming. Only once did I actually have to wait for the charger.

Was it an EV with only 200 mile range?

That is 200 miles in perfect conditions. Last winter I tried to make a 120 mile trip in my EV and I didn't make it despite having a claimed 220 miles of range when I left. I realized in time to make it to a charger (this was in a very rural area there were few gas stations), but it was a slow level 2 - an hour having lunch someplace other than where I would have chosen and I was able to get home but the car switched to power saving mode for the last mile.

200 miles in perfect conditions is the minimum anyone should accept. Just like in winter I never let my gas tank go below 1/4 tank - in case I get stuck and need to run the engine for heat while waiting for help. You should plan to only run between 20% and 80% battery, which means your 200 mile range is already 120 miles of useful range in perfect conditions.

I agree with your take, hence my "on a good day" part of the comment. For a lot of people, 200mi of on a good day range on an EV probably isn't enough. In fact, for a number of people who drive a good bit in very cold climates, I don't think an EV will make sense for them without some pretty radical changes in battery energy density. The fact an ICE throws off so much waste heat is such a feature and not a negative in some climates.

Not everyone lives in the rural parts of the North though. In fact, most of the country doesn't.

The Slate got swapped to LFP so you can take it down to 10% without care.

I take my E-Transit down to single digits because I gotta make this 130 miles of range work for me. I max out around 80 miles between stops during winter road tripping.

The EV life is just getting used to planning ahead of time like the old days again. I always pull up the route on ABRP app, and check its suggestions on plugshare for recent issues if I'm driving somewhere I haven't before.

I drive about 300 miles a week, have a convenient already-wired in 240v socket in my garage, and 200 miles with a 30 minute boost charge should cover 99% of my driving.

I have a pickup and a car, I'll be trading both of them in to help cut the cost of this down, and if I'm going on a road trip I'll just rent a car. It's no big deal.

The US is bigger.

It's a fine anything-other-than-5hr+-road-trip car. Which covers 99% of people's daily driving. And frankly even if this thing was gas, it looks brutal to road trip in.

A 200mi range means you can comfortably commute an hour to work each day, and then get back and "drive around town" in the evening without any worry.

100% agreed, yup :)

People buy their vehicles with the 1% use like the 5 hour road trip in mind. The cost of renting a car is high enough that it is cheaper just buy the one you need for everything. That is before you realize that sometimes who show up to pick up your rental car and they don't have anything.

Yup. My parents bought a Jeep Cherokee back in the day as the family car rather than something like a Ford Taurus just so they could drive on the beach. That probably only happened a few days a year, but they were beloved outings and made the Jeep worthwhile to them. You could say that it would make more sense to drive a more economical car for most of the year and only rent a Jeep for the beach excursions, but how realistic is that? Most rental car places won’t guarantee much in terms of what sort of vehicle you’ll get. And most forbid offroad driving. It makes sense to a lot of people to buy vehicles for the 1% case if that 1% case is something they really value.

If every couple had one EV truck for heavy lifting and a small ICE hatchback for long distances, we’d reduce our emissions and our gas bills massively.

Most people don’t have to pick an everything vehicle. We all benefit when we focus on maximizing our division of labor.

> If every couple had one EV truck for heavy lifting and a small ICE hatchback for long distances

Maybe it's because I'm a dad but I can't imagine telling the family, "Roadtrip time! Let's all pack into the smaller car!". When we're taking the long family road trip to the beach or whatever, we always end up with the big car full of boogie boards and pool toys and cooler and beach umbrella, etc. Bigger cars with longer wheelbases tend to be more comfortable on the highway as well.

The folks I know who do the ICE/EV split household like you've mentioned tend to do the opposite. Dad has a small EV for a cheap and easy commute to work and Mom has an ICE (or hybrid) SUV or minivan that gets used for the long road trips as well as daily errands (but Mom doesn't rack up enough miles for the cost of gas to be much of a worry). There also seems to be less willingness from women (at least in the US) to make the switch to full EVs.

Yea, I just think that's a luxury for folks who have plenty of money. When you're basing your use case on 1% of use, then you're buying a luxury car, but pretending it's practical.

A practical plan is a diversion of labor that maximizes the best and most frequent use cases.

That is how most of the middle class in the US works. Now granted the US middle class is well off by world standards but they don't consider it luxury they consider it normal.

Yes, and at the same time they are whinging about the price of automobiles and gasoline.

Preferences are driven by culture in the short run and by practicality in the long run.

Are you including the emissions of producing two cars instead of one?

No, because the family is going to have two cars anyway.

Once we're at the point where a single vehicle and, say, an ebike are acceptable transit options, then America will have already exceeded it's climate goals. To achieve that, we'd likely need density near that of San Francisco (about 1.10 vehicles per household) or Chicago (about 1.12). Even bike friendly cities that are fairly dense, like Portland, have about 1.5 cars per household.

Again, though, the savings from that would be exceedingly obvious for anyone who chooses this path.

The weighing though is "and extra hour per 5 hours driven, cost of a rental, savings using an EV (time and money) the other 99% of the time".

For example, my boss, who has a 1.5 hour driving commute, refuses to get an EV because he drives a 750mi road trip once a year. In order to avoid spending an extra 3 hours for this road trip, he shoulders all the additional gas costs (and many more than 3 hours spent driving to and sitting at gas stations annually) and then service costs of owning a gas car on top.

The guy is trading $2500+ a year and 20 hours a year fueling, to save 3 hrs on a single road trip. Totally illogical.

It is a reasonable bet that your boss has a "wife" who is also driving a car every day. Which is to say they could have an EV for the closer trips and whoever really is doing the long trip that day can get the gas car. Or a PHEV works well in this situation, my wife has that and it saves more than $200/month in gas since we now only fill 1/month.

