Slate Emerges From Stealth With A Low-Cost, Transforming EV Pickup

• Slate is a new auto startup that broke cover on Thursday. 
• Its pickup targets a starting price below $20,000, when you factor in federal incentives. 
• Slate’s bare-bones truck has crank windows and no screen, but the company will offer tons of accessories. 

Word of a brand-new electric-vehicle startup might call to mind the strange days of the COVID era, when headlines were jam-packed with all sorts of Tesla wannabes. Some went public without an actual product or a dime in revenue. Not surprisingly, most never quite took off. Some straight-up crashed and burned. 

Slate emerged on Thursday as a very different kind of EV startup: one focused on bringing affordability back to America’s car market. That starts with a back-to-basics, highly customizable two-door pickup truck that Slate claims will cost less than $20,000 after applying the federal EV tax credit. 

“The heart of the market that we’re going into is more the wage earner, the mass population,” Chris Barman, Slate’s CEO, told InsideEVs. “There’s a massive population out there that is looking for that affordable vehicle.”

Photo by: Slate

The startup was founded in 2022, and one could argue its timing couldn’t be better. Car prices in this country never recovered from the supply squeeze of the pandemic and have remained way out of hand. A record share of American car buyers—nearly 20%—now sign up for 84-month car loans. The average monthly payment for a new vehicle has stabilized at around $750. 

The average battery-powered ride, meanwhile, will set you back an eye-watering $60,000. That’s a huge drag on efforts to break up with gasoline. Tesla talked about a $25,000 EV at some point, but like a lot of that automaker’s lofty promises, it hasn’t materialized. 

What Is The Slate Truck?

I checked out Slate’s new truck during a preview event in Los Angeles last week. The company’s novel approach to building an EV business goes deeper than just making a dirt-cheap set of wheels. Here are the basics.

It’s refreshingly compact, sitting at 174.6 inches long or over two feet shorter than a Ford Maverick. It reminds me of the two-door pickups of a different era—before Toyota Tacomas and Ford Rangers got super-sized. It has a five-foot bed, a seven-cubic-foot frunk and a simple, utilitarian design. 

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Source: Slate

It uses a single-motor, rear-wheel-drive setup with around 200 horsepower. With the included 52.7-kilowatt-hour battery equipped, it’ll return a projected 150 miles of range—not great, but Slate says this is meant to be an around-town vehicle more than a road-tripper. 

“We recognize that it’s not a vehicle for everybody, especially if you have to go long distances,” Barman, a longtime Chrysler executive, said. 

The optional 84.3-kWh pack gets you a healthier 240 miles of range. Battery cells will be made by the South Korean battery company SK On. 

The Slate truck charges at a peak rate of 120 kilowatts and recharges from 20% to 80% in around 30 minutes—again, middling. But on the plus side, it will come with the Tesla-designed NACS port from the factory. Slate hasn’t confirmed Tesla Supercharger access for its customers, but that’s likely in the cards. 

Photo by: Slate

The automaker has backers that include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, TechCrunch first reported and Slate confirmed. It plans to take over a plant somewhere in the Midwest and kick off production toward the end of 2026. By late 2027 or early 2028, once production is in full swing, Barman expects Slate will be churning out 150,000 vehicles annually. 

As of Thursday, it’s taking refundable deposits from anybody who wants a spot in line. Slate isn’t talking specifics about pricing yet, only saying that it will land in the mid-$20,000s and drop below $20,000 with the EV tax credit. With those basic figures in mind, it’s safe to assume a starting price possibly as high as $27,499 before any add-ons. And those add-ons are where things get really interesting. 

A Transforming Truck

Slate’s truck is unique in that it comes with shockingly little standard equipment—but offers practically limitless customization options.

Photo by: Slate

The startup opted to streamline manufacturing and slash the vehicle’s cost by making just a single variant that gets accessorized later. Slate refers to this as a single “SKU,” short for stock-keeping unit. Compare that to a typical car that might have dozens of different permutations of paint colors, wheels, trim packages, interiors and so on, all rolling off of the assembly line.

