By Evan Pilego
On April 24th, Slate Auto revealed its first car: the Slate Truck, a small EV truck with a unique amount of customization. The company was founded in 2022 in Troy Michigan by another company called Re:Build Manufacturing, co-founded by Jeff Wilke (a former CEO of Amazon) and his MIT classmate Miles Arnone, backed and funded by Jeff Bezos. The company itself had been working in the shadows since its creation, so most major developments on the vehicle have been announced only recently.
The Slate follows an interesting business model. Selling baseline electric trucks with the basic features, cutting out all unneeded features that just add onto the cost of cars nowadays, all for under $20,000. Many people seem to be here for it. People have been talking about how crazy and feature-filled cars have become (in turn hiking up prices), and how some people don’t need or want heated seats, automatically adjusting cupholders, speakers, or a large touchscreen media player. These things don’t come on the base model of the truck, but can be added on when you order the truck or purchased later and added on yourself.
Here are the basic specializations from the slate website. With a full length of 174.6 inches, 5 ft bed length, bed volume of 35.1 cu. ft., 69.3 in height, NACS (Tesla) charger, with DC fast charging. Max payload of 1400 lb~, Max towing capacity 1000 lb~, all the standard safety measures, on normal charging- full charge in 4-8 hours, 25-40 miles per hour of charge. On Fast DC charging 20-80% charge in 30 minutes.
So, what’s the drawback? The big problem? An under $20,000 small EV truck with complete customization? That all sounds like a win. Especially compared to the $28,145 Ford Maverick, or $47,780 Ford F-150 Lightning. Well, there are two major worries going around. First, that the truck will be cheap for a reason, with creaky plastic and falling apart by the time it ends up at your door. The other worry is that the customizations will be ridiculously expensive. Sure, you can choose to turn your $20,000 truck into an SUV, but at an unreasonable price tag, especially if the parts and add ons are cheaply made. But, unfortunately, time will only tell. The prices for add-ons have yet to be released. TLFnow did an in depth video on the early showing of the Slate Pre Production model, which didn’t seem to have any noticeable interior “cheapness” problems. One of the people in the video even stated that the material on the seats felt high quality and far better than they expected for such a cheap vehicle, saying, “what’s fascinating about the material, the color, and trim of this vehicle at $27,500 (pre production price) [is] you’d expect [these seat covers] to be vinyl. But…the tactile feel is pretty good!” At the end of the day, only time will tell. Take a look at the Slate Auto website and mess around with their Slate truck customization page.
https://www.slate.auto/en/specs
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