Now that I've had an EV for a few years, I don't even think it's saving 3 hours. My lunch stop on a road trip is almost never shorter than my charging session; I usually have to hurry out to get back to the car.

And with lots and lots of typical road trip hotels (your Hampton Inn and Holiday Inn Express) now with L2 chargers, there's even a good chance that my only charge for the day is the lunch charge, and overnight I fill up for free. A few years ago they'd sometimes be broken, or there'd only be two, or whatever, but it's just steadily getting better.

I pretty much concur with your take. I'm interested in this because I sometimes need a truck, but I don't want to spend a lot of money on an oversized gigantic vehicle I don't really need to have a truck the sometimes I need it. For me, that is mostly to go to the home store and back w/ materials, which is something I expect to do more regularly near the tail end of this summer onward as I ramp up my carpentry hobby. That 200 mile range is fine for me, because the closest home store is just 2.1 miles away from my house.

The flip side of that is over the holiday weekend I drove more than 250 miles to go visit my folks for Father's Day, which is just a couple of hours driving each direction. That's not even a long drive, that's a fairly normal weekend mini-roadtrip. It's not unusual for me to sometimes drive to the office in the next city over for meetings, and that's 116 miles from my house, where I work from home hence having significantly shorter typical driving experiences than most Americans. That next city over is a place where quite a lot of folks work and commute daily. 200 miles is definitely on the short side of acceptable range in the US.

Maybe it's just a Texas thing, but driving a hundred miles or more in a single direction is a typical behavior for many people under a variety of circumstances when you expect to return on the same day. This state also has the largest market for truck sales in the US.

FWIW I just rent a truck from the home center when I need to do that two or three times a year. Small hassle but a lot easier than owning a whole vehicle.

That's what I do now, but as I spend more time on a hobby that requires trips for materials, it becomes unreasonable to do that. I am not quite at the break point where I think buying a truck makes sense, but I could see that happening by the end of this year. For those wondering, Home Depot rents pickups for $20/day if you are not leaving the immediate area of the store (the metro pretty much).

A 4x8 trailer is also a great option, if you have a place to keep one, and super cheap. I have a Thule that stands on end in the garage. Trailers are a lot easier to load and unload than an American pickup, too. It seems like every time I take mine to the Home Despot I see someone struggling to get materials into their SUV or short-bed pickup, and I'm in and out in a flash. Just don't expect to win any races driving in reverse.

It's $20 for 75 minutes in California. Add on that you'll spend an extra hour at the store minimum just trying to get the truck and return it. I would use the service way more and buy more from Home Depot but they have the worst customer service out of any retail I've ever been in.

I've decided to just buy my own vehicle rather than deal with the hassle.

To be fair texas also has a fairly decent amount of charging stations at this point as well. I road trip my E-Transit from South Louisiana to Austin/Dallas all the time. Does it suck? Yeah kinda, but stopping every 1.5 hours to charge isn't so bad once you get used to it. I hate road tripping in ICE cars now that can go 500 miles on a tank of gas and no one wants to stop to pee and stretch every few hours.

> probably a 400V architecture, which is becoming outdated as 800V architectures and chargers exist now.

Good luck getting 800V mode to kick on half of the time if you ask most US drivers of 800V architecture EV's. Most of the networks I see with 800V capabilities are also the most expensive per KW of electricity by 10-20 cents a KW.

I'd much rather stick to 400V platforms for the next decade before we get serious expansion of modern charging networks in the US.

Many 800V vehicles have a split pack that can charge in parallel at 400V or series at 800V so they don't charge extremely slowly at 400V. Those are fine.

>Those are fine.

Not so fine if you go by Silverado EV experiences where they fail to ever go into 800V mode reliably and cause months of dealership woes with zero fixes. [1]

In my opinion its just another failure point that makes me prefer 400V EV's.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4T9p-Iks6Q

On the specs page is say "205 miles" estimated range for the blank slate/minimal version - which is not great

Very surprising it doesn't say the battery capacity anywhere and has no option for a bigger battery

I dug in a bit. Slate has around 63Kwh battery capacity and a range of 205 miles. For pure metrics comparison - chevy bolt has similar battery capacity and a range of 260 miles and similar price range. So basically slate looked at the existing market and said we need a better looking chevy bolt even if it sacrifices range. I guess there will be a market for this.

I love the Chevy Bolt. Wish I could find one for a decent price in my local market.

Slate was far more compelling when we still had the federal EV incentive. Now... you can get a far better equipped Ford Maverick hybrid just around $30k (maybe less with dealer discounts). Hard to see what the market is for the Slate.

There are people who want an EV and not a hybrid, like me.

That's fine, but there are a lot of used EVs that have more features in the low-mid 20s now. You really have to want an _EV_ truck.

Considering the cost of gas wanting an EV is an economical choice.

If you keep your eyes on the market often enough you can even grab a Ford F-150 Lightning used for sub $35k and I've seen a few go sub $30k. They haven't devalued as fast as some of the other EV work vehicles. The E-transit was $67k new for a high roof and now they are going for $23k on the used market.

>Hard to see what the market is for the Slate.

Well you quoted a hybrid, which needs fuel. At current local electric rates ($0.07/kw) I can fully charge my E-Transit (~68kwh usable in the battery) for $4.76. Then I can go around 130 miles before coming back home to charge.

Vastly cheaper than a gas van, but lets look at the Maverick which gets even better economy.

Most gas stations I drove by today were $3.15 to $3.39 for 87oct gas. Self reported fuel economy for the Hybrid Ford Maverick on a few sites maxes out around 37mpg combined.

