Slate Truck: The $25,000 Electric Pickup That Strips Out Everything
What is the Slate Truck? It is a small, bare-bones electric pickup from Slate Auto, a US startup backed by Jeff Bezos. It is expected to start around $24,950, which would make it one of the cheapest new vehicles in America. The catch is what is missing: no paint, crank windows, no touchscreen, no speakers. You buy a "blank slate" and add what you want later, including a roughly $5,000 kit that turns the pickup into a five-seat SUV.
Every carmaker on earth is racing to put a bigger screen, more horsepower, and more software in your next vehicle. Slate Auto is betting its entire existence that a lot of people want the opposite. Its first product, the Slate Truck, is a small electric pickup with crank windows, unpainted plastic body panels, no infotainment screen, and no speakers. It is expected to cost about $24,950. In a market where the average new car now sells for nearly $50,000, that is not a price cut. It is a different theory of what a car should be.
And people are listening. Slate has collected more than 150,000 refundable reservations for a truck nobody has driven yet, on the strength of a promise that sounds almost old-fashioned: a simple, cheap, honest vehicle that does the basics and lets you add the rest yourself. Whether that promise survives contact with reality is the most interesting question in the EV world right now.
Who is actually behind it
Slate is not a hobby project. It spent roughly three years in stealth in Troy, Michigan under the name "Re:Car," and it is backed by a who's-who of operators who know how to scale things. Jeff Bezos is an investor. The co-founders came out of Re:Build Manufacturing, and the leadership bench is stacked with Amazon alumni: co-founder Jeff Wilke ran Amazon's entire worldwide consumer business, and the chief executive, Peter Faricy, built Amazon Marketplace across 14 countries. The company has raised about $1.4 billion, including a $650 million round in April 2026, and it is converting a shuttered printing plant in Warsaw, Indiana into a factory that can build up to 150,000 trucks a year.
That Amazon DNA matters, because the Slate playbook is pure Amazon: strip the product down to a cheap, standardized core, then make money on the accessories and the long tail of customization. The truck is the Kindle. The wraps, kits, and add-ons are the e-books.
The price, and the asterisk
The number everyone is chasing is the price, and it comes with a story. When Slate revealed the truck in April 2025, it teased a sticker "under $20,000," a figure that only worked with the old $7,500 federal EV tax credit. Then in mid-2025 that credit was scrapped, and Slate quietly scrubbed the "under $20,000" language from its site before the ink was even dry. The company built to exploit a cheap-EV incentive lost it before shipping a single truck.
What is left is a starting price that leaked, embarrassingly, out of Slate's own website code: $24,950. Slate is due to confirm final pricing at a reveal in June 2026, and we will update these figures the moment they are official. If $24,950 holds, the Slate Truck would undercut the Nissan Leaf and the new Chevy Bolt to become the cheapest new EV in America, and the cheapest new pickup of any kind, gasoline included.
There is a quieter angle worth keeping. Seventeen states still offer their own EV incentives. In Oregon, a lower-income buyer could stack up to $7,500 in state help and land a brand-new truck near $17,500. The sub-$20k Slate did not die. It just moved to the states that still want it.
What you get, and what you don't
This is where the Slate Truck stops being a normal car review and becomes a philosophy argument. Here is what the base truck does not have: paint, power windows, a touchscreen, speakers, and alloy wheels. The body panels are dyed-through gray polypropylene, so there is no paint shop, which removes one of the most expensive and complex steps in all of car manufacturing. The windows roll up by hand. Navigation and music come from your phone on a mount. There are exactly two seats.
What it does have is the equipment that keeps you alive and legal: automatic emergency braking, forward-collision warning, up to eight airbags, and air conditioning (engineers reportedly debated even that). The result is a vehicle with fewer than 800 parts, roughly a fifth of the part count of a normal pickup. Fewer parts means lower cost, fewer things to break, and a truck a competent owner can actually understand.
Slate is leaning all the way into that. There are no dealerships; you buy direct. There is a "Slate University" of how-to content, a RepairPal network of 4,000-plus shops from day one, and a clear right-to-repair, do-it-yourself ethos. This is a truck that wants you to wrench on it.
The modular trick
The cleverest idea is that every Slate Truck rolls off the line identical, and you personalize it after you own it. Slate sells more than 100 accessories through a "Slate Maker" configurator, from vinyl wraps (the answer to "no paint") to wheels, lighting, and interior trim. The headline kit is an SUV conversion: for a reported $5,000, a flat-pack box arrives at your door with a hardtop, a roll cage, and a rear bench that turns the two-seat pickup into a five-seat SUV. One vehicle, assembled one way at the factory, becomes a pickup, a fastback SUV, or a square-back SUV in your driveway.
It is IKEA logic applied to a car, and it is genuinely novel. It also makes for irresistible content, which is exactly the kind of free marketing a startup needs.
The specs, briefly
Under the simplicity sits a sensible EV. Two battery options: a 52.7 kWh pack good for about 150 miles, or an 84.3 kWh pack for up to 240 miles. A single rear motor makes 201 horsepower and 195 lb-ft, enough for a roughly 8-second 0-60 and a 90 mph top speed. It fast-charges at up to 120 kW over a NACS plug, so 20 to 80% takes about half an hour, and it tows around 1,000 pounds. Nobody is cross-shopping this against an F-150 for towing. That is not the job.
