The electric pickup truck is diminutive and spartan — the windows are cranked by hand, and it comes in a single color, gray. Plenty of questions linger over the entire project, but Slate Auto is betting it has a big part of the answer: affordability.
The bare-bones truck that has turned heads online and off will cost roughly $25,000 (not including an undisclosed destination charge), selling directly to customers.
Among those burning questions: Can Slate ever meet its target of 150,000 sales a year? And can it survive in an environment where better-funded electric car companies like Rivian and Lucid have yet to meet volume targets or turn a profit, despite excellent reviews and enviable owner satisfaction?
With the average price of new pickups topping $64,000, Slate Auto last year told the automotive world its audacious plan: It was building an electric truck with a target price of $20,000 after a $7,500 federal tax credit, one of the least expensive vehicles of any sort.
But a lot can change in a year. Tariffs have come and gone at dizzying speeds, affecting battery and material prices, while federal E.V. tax credits disappeared at the insistence of President Trump.
Last month at its new design studio in Carson, Calif., Slate offered test rides and announced its new price, $24,950, suggesting a decision to swallow a few thousand dollars of the lost federal subsidy. The company says it has received 180,000 reservations, along with 10,000 confirmed orders with a nonrefundable $300 deposit. All sales are conducted online.
A network of 3,000 repair shops will handle servicing, 200 of them equipped for heavy electrical repairs, the company says. Deliveries are meant to begin in the fourth quarter. The pickup will be built at a brownfield site that Slate acquired in Warsaw, Ind., inside a retooled factory that once printed JC Penney catalogs.
Slate claims a range of 205 miles (a bump from its original projection of 150) — enough for day jobs and easier commutes but a little skimpy for road trips.
Short test rides for auto journalists offered limited opportunity to assess the truck but revealed punchy acceleration (zero to 60 in a claimed eight seconds) and a surprisingly smooth, rattle-free experience. A sophisticated suspension system known as De Dion sits in place of cheaper leaf springs at the rear of the truck, chosen to increase room for batteries and improve handling without compromising hauling space. If we are to take the word of the engineer who drove us around, the all-electric power steering has been optimized for road feel and quick response.
There are plenty of add-on options. A $5,000 kit can turn Slate’s pickup into a sport utility vehicle, with a rear seat, a roll bar with built-in airbags and a long roof. Slate imagines owners switching back and forth between pickup and four- or five-seat S.U.V., as the transformation can be accomplished with hand tools and no special wrenching skills.
Among those 200 options, pre-cut vinyl wrap kits in any of 100 colors are $500, with a similar sum anticipated for installation. With no plans to outwardly revise the model, the company says it expects that people will keep their trucks for decades and add options as they go.
To bolster confidence for buyers of the new company’s first product, Slate is offering a four-year, 50,000-mile bumper-to-bumper warranty, with a longer warranty for the battery and powertrain.
The promised payload of 1,550 pounds approaches the 1,850 pounds that the much larger Ford F-150 in base trim can haul. The towing capacity of 2,000 pounds will best suit homeowners and professional gardeners; those towing large boats, for instance, will need to look elsewhere.
Inside is just as spartan, with no central infotainment stack, no screens, no carpeting. Owners are expected to use their phones for guidance — a dash mount is standard equipment, as is, mercifully, air-conditioning.
Seats seemed comfortable during our brief rides, while door panels and other plastic trim, said to be preproduction items, did indeed look like preproduction plastic, though time will tell if final plastic pieces even approach premium grade. Slate claims to have kept the price low by reducing the vehicle’s parts count (800 versus 1,800 in a typical pickup) and avoiding the $1 billion cost of equipping the factory with a paint shop.
Some competition is coming, including an electric Ford pickup that is expected to start around $30,000, after the automaker shelved its electric F-150.
Despite the challenges of a start-up automaker, there are reasons to think Slate has a chance. The executive team has deep experience in automobile manufacturing and design, as well as online retailing. The chief executive, Peter Faricy, is a former head of Amazon Marketplace. Chris Barman, the president, spent 15 years at various permutations of Chrysler, finally serving as vice president of electrical engineering. Other executives have résumés including Chrysler, Volvo, Harley-Davidson, Rivian, Ford, Toyota and Tesla.
While Jeff Bezos’ personal involvement in Slate is said to be minimal, his investment put the company on the radar of the auto world. And Amazon’s DNA is well represented. Jeff Wilke, a Slate founder, spent 20 years building Amazon Prime, and William Barker, another founder, was an early Amazon investor as a teenager.
With Miles Arnone, an engineer and investor, Mr. Wilke and company founded Re:Build Manufacturing, Slate’s parent, arguing that American manufacturing was dying and that offshoring and other favored strategies of private equity firms were hollowing out American competitiveness along with American communities.
Slate intends to be an antidote to that approach. At the opening ceremony in California, Mr. Wilke noted that 4,000 employees had lost their job with the closing of the Warsaw catalog factory.
“There were folks who had spent their whole careers at the plant, and they got really emotional, tearily recounting their experience and, now, joy at the fact that this place was going to go on,” he said. The company plans to hire 2,100 of them back, he added.
Beyond its small electric truck — a market opening that remains, for the moment at least, ripe for the taking — the investment philosophy behind Slate is meant for the long haul, not a quick public offering.
“When we raised the original capital for Re:Build,” Mr. Wilke said, “I just called people that I knew were patriotic Americans that were friends who could write significant checks.” Referring to Mr. Barker, he added: “Will was the first person that I called to invest in Re:Build, and we did the same thing for Slate.”
The company has raised over $1.4 billion privately to date.
“You have to really believe in a 10-year journey,” Mr. Barker said. “We’ve been really lucky and focused on making sure that everyone we brought into the company is very long-term orientated. Long-term greedy means a wake of value to the ecosystem. Short-term greedy usually is trading paper. Win-win versus win-lose.”