That means for a Slate truck with the larger 84kwh battery you'll be spending $5.90 for a full at home charge in my area which will get you ~240 miles. While if you bought a Maverick you'll be getting around 70 miles for the same cost.

This is all before we even factor in maintenance differences.

EDIT// They dropped the 84kwh battery, but my point still stands.

YMMV here. Your electric rates are insanely cheap and places where EVs are most popular are in states like California where paying $0.50/kwh is not uncommon. Plus many of us in CA can't even install solar to offset any of it.

Trade off, gas prices in California are also much higher. I was there a few weeks ago and the cheap gas was $6.19/gal

Can't believe it's come down to this in 2026, but if this does not beep incessantly and slam on the brakes when maneuvering around some foliage I'm all in.

You’ve hit a nerve for sure. A couple years back I was doing some field ops in rural Illinois and the rental SUV I had (Nissan?) made it almost impossible to turn around on a gravel road. Slowly backing up towards the ditch, watching carefully in the backup camera… BAM, full brake, lots of beeping, cue frustration. Every damned time.

You can usually disabled the automatic braking in every vehicle I've driven from 2020-2025. I tend to leave on the warning noises, but disable to auto braking.

I went through all the settings on my vehicle, and I can't; all I can do is just lower the sensitivity.

I like the idea of the Slate. I think the ability to transform from truck to SUV mode in your driveway is pretty great. It reminds me of my Broncos where I can remove the top and the rear seat and have a truck. I love the idea of individualized wraps as there are far too many white, black, silver, and grey vehicles on the road. We need some color.

I love that it is a bare-bones basic vehicle that can made to be whatever you need it to be and that it does not have all the factory owner tracking bullshit in new cars today.

I can see this being useful to my wife and I both as a small truck and as an SUV. For the things that we do every week this vehicle would work fine and would replace our Ford Ranger. It might be able to replace our 90's F150 too.

I do most of my own maintenance so a vehicle that comes with factory manuals at no cost is far superior to any other that I have owned. I have bought factory manuals for all of our vehicles so that I can minimize downtime when doing maintenance. I would also take advantage of a service network in the event that I had more projects than time, which is increasingly the normal case at my house. With that network I could spend my time on things that have the highest impact.

The vehicle's range works fine for my wife and I. As a vehicle for our kids off at college it is not as attractive. The distance from our house to campus is just under the stated range of the Slate so anything that prevented the vehicle from hitting maximum target mileage would cause it to fall short and I would need to tow or trailer it the rest of the way home. That would be a drag (haha, I made a pun). Adding the ability to run from an external battery would be a huge plus since that would eliminate range issues.

I wonder how difficult it would be to add connections and charge circuitry for an EcoFlow or Jackery battery bank so that it could be carried in the cargo compartment and serve as a backup.

I would also probably use solar panels to keep it topped off while in my driveway. I think the existing EV chargers manage that well today.

I don't like trucks, but I might get this solely because it's the only thing like it right now. Honestly half the reason I want one is because I'd love to cram a raspberry pi and some cool shit in there to make a custom "smart car"

Dead on arrival.

China will sell you fully kitted hilux equivalents with japanese engines for 10k. Even toyota is making 10k trucks in thailand.

US manufacturers are just not ready to face free market competition these days. They're entirely reliant on tariffs protecting them.

That is not just the auto industry either. US manufacturers have really dropped the ball across the board, and tariffs are not going to fix it for them.

I’m not really sure what the solution is at this point. We can’t just drop the tariffs, as that will decidedly end almost all manufacturing that has been propped up by them. On the flip side, the current administration’s recent erratic application and resulting litigation in this area have created an environment where no one in their right mind would invest in building out new capacity. The winds have demonstrated that they are too likely to shift again.

I hope someone can swoop in on this thread and explain how it’s all going to work out. Because I just don’t see it anymore….

And that makes me sad, because I want to love the Slate. Seems great. But I can’t see past how the pricing is tantamount to systemic theft, knowing that it has been artificially inflated by such protectionism.

I think the answer is subsidy rather than tariffs (maybe a combination). One of the reasons China is beating the US in manufacturing is because they have a fully thought out economic plan and directly subsidize targeted sectors. In the US its a free-for-all with tariffs, which means we can't compete on world markets.

US manufacturing is hanging on by leveraging heavy automation. At least a couple years ago I saw a chart that showed while employees dropped, manufacturing output stayed steady or went up. Labor is too expensive relative to Asia for it to be otherwise.

That’s not a full answer but party of the story.

As a nation we want a local manufacturing base. But as consumers we just want the thing, and it doesn’t matter where it’s made.

You say inflated by tariffs, I say protecting workers' rights from being undercut by other countries. We can have a bunch of workers' rights, 8 hour days, and minimum wages, or we can compete with China, but not both.

If we don’t/can’t do the latter, I expect we won’t have the former for very much longer.

crank windows and zero touchscreens is a feature, not a compromise. give me a dumb car with physical buttons over a rolling ipad any day of the week.

We are about to see this increasingly frequent commentary put to the test.

I understand zero touchscreens, but what's the problem with power windows? What if you're driving and you want to lower the passenger window?

The obvious answer is that you don't. I don't have any particular preference for crank windows, but drove cars with them for years, and can't ever recall it being a problem that I couldn't lower the passenger window while driving.

What if you get swept away by an unforeseen surge of water, and want to lower a window to get out?

https://www.kens5.com/article/news/local/public-safety/1-yea...

This looks great, I'd happily buy one if they are proven reliable and can remain a sustainable company.

I could not see anything related to safety besides airbags and cameras. Any crash tests available anywhere?

I’m on the waitlist and this is the main thing I’m contemplating before actually pulling the trigger on buying one.

