James May pulled up to a stop sign somewhere in Texas and realized something was off. He had been driving for an hour through city streets, country roads, and freeway stretches, and he still had not touched the brake pedal. Not once. It is that kind of quietly disarming experience that the Slate Truck keeps delivering, the sort of thing you do not expect from a vehicle that costs just a tad under $25,000 and does not even come with paint.
A pickup truck that treats the brake pedal as optional
The Slate Truck is made by Slate Auto in Detroit, with funding from Jeff Bezos. It is electric, two-wheel drive, and arrives from the factory finished in dark gray plastic with no upholstery to speak of beyond the seat itself. The windows are wound up and down by hand. The heating and ventilation is controlled by three knobs: fan speed with an AC button in the middle, temperature, and airflow direction. No touchscreen. No digital display. May noted that this system has probably never really been beaten.
The one-pedal driving setup means you press the accelerator to go and lift off to slow down, with the regenerative braking effect pronounced enough that the brake pedal genuinely becomes an emergency-only fixture. After about a mile of adjustment, the system becomes completely intuitive. The range sits at roughly 200 miles of usable driving, the 0-60 time runs at about 8 seconds, and the top speed stays under 100 miles an hour. May compared its real-world character to the original Fiat Panda or the Dacia Spring: a cheap, simple car wearing a pickup truck’s body because pickup trucks are, as he put it, ‘an American cultural hard point.’
The interior reminded him of ‘one of those bathrooms in a French Formula 1 hotel, which always seem to be made out of one piece of injection molded plastic.’ He pointed out you could jet-wash it from the inside, which is either a criticism or a selling point depending on what you carry in your truck. A shoulder blind spot bothered him enough to mention it twice, but beyond that, his criticisms ran thin.
The bagel you finish yourself
The base price holds because Slate Auto produces the same basic black plastic pickup over and over. Everything else is optional. Wraps in any color, decals, roof racks, extra bodywork to convert it into an SUV or something closer to a beach buggy, a phone mount if you want somewhere to put your mobile. May used the configurator alongside his traveling companion Lucy Brown to make the point concrete. She added nearly everything available and landed at $33,827. He added nothing at all and stayed at $24,950. ‘I’ve beaten them at their own game,’ he said, ‘and I’m just going to have it as it comes.’
The shape itself won him over in a way the price alone would not have. May maintains there are exactly three things that were genuinely better in the past: electric kettles, zips, and the design of American pickup trucks from the 1970s and 1980s. The Slate, with its boxy cartoon-simple profile, fits that older template. He described the design process at Slate as having ‘an Etch A Sketch and a coin to draw around for the wheels,’ and meant it as a compliment.
Lucy Brown, rain-soaked in the passenger seat
The final stretch of the drive happened in what May described as ‘the pissing rain.’ He turned to Brown, who had arranged the trip, and asked why she had scheduled it for that particular day when the day before had been dry and beautiful. She did not have a great answer.
May drove back and parked the Slate Truck in exactly the same spot where he had started, the rain coming down on its unpainted plastic body, and concluded that he would genuinely buy one. Not the configured version. The blank one.
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