Slate Auto plans sub-$25,000 electric truck

Start with the window: the base Slate uses a hand crank. That small piece of hardware captures the company’s larger bet—a tiny, two-door electric pickup, shorter than a Honda Civic, sold with only what Slate considers necessary. The base model is priced at less than $25,000, a sharp contrast with the roughly $50,000 average price of a new vehicle in the US.

The sacrifice is range. Slate’s lithium iron phosphate battery holds 65 kilowatt-hours, and the truck’s quoted top range is 205 miles. The most basic Tesla Model 3, by comparison, can go over 320 miles on a charge. Buyers can add a Bluetooth stereo system, vinyl wraps or power windows, but the formula remains the same: a smaller battery and fewer standard features in exchange for a lower entry price.

That trade-off targets a gap in how cars are bought and used. The average American driver puts under 35 miles a day on the odometer, while nearly 90% of trips in a personal vehicle are 20 miles or less. A recent study of EV drivers found that people tend to use less than 20% of their vehicle’s range on a typical day. Slate is betting that daily errands matter more to some buyers than the longest road trip they might take.

And so what, concretely? Someone struggling with gas and grocery costs could get an electric vehicle without paying the price of a large battery or a heavily equipped truck. That matters in a US market where EVs account for under 10% of new-vehicle sales and where transportation is the country’s biggest source of greenhouse-gas emissions. China offers a useful comparison: roughly half of new vehicles sold there are electric, while new EVs sold in 2025 averaged 247 miles of range, against 329 miles in the US.

The bet is not yet proven on American roads. Slate says deliveries on preorders will start in late 2026, with factory capacity of 100,000 vehicles in the first year and 150,000 soon after; thousands of customers have already placed preorders. Investors including Jeff Bezos have put nearly $1.4 billion into the company, and Ford is expected to introduce its own small electric truck in 2027 at around $30,000. The decisive test will be whether buyers accept a smaller, shorter-range vehicle when the price is low enough.