Do they actually have solid delivery dates yet? This still reeks of vaporware to me.

The preorder delivery window they offered me was effectively q2 2027. No idea what the likelihood of them delivering it by then is.

The Specs page has a list of safety features. Sadly it's an image and not text, so here's a direct link:

[PAGE] https://www.slate.auto/en/specs

[IMAGE] https://images.ctfassets.net/20dhmw20vttc/2wmiW5shOfgAKsd1nF...

They did a demo and some discussion in this video. I recall some discussion on safety features www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6_9_HHLOSY

Price is nice to see. The cab design is from before the '90s though. That's to say, not much space and rather plain.

Also, like many contemporary vehicles it still has that snubbed nose design that limits vision of low profile objects in front of the vehicle. It's a design choice, not a necessity. Wonder why given it was a blank slate design,

If only the federal incentives were still in place that might have made this brand new car cost $16k. I would have got one for each of my daughters.

The truck is cool. The blank slate looks good. Every other "suggested" design looks insanely corny, in the Cybertruck sort of way.

Everyone has their own corny. Problem with the Cybertruck is that it's corny in a single cyberpunk kind of way which doesn't appeal to many people. Some of the designs are corny but in a way I find quite appealing. The Moon Duster looks super cool imo.

Speaking for Minnesotans and other winter folk, I would love to see heated seats as an option!

Heated seats make a lot of sense for small battery EV's. Cabin heating can really take quite a dent out of your battery, but heated seats use a lot less power.

Do they not use any memory chips in this thing?

I love that it's reasonably priced and somewhat low tech, but the range is just too limited for me. I can't wait for the batteries promising 4x energy density. That would really change things.

Single pedal is a non starter. I know from experience when trying to run single pedal machines that I make "mistakes", instinctivly reaching for the brake pedal, that isn't there. And further, anyone who breaks with a convention used by billions, without a very very good plan and rationalisation and explanation, is an asshole, or a genius, and I am the asshole, but not I think, this time.

I’ve never been a truck person, if I hadn’t just bought a car 3 years ago, I’d be eyeing this. If it’s still around and remaining true to form when I’m ready for my next vehicle it will be a serious contender.

Working from home, I don’t drive much. If I could not have a car at all, I would. Having a no frills truck, that’s isn’t an old beater in constant need of repair and maintenance, sounds really nice.

A pickup truck with less towing capacity than a Tesla Model Y?

Pricing was released today for the base truck and accessories.

Like for car EVs, I'd like ot know what those range numbers are when tested in the real world - like with two or three passengers or in the case of this small truck, a few hundred pounds of tools and/or supplies (and better yet, hills and cold weather). I'm skeptical that that 200 mile estimate range doesn't drop quite a lot and heaven forbid you get a load of gravel in the back.

Price on the tower roof racks? I need a plywood hauler.

Here's to hoping that they don't pull a CyberTruck and decide "you know what? $79000 US seems like the right price."

Slate Auto filed patented its electric pickup in India. https://www.team-bhp.com/news/slate-auto-patents-its-electri...

Hope they can enter India in the next 5-10 years.

Is that not just a standard design patent (which is different from a utility patent, but nobody understands that), like the infamous first iPhone?

If they just had a back option that was a foot higher, I'd seriously consider buying one of these to use as a mini camper. I feel like they were so close!

Edit: damn, bed length: 5 feet. Wonder if they could get an extra foot in the other direction as well, although I'm guessing all that would eat into range.

There used to be (before preorder) an option for an extended battery. Am I missing it hidden in the customizer?

I believe they got rid of the smaller battery. Before the tax credit was removed, they were sourcing a more expensive battery. After the credit was removed the switched to a cheaper battery. The cheaper battery would not have qualified for the tax credit, but that’s not an issue anymore.

https://insideevs.com/news/799667/slate-truck-lfp-battery-ra...

Thank you for that!

Does it fit a standard 4x8 sheet flat with the tailgate down?

(Anyone seen detailed dimensions specs?)

Easily found: https://www.slate.auto/en/specs

None of that seems to answer my question.

Detailed dimension specs are.. right there.

Your other question is about.. bed vibes? That's not a real spec (for any truck builder). You can put a 100x4 sheet rock in any 4'+ wide bed.. best of luck to the person behind you. Don't forget the red flag (day) or light (at night).. in north america.

Only the bed length is listed there. It’s insufficient data to determine whether a full size sheet of plywood will fit.

the bed is listed as 5 feet long, and the entire truck a bit under 6 feet wide. so I don't think you can get something thats 4x8 feet to lay flat.

It seems like not quite.

The width is 50 some inches but the wheel wells are there so you may need some 2x4 or something to keep plywood from flexing over them. And the length of the bed isn’t near 8 feet so you’d need the bed open and the boards strapped in.

This jalopnik article had some helpful measurements: https://www.jalopnik.com/1845231/slate-pickup-bed-fit-every-...

Not flat between the wheel wells (42.9"), but on top of them. There's a photo (don't know if it's real though).

https://www.slateforums.com/forum/threads/slate-truck-dimens...

As much as I’m on-board with EVs this isn’t as compelling as the Ford Maverick at the price point. As you add features they’re at price parity and you arguably get much more for your money with the Ford.

Looks cool but rear wheel drive only is a no-go where I live (somewhere very snowy).

Don't be so sure. Rear wheel drive is just fine in a truck if you fill the bed with firewood. This is an EV, so I would expect they put a lot of batteries under the bed and so have good weight on the back wheels.

Of course I'm waiting for real world reports, but I'm not going to rule it out yet.

> Rear wheel drive is just fine in a truck if you fill the bed with firewood

"Just fine" lol. Alright let's go straight back to being 16 years old and doing ghetto shit for the sake of it.