“We’re giving the power of accessorization back to the customer,” said Eric Keipper, Slate’s head of engineering. “They can accessorize over time and put the things that they want in the vehicle on their timeline and on their budget.”

The so-called “Blank Slate” truck comes with black steel wheels and one exterior color: gray. It sports a tiny display behind the steering wheel that houses the speedometer and backup camera. It comes with honest-to-goodness manual roll-up windows and a plastic-heavy interior. There is no infotainment screen—instead, you get a phone holder and an app. There’s no radio, no speakers, no center console and no door pockets. 

Photo by: Slate

Every vehicle leaves the factory just like that.

The interesting bit is what happens next. Customers will be able to select from over 100 accessories at launch, and not just familiar stuff like wheels, tires and interior materials. You want an SUV instead of a truck? That’s an add-on kit that installs with just a few hours of elbow grease. There are two of those: a boxy one resembling a shrunken Land Rover Defender, and another with a slanted, fastback design. 

Buyers can arrange for a “service partner” to install accessories for them, or more adventurous owners can save cash by DIY-ing the upgrades in their driveways. Plus, owners can buy accessories at any time, be it at the time of purchase or down the line. You can start with a stripped-down truck on steelies and slowly work your way up. One day, you might have a lifted, five-seat SUV with a leather interior and fender flares. And, if you get sick of anything, you can pop it off and try something else. 

That’s the idea, anyway.

Photo by: Slate

The company is developing an instructional content library called Slate University that teaches owners how to, say, install a roof rack or pop off a body panel. In fact, the truck’s access points and accessories were designed with DIY-ers in mind. A lot of stuff is held together by regular-old Allen bolts. 

Other noteworthy accessories include daytime running light covers with designs etched into them, and vinyl wrap kits in any color. The company says those wraps are straightforward for even amateurs to apply thanks to the truck’s many “coach lines,” or breaks in the body work. 

For the truck’s interior, Slate will offer accessories like door bins, electronic window switches, speakers that slot into the dash and pair to a phone via Bluetooth, a lockable glove box and a center console. Seat covers of various colors and materials—including heated ones—can be swapped in too. 

Photo by: Slate

If you want to jury-rig an infotainment system for this decidedly low-tech car, you can buy doodads that attach an iPad and portable speaker to the dashboard. One more whimsical and less functional touch: “Slatelets,” little tiles that slot into a track on the dash and are a lot like the charms you can stick into your Crocs. 

Now Comes The Hard Part

Slate has created a charming vehicle and an interesting concept. Now comes the hard part: Building a car company while avoiding the pitfalls that sank other upstarts. Doing this from scratch is hard and expensive, which explains why the last surviving U.S. car “startup” before Tesla was Chrysler, a company founded in 1925. 

With such a low-cost product, Slate will need high volumes to bring in sufficient revenue and eventually break even. So far, no automaker in the U.S. apart from Tesla has sold 150,000 electric cars in a single year, though Hyundai and General Motors are coming close. Ramping up vehicle production is one of the tougher tasks EV startups face—and that famously almost bankrupted Tesla during the early days of Model 3 production. 

Photo by: Slate

Slate executives say it’s primed to scale up without issue because of its simplified vehicle and manufacturing process. 

“The number of components that we have in the vehicle is far fewer than those of others. So getting it right the first time is going to be a lot easier in the manufacturing facility,” Keipper said. “And for us in engineering, it also allowed us to focus on this single SKU, so that we can get that dialed in from a quality perspective.”

It’ll also need to convince enough buyers to take a chance on an unproven brand. The price and customization options will help there, surely. But we still don’t know how much Slate’s various accessories will cost. That will ultimately determine, pound-for-pound, how the EV stacks up to what’s on the market. Will a Slate SUV with the 240-mile battery pack and some modest interior upgrades be competitive with something like the Chevrolet Equinox EV? 

And what if Donald Trump successfully gets Congress to gut the $7,500 incentive for plug-in car purchases? There goes a key driver of Slate’s low entry price. 

Whether this ambitious plan can succeed is still TBD. But Slate brings a fresh—and arguably very needed—approach to the EV space.