Inside Slate’s radical design process to build a $24,950 EV truck you won’t be embarrassed to drive
Inside a sprawling former printing plant in Warsaw, Indiana, the new factory for Slate Auto—the affordable, ultra-minimal electric truck backed by Jeff Bezos—doesn’t look like a typical car manufacturing plant.There’s no paint shop, something that can cost automakers $300 million or more to build. The factory doesn’t have standard stamping equipment to cut out metal parts like doors, which can cost another $100 million. The assembly line is built to make only a single model, and that vehicle is radically stripped down: Apart from the bare minimum and required safety features, there’s little inside. No infotainment screens. No radio or speakers. No carpeting. The windows roll up manually.“So many of us joined this project early on because we felt the same heartache: What happened to the two-door, affordable, highly useful truck?” says Tisha Johnson, Slate’s head of design, who helped spearhead the disruptive design process that led to the company’s bold new take on what consumers really want from their cars.Rather than just building a cheaper truck, Slate rethought nearly every assumption in modern automotive design: what features people actually use, who should be able to repair the vehicle, and whether owners should have the ability to fundamentally change it over time.Drivers can customize the EV in multiple ways, from wraps that come in any conceivable color to a kit that turns the truck into an SUV. But the company’s obsessive focus on cost means the base model is just $24,950, making it one of the most affordable EVs on the American market, and less than half the cost of a typical gas-powered truck.At the factory, workers recently began building design validation vehicles and programming and testing robots that will build the final trucks that roll out later this year. The company, which has raised $1.46 billion to date—including from General Catalyst and Bezos Expeditions, Jeff Bezos’s family office—started taking preorders today, marking the moment when its u