AWD is ubiquitous nowadays. Can get it on entry level vehicles as an option. Electric vehicles are way simpler, as in they could simply strap a motor to the front wheels without much complication.

I already have a 4WD SUV. 4WD is simply superior in the snow, even if I could suffer and survive with RWD.

Previously (2025):

A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43794284

Neat vehicle but there's no way I'm giving bezos even more money. Maybe I'll buy used if it's proven there aren't always on connections later down the road.

I was interested until bezos. Hard pass.

The Bezos investment gives me pause too. But the claim that there’s no telemetry is exciting: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/06/slate-says-its-electric...

I'll believe it when it's verified by a third party hacker. Not trusting a bezos org on it's word.

Easiest decision ever to skip the infotainment system - your phone is better at that anyway.

The Slate is like the original Nintendo Wii - swapping sophistication for fun.

If this actually ships this year, at this price, it will be an incredible accomplishment.

I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets delayed and inflation pushes that MSRP up.

This truck is remining me of the Yugo. When the Yugos were announced people were thrilled about the price. Unfortunately after they were in use people understood why they were so cheap, quality suffered and they were basically disposable cars. Cheap is nice in theory but eventually you wish for something a bit better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugo

I also wonder if it will develop a negative stigma as a cheap beater truck used in company fleets and such.

I actually think it is not cheap enough. Start adding basic, standard features and the price doesn’t look as competitive against legacy manufacturers. Do those manufacturers offer an equivalently cheap EV today? Maybe, but probably not. Though they could, and if they did, Slate is probably toast.

It seems unlikely they'll be like the Yugo. That car was produced in a low quality factory. This is a modern product from Jeff Bezos that has fewer parts, not just cheap, poorly made parts. Yugo was Yugoslavia's only car manufacturer. Slate competes with all the other US brands so it can't just be total garbage going in. That wouldn't make sense.

Bezos is just an investor; he played little part in its design or engineering.

Yes, it's a very different environment from the state-run Yugo company that was a product of socialism and never could compete successfully in the market. That's not the situation for Mr. Bezos.

Is this an actual think that is actually going to happen? I really want a simple notech ev.

Wish it had all wheel drive...

Wish it was at least at FWD. I know, I'm the oddball that wants a subaru brat. I'm more concerned about snow handling with very limited truck utility.

Agreed. Driving in snow is paramount for me...

In an ICE pickup, maybe, but assuming the Slate has an EV weight distribution advantage, RWD is probably better. To each their own, but I much prefer my driven wheels not to be my turning wheels.

That said, lack of 4WD is really a bummer.

can someone please make an EV passenger van with good range and costs 25k?

Probably not, no. Large vehicles are heavy which needs more battery, and good range needs more battery too. Batteries are expensive.

What do you consider good range? Ford [1] and Stellantis [2] have small EV passenger vans.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Transit_Courier#Tourneo_C... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_e-Berlingo

What I find appalling about Slate is that it's already more expensive than actual low end EVs. All the supposedly radical cost saving measures don't seem to be doing anything. I guess it was just Amazon trying to undercut Rivian EDV, in the end.

Its size and range are too low for the price. End of story on this one.

The range is fine. Did you overlook that it has an LFP battery? LFP batteries do not suffer increased degradation at either end of their charge range. You can charge to 100% daily and run them down to 0% (although if you leave them at 0% parasitic drain could drain them below the built in below-0% buffer which can be bad).

The other common EV batteries suffer increased degradation at the high and low ends and it is generally recommended to stay in the 20-80% range except on road trips. Then charging to 100% just before you start and driving down to 10% if you are going to recharge soon after back to above 20% is OK.

Let's first consider non-road trips. With level 2 home charging and a 200 mile range LFP EV like the Slate, I could actually get 200 miles between charges. I'd be cautious though and try not to let it go below 10%.

That's 180 miles of usable range.

On a non-LFP where I only get to use 60% between charges (80-20%) I'd need a 300 mile range EV. That's more than the 262 mile range of the 2027 Chevy Bolt which is doing fine and costs more than Slate. That's also better than or close to the most popular non-Tesla EVs in recent sales, namely the Chevy Equinox, Ford Mustang Mach-E, and Hyundai Ioniq 5.

For road trips it is a little different because even though LFP won't be harmed going to 100% it, like non-LFP, slows down when you are trying to charge with high power DC chargers, so it is almost always faster to just charge to 80 and get back on the road than charge to 100 to get maximum distance before the next stop. The LFP still punches above its weight on road trips, but not by as large an amount as it does for around town use.

On a road trip, past the initial segment when running on home charge, if we assume the Slate will be going from 80 to 5% and the non-LFP is doing 80-10%, the Slate would be equivalent to a non-LFP with around 215 miles of range.

For people who won't want to use it for long road trips (road trips long enough that you would have to charge before reaching your destination) it should be fine.

BTW, for long road trips charging speed is generally quite a bit more important than range as long as you have enough range to cross the gaps between charging stations. The Ioniq 5 is widely considered to be one of the best long road trip EVs because of its fast charging even though its range is smaller than many competitors. It is 800 V so can accept very high power without excessive heating, and its charging curve stays high for longer than most others. (But you need a trip that has high power chargers, which most Tesla Supercharger stations lack).

> On a non-LFP where I only get to use 60% between charges (80-20%) I'd need a 300 mile range EV. That's more than the 262 mile range of the 2027 Chevy Bolt which is doing fine and costs more than Slate. That's also better than or close to the most popular non-Tesla EVs in recent sales, namely the Chevy Equinox, Ford Mustang Mach-E, and Hyundai Ioniq 5.

Correction: 2027 Bolt is also LFP.