How it stacks up against the cheapest trucks
Put the Slate next to the other affordable electric trucks and the trade is obvious: it wins on price by a mile and gives up capability everywhere else. Tap the metrics to see it.
On price the Slate is in a different league, roughly half a Lightning and a third of a Cybertruck. Switch to range or towing and the picture flips: this is a city-and-errands truck, not a workhorse. That is the deal you are making.
The wider benchmark is the gas-powered Ford Maverick, the current value champion of small trucks. The Slate undercuts even that, which is the whole point: it is not trying to beat other EVs, it is trying to beat the cheapest new vehicle you can otherwise buy.
| Vehicle | Starting price | Powertrain | Range | Towing | Seats |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Slate Truck | ~$24,950 | RWD, 201 hp | 150 to 240 mi | ~1,000 lb | 2 (5 with kit) |
| Ford Maverick | ~$27,145 | Hybrid / gas | n/a (gasoline) | 2,000 to 4,000 lb | 5 |
| Ford F-150 Lightning | ~$50,000 | AWD dual motor | 240 to 320 mi | up to 10,000 lb | 5 |
| Tesla Cybertruck | ~$80,000 | AWD | ~250 mi | 11,000 lb | 5 |
Prices are approximate US starting figures in mid-2026. The Slate price is the widely reported pre-reveal figure and will be confirmed at Slate's June 2026 launch.
The risks, stated plainly
A cheap, simple EV is easy to love on a spec sheet and hard to deliver. Slate has raised $1.4 billion and banked more than 150,000 reservations, but it has not delivered a single truck. Production is slated to start in late 2026, and realistically most reservation holders are looking at 2027. EV startups are a graveyard, and the failure mode is almost always the same: the first car is late, the price creeps, and early build quality bites.
There are other clouds. The federal tax credit the whole concept leaned on is gone. Ford is openly building its own roughly $30,000 electric pickup for 2027, and its EV chief took a direct shot at Slate, promising his truck "is not going to be a stripped-down, old-school vehicle as a path to low cost." And in a detail that set off speculation, the Bezos family-office representative quietly left Slate's board just before production. None of this is fatal. All of it is worth watching.
Why it matters even if it stumbles
Strip away the Bezos headlines and the Slate Truck is a real argument about where EVs went wrong. The industry chased range, horsepower, and screen size, and priced normal buyers out in the process. Slate is the loudest bet that there is a market below all of that, for people who want a tool, not a gadget, and who would rather add a feature than pay for one they will never use. If it works, it reframes the cheap EV from "a small car with a small battery" into "a simple car you finish yourself." That idea is bigger than one startup, and it is not going away even if this particular truck does.
How Slate got here
From a stealth project to a national talking point in about four years.
Slate is founded in stealth as "Re:Car" inside Re:Build Manufacturing in Troy, Michigan.
The truck is revealed publicly with an "under $20,000" pitch (with the tax credit).
The federal EV tax credit is scrapped; Slate drops the sub-$20k claim from its site.
Reservations pass 150,000, on a refundable $50 deposit.
A $650 million round lifts total funding to about $1.4 billion; ex-Amazon executive Peter Faricy is CEO.
Official price reveal and preorders, with production starting in Indiana late in the year.
The EV-Global Verdict
The Slate Truck is the most interesting EV nobody has driven. At around $25,000 it is priced like a statement, and the no-paint, no-screen, build-it-yourself concept is the first genuinely fresh idea in affordable cars in years. But a reservation is not a delivery, and startups die in exactly the gap Slate now has to cross: from 150,000 deposits to 150,000 trucks in driveways. If it ships on time, near its promised price, with the quality to back it, it could do to cheap trucks what the Model 3 did to sedans. That is three big ifs. We will know far more after the June reveal, and even more in 2027.
Slate Truck: frequently asked questions
How much does the Slate Truck cost?
It is expected to start around $24,950, with the official price confirmed at a reveal in June 2026. That would make it one of the cheapest new vehicles on sale in the US.
Who makes the Slate Truck?
Slate Auto, a Michigan startup backed by Jeff Bezos and run largely by former Amazon executives. It is building the truck at a factory in Warsaw, Indiana.
What is the Slate Truck's range?
About 150 miles with the standard 52.7 kWh battery, or up to 240 miles with the larger 84.3 kWh pack. It fast-charges at up to 120 kW over a NACS plug.
Does the Slate Truck really have no screen or paint?
Correct. The base truck has crank windows, unpainted composite body panels, no central touchscreen, and no speakers. You add what you want afterward, including a phone mount and accessories.
Can the Slate Truck become an SUV?
Yes. A reported roughly $5,000 kit adds a hardtop, a roll cage, and a rear bench, converting the two-seat pickup into a five-seat SUV. It ships as a flat-pack you fit yourself.
When can I get a Slate Truck?
Production is expected to start in late 2026, with most customer deliveries likely in 2027. Reservations are refundable and preorders open alongside the June 2026 price reveal.
Image: Slate Auto. Resized and converted to AVIF.
