Hacker News Reader

Comment by efsavage | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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...

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com