Final night time, a brand new firm known as Slate Auto unveiled its first product, a spartan two-seater electrical truck with a mere 150 miles of vary and a world of chance. There’s no paint, no distracting infotainment display screen, and no stereo and even radio. It doesn’t tower over your common 12-year-old, and it might promote for below $20,000 (together with incentives) when it arrives in 2026.
If it arrives, in fact. We don’t have to get into the litany of obstacles that lie within the path of Slate’s future success — together with a world commerce battle and a presidential administration brazenly hostile to EVs — as a result of as an alternative I’m all for speaking in regards to the truck as a potential antidote to our rising obsession with overpowered, oversize vehicles and SUVs.
You’ve in all probability observed this downside when you’ve got eyes and dwell in America in 2025. Our roads are filled with these roving land yachts. Gross sales of SUVs and pickup vehicles reached new highs in 2024, accounting for 75 % of whole automobile registrations. A decade in the past, these two segments made up simply half of the market. In the present day, they symbolize three out of each 4 new automobiles bought in America.
These automobiles are greater and heavier than their predecessors. In 2023, 31 % of latest automobiles in America weighed over 5,000 kilos (2.27 tons), in comparison with 22 % in 2018, in keeping with a recent investigation by The Economist. And with the shift to electrical automobiles, a lot of these automobiles have grow to be even heavier. The Ford F-150 Lightning has a curb weight of round 6,500 kilos, roughly 60 % heavier than its fuel equal.
And as they’ve expanded, rising taller and wider on common than automobiles from earlier many years, they’ve additionally grow to be extra lethal to pedestrians and different susceptible highway customers. The form of a automobile, particularly the hood, additionally performs a essential position in figuring out whether or not a pedestrian can survive being struck. Automobiles with hood heights of greater than 40 inches (about 3.3 toes) and blunt entrance ends angled at larger than 65 levels have been 44 % extra prone to trigger fatalities, in keeping with the Insurance coverage Institute for Freeway Security.
In the meantime, pedestrian deaths have skyrocketed in recent times. Between 2013 and 2022, pedestrian fatalities elevated 57 %, from 4,779 to 7,522, NHTSA stories. In 2022, 88 % of pedestrian deaths occurred in single-vehicle crashes.
Screenshot: Slate Auto
The Slate Truck is virtually diminutive in comparison with most different vehicles on the highway. It’s 69.3 inches tall, 174.6 inches lengthy, and 70.6 inches large (mirrors included), with a wheelbase of 108.9 inches. Evaluate that to the 2024 Ford Maverick — typically held up as the kind of compact truck most automakers don’t make anymore — which is 68.7 inches tall, 199.7 inches lengthy, and 83.5 inches large, with a 121.1-inch wheelbase. Slate even has a nifty visualizer on its website that compares its truck to the Maverick, in addition to the Chevy Silverado EV and — delightfully — the 1985 Toyota SR5 Pickup.
The Slate Truck could are available a smaller bundle, however as Verge contributor Tim Stevens noted in his newsletter, it’s nonetheless designed to do all of the truck stuff truck homeowners love. Its cargo space measures 50 by 60 inches, and it could possibly carry 1,433 kilos of payload and tow 1,000 kilos of no matter you’ve bought. Most truck homeowners have satisfied themselves that they want extra, which is why the 2025 GMC Sierra 1500 affords a most towing capability of as much as 13,300 kilos. However when the typical Airstream trailer weighs round 3,000–5,000 kilos, it’s unclear what homeowners are imagined to do with all that added towing energy.
Slate’s method to expertise can be refreshingly easy. As a substitute of an enormous central touchscreen, the corporate consists of sprint mounts for a smartphone or pill. Slate affords its personal app, however the whole lot else you could know is on the market on a smaller gauge cluster display screen behind the steering wheel.
The Slate Truck is virtually diminutive in comparison with most different vehicles on the highway
Analysis means that the shift towards touchscreen-based infotainment techniques has accompanied an enormous improve in driver distraction, with a AAA study concluding that drivers utilizing touchscreens have been visually and mentally distracted for greater than 40 seconds when finishing duties like programming navigation or sending a textual content message. Eradicating your eyes from the highway even for simply two seconds doubles the danger of a crash.
In fact, this monastic method to design helps Slate hold its prices low, which in flip permits the corporate to promote at rock-bottom costs. When the typical new automotive purchaser in America is paying $49,740, which according to Kelley Blue Book is near an all-time excessive, then the thought of a low-cost, bare-bones, micro-truck with an all-electric powertrain (assume decrease upkeep prices, no air pollution) all of a sudden begins to look so much higher than you would possibly assume.
To make sure, Slate faces an uphill battle. All the final caveats about beginning a brand-new automotive firm in America in 2025 apply. Prospects might reject the lo-fi method or flip their noses up on the thought of all of the aftermarket customization. Who needs to do all that work? The Trump administration might kill the federal EV tax credit score, which might then nudge the Slate Truck again as much as extra acquainted Maverick territory of round $28,000.
But when it’s a success, and other people begin clamoring for extra reasonably priced, smaller, right-size automobiles, then maybe a world not overrun by gigantic, overstuffed, environment-destroying, killing machines is definitely inside attain.