How The Slate Truck Might Be The Wrecking Ball The Industry Needs

If you haven’t caught the hype yet, a new company has surfaced after three years of developing a new low-cost, truly bare-bones, electric truck. Backed by Jeff Bezos money and a slew of industry talent on-board, the truck is designed to disrupt the automotive industry with a new vehicle people can actually afford – we’ll admit we aren’t free of cynicism, but we’ll put it aside for now. We were there at the launch party to drink in the marketing and mix with the influencers and prospective investors, but now that we’ve had time to digest what we saw and heard, this truck is making more and more sense.

Can You Buy An Affordable Electric Truck?

The short answer is no. Not yet, anyway. The Ford F-150 Lightning is currently the cheapest and that starts at a hair under $55,000 for the no-nonsense Pro model that comes with a pretty lousy range. Ford is aiming to be the first to bring an affordable electric truck to market, with a price below $25,000 – but we are still a year or two away from seeing a truly affordable model.

We’re not hopping on the hype train here, though. New electric truck startups have come and gone with their plans to revolutionize or disrupt the industry. On the flip side, if Slate can execute this (and it’s still an if), production is set to start in 2026 – and it’s being advertised as a $20,000 EV based on federal tax credits that exist now, which is incredibly unstable ground to base a price on. Now, with the cautious part of our ‘cautious optimism’ out of the way, let’s get optimistic.

Removing Everything That Isn’t A Truck

Slate calls it truck the Blank Slate because it arrives as a stripped-down truck ready for someone to make it their own. It arrives with safety systems, air conditioning and heating, manual wind-up windows, manually adjustable seats, and steel wheels. There’s no infotainment system (there’s a universal holder and charger for your phone), and if you want music, you add on either the optional Bluetooth speakers or just use use your own.

This goes completely against the industry grain where a standard features list is used to sell a car, whether the customer actually uses those features or not. If you just need a runaround little electric truck, that’s all you get and all you pay for. Imagine if Ford did that with the $27k base Maverick… if the Slate truck takes off, Ford may have to.

A La Carte Options

This is where the real disruption could be – the Slate truck arrives as a base model and then, if wanted, upgrades can be added one-by-one or ordered from the factory, making it almost infinitely upgradable and customizable. If you’ve shopped for a base model car, you would have noticed the base model has a feature list, and you’re paying for those features whether you like them or not. Just want to use your phone? You’re still paying for the infotainment system. Don’t want or need heated seats? Tough. But you do want cooling seats, and they’re not a standalone option.

So you have to go up a trim, probably two to get them, but now you have a bunch more stuff you’re paying for you don’t want or need. Maybe you rarely have a passenger in the car, so you’re paying for 15-way electric adjustable seats, or heated wing mirrors and on-board navigation you don’t need. Maybe the feature you want is only in a package, lumped in with a moonroof that holds no appeal to you. Don’t listen to music? Well, you pay for speakers anyway.

This is how manufacturers make more money on each car sold. Those feature lists and trims are carefully curated and designed to upsell and get you to buy as much as possible. What we hope for is that the Slate truck starts the ball rolling to eat away at that, starting with small trucks. Later, maybe Slate builds a car or another automaker follows the business model.

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Cultural Possibilities

We’re going to pick on the Maverick here, but Ford has pushed out the Lobo trim as the idea of a street truck. However, your Maverick is expensive and comes with expensive paint and is expensive to modify. The Slate truck doesn’t come painted, the idea being that customers can have it wrapped how they want, and the truck is designed to be easy to wrap. The steel wheels aren’t an expensive item to remove and replace, and the whole truck is designed to be easily worked on.

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The Ford Maverick can learn a thing or two from this build.

Even the body parts are a composite material, and you can bet the aftermarket will have fun with things like new fenders, doors, and bodykits in general. You can remove and replace components easily and Slate says it will open-source all specs and measurements, which opens up the 3D printing opportunities in a spectacular fashion. It’s a small truck that’s designed to be customized, and we suspect people will pick up that idea and run with it. If enthusiasts can genuinely modify and customize their relatively inexpensive yet useful truck to express themselves, this could be the actual return of the street truck.

An Actual Cheap Work And Fleet Truck

If slate pulls this off, the truck won’t just be relatively inexpensive to buy. It will also be inexpensive to maintain and repair. Dent a body panel or break the tailgate? Replace and re-wrap it if it’s wrapped. Bend a wheel on a big rock? It’s a steel wheel, it’s not expensive. Need an oil change? No you don’t. And you’re not going to have infotainment and software-related problems because that’s your phone or the tablet you mounted on the dashboard.

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Video: Slate’s $25k Pickup Is Even Better In Vibrant Paint

The Jeff Bezos-backed venture is already making waves.

That makes this a wonderful pitch for a local work truck, whether that’s for self-employed workers, business fleets, and government fleets. Even rental companies can get in on the action by renting small trucks for small jobs.

Options, Options, Options

We spent some time speaking with a few people and the question of how Slate will profit came up repeatedly. Slate isn’t vocal about that, but we think it’s quite obvious what the business plan is. The first key to making money will be volume with a small profit margin. The second will be keeping the build cost as low as possible, so that profit can exist. It’s built with minimal components and the manufacturing plant doesn’t even need a paint shop.

The real profit, we suspect, will be a result of the lack of standard features. There are options, and a lot of them, starting with the wrap and different lights. Inside, most of the panels are easy to remove and replace, and Slate will offer different colors and materials – including leather, we were told. If you want speakers, the dashboard has two glove compartments with a mesh cover, and one can be filled with Slate’s Bluetooth speaker.

It will even sell a tablet mount for the dashboard or a holder for your own Bluetooth speaker and what it calls Slatelets – little expressive clip-on badges for the dashboard. By offering a menu of options, people will be inclined to buy them and not feel like they’ve paid for what they don’t want or need. It could turn out to be one of the smartest moves an automaker has made in years.

Working On Your Own Car

The more complicated cars get, and they’re all complicated now, the harder it is to work on your own car without specialized equipment. And automakers do not want you working on your own car. Now, Slate has specifically said the drivetrain is off limits for easy modification, and we suspect that would be a quick way to void the warranty. But, as it is built simply and deliberately easy to work on by someone that wants to, this is a big deal. Home repair could make a bit of a comeback here, and if you have access to a 3D printer, it’s game on for customization.

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Video: This Is When Slate EV’s $25k Pickup Arrives

We don’t have long to wait at all.

Words Of Caution

What we saw at the reveal were prototypes, and you could tell. How much better the production model will be remains to be seen. It’s a budget truck and built to be modular, so the ride and comfort quality will likely reflect that. We’ve mentioned the Ford Maverick, and we highly doubt the Slate truck will be as nice of a ride as any trim Maverick. It’s also possible that once you start adding options to a Slate truck, that price starts rising dramatically.

3D printing was mentioned by Slate, but that is its own world and a hobby. Few people can buy a 3D printer and have the thing they wanted to print done immediately. It’s a learning curve and an investment of time and money, albeit one that isn’t as steep as it was just a few years ago. On the flip side, there are a lot of people out there with 3D printers and already have businesses making things, automotive or otherwise, so the aftermarket could grow quickly.

This writer has put down the $50 deposit as a $20,000 runaround electric truck with nothing I don’t need is an attractive one. But even the price could change – and not just because that $20,000 number takes into account federal tax incentives that could easily go away before the truck reaches the manufacturing stage. We’re going to watch this with interest and hope it doesn’t go the way of the previous low-cost electric truck companies and that EV credits somehow survive. This could be the start of something cool.

Isbark.com