I would honestly consider one of these for the utility of a cheap, small electric truck, but not having 4wd is an absolute deal breaker for a truck in the mountain west.

I love the concept, but it's giving me Elio vibes.

I mean, it still seems like a lot for an absolutely barebones vehicle. Going by an inflation calculator, $25K in 2026 translates to $~13K in the year 2000, and in the year 2000 the average completely barebones/entry car sold for $~8K-9K. So this is still 50% more expensive than barebone cars used to be.

Compared to ICE? Yes. EV's are still paying a premium for the battery. That's not going to change any time soon.

Compared to Ford or GM's EV trucks? It's almost 1/3 the price...

The closest comparison is like the Ford Maverick, and that starts at 29.

the sun seeker wrap is a cool retro look. can anybody place what it's based on / inspired by?

The Japanese Kei trucks have a cult following, so if this hits the right niche, it might be viable. I think these might have a slow start, but as long as the company can survive and the trucks last, I think they could have a winner.

How can they make any money on this?

cute cute car

This is very cool, probably should have gotten more inspiration from Porsche on the design UX. It's pretty rough.

This was posted about a year ago and it was complete vaporware, all pictures and videos were digital art.

And looking at their website now, I see the same thing unfortunately. Why would someone "preorder" a car that only exists as a prototype and digital art? What proven track record do they have of actually being able to manufacture these, and what independent outlets reviewed it?

I'm sorry, but a lot of red flags immediately pop up for me, I'm confident this is 99% a scam.

You get to give Bezos a $300 loan, with the opportunity to upgrade to $25k later.

That deeply undercuts Rivian.

You wouldn't cross-shop a Rivian and a Slate. The Rivian is a high-end luxury vehicle with a laundry list of features, including things like self-driving. The Slate is literally the opposite: it has a laundry list of things it doesn't have and, indeed, its lack of features is part of the sales pitch.

Right. Even the cheaper R2 just released is in a different market segment. There will be some cross-shopping of the Slate with the upcoming new platform Ford EV truck, which Ford is hinting will be $30K. Of course, I remember when Ford hinted that the F150 Lightening would initially be a $40K truck, so we'll see.

Lack of features sounds better and better as time goes on. No thank you, I do NOT want my car sending telemetry data.

Someone is finally building an electric vehicle for people like me!

On your point of self-driving, I was just looking into if this would be compatible with a comma.ai autopilot, and it looks like Slate doesn't even have the default hardware onboard to allow it (and there's no option to add it?). Unfortunate miss.

A “miss”? If you’re looking for self-driving HW in a $25K vehicle, I think you’re “missing” the point.

> The Rivian is a high-end luxury vehicle

High end luxury vehicles are coach built. The Ferrari Luce is a mid end luxury vehicle. Rivian is more like a low end luxury vehicle.

I'm sorry, but this is nonsense. The Rivian R1T starts at $80k for the dual motor trim and the quad starts at $116k, before options. This is so far outside of the average car that I am comfortable considering it high-end luxury. A Ferrari is unattainable luxury. A custom-built coach should come with an invitation to the guillotine. I forget sometimes that this forum is full of wealthy individuals who insist that they are still just common folk.

Has it at all occurred to you that "luxury" and "attainable" are mutually exclusive, like definitionally? Of course there's more to luxury than it simply being out of your reach, and there are many things which are absolutely not a luxury which are assuredly out of your reach to begin with. A house is not a luxury, for example. Especially not a mass-produced timber framed shitshack made out of particle board and sheetrock in the middle of nowhere. But the system certainly tells you it's a luxury, and you can't afford one anyways, so it must be a luxury, right?

I understand you're probably frustrated because you have been sold a manufactured idea that as an American, luxury is supposed to be attainable to you. That you were promised a high end lifestyle. That the American dream guarantees to lift you out of the filthy squalor of the ancestors. Finally, the common man is to be given nice things! He will live as a king! Or maybe you're just a westerner in general, and you really bought the lie that you are actively wealthy compared to the rest of the world.

That was all a lie.

And your assumption is absolutely faulty, by the way. I just actually know a nice thing when I see it. It's defined by it being a nice thing. An ugly, mass manufactured truck filled with materials that feel bad in the hand is really not that nice in the grand scheme of things. Sorry. You should absolutely be filled with outrage that even something as mundane as this is unattainable though. Projecting that frustration on to me for not letting shitty marketing jargon slide is ridiculous. This doesn't just affect us, either. You should remind the wealthy at all points that their standards are sliding backwards, and their hollow sense of luxury has become a category of complete crap driven by lowered standards and artificial scarcity.

Approximately zero people who are in the market for a Rivian would consider buying this.

is this vehicle actually available for purchase at $24,950?

Preorder shipping late 2026

This is microtransactions in real life. The upsell on these will be crazy.

I am glad there is some viable disruption in the auto space here, but I am also really disappointed.

A new 4wd kei style truck is ~10k, with a bigger bed. I know its apples to oranges, but damn do I hate the ridiculous regulatory capture around small vehicles and trucks we have in the US.

tight cabin. where's the legroom.

I like the idea, but the "About" page triggers some warning bells: "We’re not trying to make this about us. BECAUSE SLATE IS ALL ABOUT YOU."

I mean, that's fine, but... I am on your "About" page, that's because I actually want to know about you. How can I trust you with $25k if all I know is "We’re designed in California and Michigan, engineered in Michigan, and assembled in the Midwest. And our team is spread across the entire country, from Washington state to Florida" ?

What's your funding? Who owns you? Who's the CEO? What are the credentials of your engineers? Basically, why should I believe that you can pull this off?

https://www.slate.auto/en/about

The general population doesn't care a lick who has invested in the company, who the C suite is, any of that.

Normal people make product-buying decisions based on the product.

I mean, that's just not true. You're right that when people buy a Ford, they're not thinking that much about the CEO. But they certainly are thinking about other Fords they've owned, or their friends have owned, or things they've heard about in advertisements or the news. Ford may not be the best car out there, but it's very unlikely to have basic thinks like seals that don't work; and if somehow they do have basic issues, the company will be around to fix it. If you pre-order a Ford, you know there's a near-zero chance that you won't get what you ordered, and an effectively zero percent chance that you don't get your money back.

None of those things are true for a brand new company. Tesla was infamous for having random things wrong with their cars in the early days which the established car companies had figured out a long time ago. And there's a non-negligible chance the company will end up folding before it can give you your product, or before they can fix the product you got.

The amount of money they have, the character of their backers and their CEO, and the quality of their engineers matters significantly.

It's well known to be backed by Jeff Bezos which might be the only reason they haven't ran out of money.

Awesome

pretty cool, now wait for the Chinese to list this company as national security threat and ban selling any parts to it.

oh, wait, that is what Americans do.

Ha, no way. China will welcomes any American manufacturers to procure parts for their products. In fact, China is already capable of competing freely in any field. So, it will only happen that the US blocks China, not the other way around.

One under-appreciated value of having an EV is that you don't have to buy gas. You literally do not have to buy gas. I cannot emphasize this enough: you do not buy gasoline for these cars. Not only that, but many places let you charge them for free. That is like someone giving you free gas.

Not only that, if you have access to an outlet at home (many do; many do not), then you just never have to think about your "gas tank" at all. You start every day at a full "tank". After a month of ownership, your state of charge is just not even something you think about, at all.

Not quite that simple. "Normal" home outlets (120v, 15A) charge EV's very slowly. And even then, non-trivial driving will show up on your electric bill.

As someone who does non-trivial driving: When I switched over, I was floored - that electric bill increase was less in a month than gas was in about three days. And yes, I also have a dedicated 240V/50A circuit, 120/15 is only fine for normal commuters.

In Seattle, we also went from flat 13.4c/kWh to a new variable rate with 8c/kWh available from 12-6am. My electric bill just dropped by about 30%.

What did you switch from and to? Even Tesla's Charging Calculator is far less optimistic than that:

https://www.tesla.com/charging-calculator

"Seattle" may be a critical bit here. The Fed thinks the "U.S. City Average" cost of electricity is far higher than yours:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU000072610

Based on how many of my friends followed their first EV purchase with an electrical outlet upgrade - even those with very short commutes - I suspect your "120/15 is only fine for normal commuters" is still a tad optimistic.

EDIT: Re-reading comments here - I'd bet a leading reason to upgrade from 120/15 to 240/50 charging is to get much more of your charging done within the 12am - 6am "lowest rate" time window. Or whatever that window is, locally.

I switched from $5 a gallon for a Subaru to 8c/kWh for a Model 3. Seattle is the best trade in the US for EVs.

You're kinda right.

Our car (2025 Ioniq 5) gets about 3-4 miles of range per hour on a 120V outlet. If you're home for 10 hours overnight, that's at least 30 miles of range each day. Some random article I found[1] suggests the average commute is about 42 miles. So if you include some extra time on weekends, a 120V outlet easily matches the average commute distance. If you drive less than that, or are home more often due to WFH or whatever, then a 120V outlet is definitely enough.

In reality, probably people drive significantly more than that, eg for shopping and seeing friends and shuttling kids around and whatever. So in the end I do agree with you, lots of people will want to get a 240 line to their garage. But an existing 120V line is probably genuinely enough for a whole lot of people, too. It is for my wife & me.

[1] https://www.axios.com/2024/03/24/average-commute-distance-us...

Yes, it will show up on your bill as a cost drastically smaller than purchasing the equivalent amount of gas. If you put solar panels on your house you can get that cost even lower.

I'm sure it shows up on my bill, but there are so many other variable costs that I can't find it. The weather (how much I use the heat pump) is a much larger factor

400 miles of driving a month in my EV van which gets on average 1.7 miles/kwh is around 235.3 kwh.

At local rates that $16.47 in electricity (235.3 x $0.07). On average my electric bill went up 15-25 dollars a month.

I spent the first two years of ownership charging mostly from the 110v socket outside the house because over night its enough to cover my commute of around 27 miles at the time.

Now that I have a 60A 240v circuit setup outside and a 40A EVSE I never even worry about what state of charge I get home with.

This is like saying "an under-appreciated value of ordering from Amazon is that they deliver to your house".

Well, if you had never used Amazon before and all you did was drive to the store it kind of could be considered under-appreciated if you didn't give it the proper weight in the convenience factor.

It really is under appreciated how much less stressful EVs are to own on a day-to-day basis until you have one. Never worried about gas prices, it's always "full", don't have to deal with crazy people bumming money at the gas station, &c.

Is that under-appreciated? It's kind of the whole deal aside from environmental concerns.

It's hard to understand beforehand just how game changing it is when you switch. Once you're not constantly thinking "Wait, is 60% enough?", it's incredibly freeing. No more "ugh, I'll have to spend $70 before I do that."

It's ok, just keep a generator in the bed and you can buy gas for it

True, but one does not have to replace their gas powered engine and fuel tank and drive train every ten to fifteen years if they want to drive several hundred miles. The problem with EV is destroying the economy to shift it to a tiny few people. From all the gas station workers, fuel distribution, parts makers, parts suppliers, etc. for several hundred moving part vehicles. To the oligarchs who control the thirty moving parts that must be replaced every ten years for ten grand.

EVs are a massive serfdom wealth and freedom transfer masquerading as a decade of not having to visit a gas station while hiding the country sized hole that will be needed for all the battery trash.

They are a blight on humanity. China survives them at scale because they are communist and have policies to mitigate economic fallout in one sector by having people supported in others. The USA just makes more homeless people and tells the next generation of high schoolers to enroll in a special work ready jobs pipeline program for whatever the local school board thinks will be left. And their non-employment rate skyrockets.

I'm not sure where you got these ideas. Do you have some recent data showing that EV batteries go to trash at all?

Sure, but it is all specific to the Leaf. And newer leafs apparently have good systems and won't have that problem.

The problem is we can only guess because we are talking about going to trash in 8-10 years, and most EVs are not near that old. Still signs are good.

I think any EV or PHEV being trashed today has its battery recycled.

Probably, but that is a difference concern. The concern here is the average car is 12 years old. If your battery only lasts 10 years, odds are the car is worse less after you replace the battery than the cost of a battery replacement. Thus the concern - if a battery only lasts 8-10 years that means there are less used cars for poor people to buy.

Fortunately it appears that only the leaf is destroying batteries that fast. Everything else we don't know how long a battery will last, but likely long enough that only collectors (who pour more money than the car is worth into it anyway) will care.

I haven't met anyone who's replaced a battery yet. So far the batteries seem to outlast the car.

Most EVs are not old enough to need a replacement so no surprise you haven't seen it.

I've seen places offering to do it to a leaf. However the cost is more than the leaf is worth by the time it needs it. I know a few people with a leaf that has half the factory range left and they just deal with it because the cost isn't worth it.

Sure, it wasn't designed for it. But the battery still gets recycled.

Talking the power company into taking it and calling that recycling is really just renaming the landfill location and making the electric customer's pay for it. Repurposing a failing piece of hardware is not recycling it.

Any data?

You always buy fossil fuels with an EV, not directly but you do. When you stop at the plaza for a quick super charge there’s no way to tell where is the energy sourced from, it could very well be from a diesel generator a few miles down the road. The value is in all the parts found in an ICE that need servicing or replacement that you don’t have in an EV. With an EV you basically need tires and maybe brakes once every 8-10 years, no oil and fluids, no oil or engine filters, water pumps, spark plugs, valves, seals, etc etc

Depends where in the country you live and when you charge. 8AM in the pnw? 100% renewables. 5PM in oklahoma? Not so much

> You always buy fossil fuels with an EV,

"always" is just not true. "most of the time" is true, and it will get less and less as time goes by.

You can charge this thing on solar panels at home

While it may be dirty sourced electricity, there are still significant benefits many people don't think about. As (or I suppose now, if) the grid moves towards cleaner electricity sources, the total emissions go down, where the ICE vehicle will always be an ICE vehicle.

Generators are also much more efficient at converting fuel to electricity. They don't have to provide pretty good power output at all RPM's, they are much more fine tuned. There are also emission reduction options that are economical at the scale of a power plant, but not when attaching to millions of cars.

You also get regenerative braking; some of the energy that you took out of the battery and put into the wheel can be recaptured and stored. The alternative is burning the fuel and ablating your brake pads.

Where I live my utility generates more wind power in a year than all customers use. (I assume the excess is sold to some other utility) There is also a lot of solar people are putting on their houses.

> no oil and fluids, no oil or engine filters, water pumps, spark plugs, valves, seals, etc etc

Those are cheap though.

You still have tires, shocks, and the general body wearing out from use.

But they are also extremely efficient. So at worst its like driving a diesel truck that gets 120mpg.

GP didn't say that you don't have to use gas; the comment says you don't have to buy gas. Which IMO signifies how miserable gas pump experience is felt to them.

Where people snag is the "gas station mentality", where everything they know about car ownership revolves around "filling up at a station".

So when they think about owning an EV, they focus really hard on "gas station mentality" things like "how long does it take to fill" and "how far can you go between fill-ups?".

Once you own an EV (and have a home charger) you pretty quickly forget about those things shy of the occasional 300+ mi road trip.

It's true it only matters for the road trip, although a slight note that the slate has a stated 150 mile range so you may have to take it into account if you're driving all over a metropolitan area.

For an around-town daily, the only real reason you wouldn't want to take an EV is because literally all of your options are rolling privacy violations. At least with an ICE you can buy a 2011 panther platform and rest easy.

Thankfully, Slate solved this problem. I don't care that it's a cheapy, uncomfortable shitbox with no range. Please yes, more modern cars that aren't literally made out of spyware at an atomic level.

That is literally the only selling point what are you on about?

One under-appreciated value of having an EV is that you don't have to buy gas.

I’m pretty sure that’s the whole g-damned point of an EV. Who are you thinking needs to be told this?

If not bankrupt in three years like Lucid and Rivian, I'll still buy a Cybercab instead. Also, I hope they succeed. There's definitely a market for them.

I'll be amazed if Tesla meets their sub-$30k target for the cab. But stranger things have happened.

And the Slate should have better utility, for anybody who needs a truck/SUV vs coupe. And also comes without the Musk stigma.

The Slate only tows 2000lbs, and has a tiny bed. If you need a truck it isn't for you. Maybe it works as a SUV.

Of course most people only need a coupe to begin with. Too bad you can't buy any that are cheap. (that and you mostly only need a coupe, but at least once a week need something more)

I bought a house recently, and need something to haul landscape stuff around. Slate is perfect for that. I also need something to haul wood around for woodworking etc. Slate is perfect. If I need to help my kids move out of their apartment or move some furniture, this is perfect. Can't do any of that with my coupe.

Personally, I hope that nothing Elon Musk ever does for the rest of his life succeeds. Maybe that's just me though.

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