How The New Slate Pickup Could Make An Affordable EV Camper

Some things in life are expected.

When I get a nudge at a dinner party from my spouse, it’s expected that the ride home will be ripe with harsh words about whatever it was I shouldn’t have said. When I take the ten-year-old remains of what was once a $100,000 German car to my mechanic, I expect that a sixty-dollar oil change has a solid chance of gaining a zero. Possibly two. There’s no way I’m ever going to get the keys back without forking over a bunch of extra dollars for something they “found.” It’s  inevitable.

The Expected happened here at the Autopian last week when essentially eighty percent of the staff was working full-throttle on stories devoted to the Slate, that curious little EV pickup-slash-sport-ute backed by the guy who came up with Prime Day.

Each and every writer was going on and on about the pricing, options, online configurator, powertrain, and even suspension details of this new Slate truck, so it wasn’t hard to guess what was coming next. I didn’t have to wait long, as the Slack message appeared not long after the Slate news dropped:

Hey, it’s only natural to Camper All The Things here at this site, and I probably would have camperized the Slate without being prompted anyway. Besides, the designers of this rig (and especially of the accessories and trim) seem to be digging a disco-era vibe, and there’s a compact, space-efficient camper from this time period that hits the spot in terms of the look I know this crew is going for. Let’s summon the spirit of that classic recreation machine to make the perfect little EV camper out of this much-hyped little pickup.

More, More, More … How Do You Like It?

The 1970s’ design aesthetics were often so extreme and absurd that it’s easy for the retina-searing colors and lurid plaid upholsteries to make you miss some of the true innovation of the products that wore those garish looks at the time. Campers are certainly good examples of this.

As RVs go, General Motor’s 1973 GMC Motorhome still stands as possibly the GOAT design for self-propelled campers, even if you don’t like green interiors. What was green? Everything. Everything was green.

I tried to conceptualize updating this thing for the eighties, but it’s impossible to follow a masterpiece.

Want a different example? Well, it might have looked like Uncle Rico would be coming out the back door of this bubble-windowed curiosity, but the 1977 Champion Trans Van was a unique and even partially successful attempt to make a camper that could justify the investment needed to buy it by working as an everyday family vehicle as well.

I tried to update that for today as an EV-van-based daily driver camper:

Another ultra-disco-fantastic RV that just oozed unsurpassed thinking was the Chevy K5 Blazer Chalet and the nearly identical GMC Casa Grande. No, the modern $ 200,000-plus overlanding campers you see today are by no means a “new thing”; General Motors was there fifty years ago, as stated in their literature:

“Did you ever notice that the toughest places to get to usually turn out to be the nicest places to stay? Too bad you couldn’t have a neat little cabin right in the middle of it all. With a new Chevy Blazer Chalet, you’ve got it.”

Our Mercedes Streeter has written about these a few times already:

In the mid-1970s, General Motors decided to capitalize on the rise of off-roading and the boom of camping at the same time. Most motorhomes of the day were built on chassis that weren’t designed to leave the manicured parking spaces of a campground. GM teamed up with Chinook Mobilodge Inc., the maker of now-famous fiberglass Class C campers, to create a camper that a truck owner could take anywhere.

This thing looked like a magnificent Tonka toy come to life. Sounds to me like it had a full GM new-truck warranty on it, too; the only thing that I totally hate about it is the redundant use of taillights. Couldn’t they have just repositioned the original ones and put body-color plugs in the holes instead of wasting another set? There were probably people starving for GM Box Body lights in other parts of the world while these have just stayed dark for the last half century! Anyway, Mercedes continues:

Around 1,800 examples were made in 1976 and 1977 with most examples being the Chevrolet model….The campers started life at GM’s factory, where a stock Blazer or Jimmy would be built. The base truck would then be sent to Chinook, where the back wall of the cab would be removed. From there, Chinook bolted its camper body to what was left. This camper is made out of fiberglass with an inner steel frame for structure.

The was not a typical pickup bed camper; you couldn’t easily remove the thing from the back of the Blazer. However, if you were careful not the crack the fiberglass structure, you could ostensibly move it to another K5 once the base truck succumbed to Midwest winters by the late eighties.

There’s no bathroom, but you get a kitchenette with a sink plus a dinette that could convert to a two-person sleeper. Plus, the pop-top roof allows for six and a half feet of headroom. Fully equipped models had a refrigerator, propane stove, and furnace; they could even sleep two more people in bunks in bunks that fit in the pop-up area.

That’s a lot of camper for something only half a foot longer than a current Tahoe, and I bet it would work as a six-passenger daily driver in a rather convoluted way if need be. Can’t we have something like this today? Well, we’re still wearing out Boogie Shoes, so let’s not take them off just yet.

Draw That Funky Camper, White Boy

The retro-modern style of the Slate is similar enough to the “box” Chevy that something that looks almost exactly the same as the old Chalet camper would work here. I spec’d out a Slate on the configurator in the most seventies-looking graphics offered, including the strange color-stripe wheels. Adding black graphic accents behind the truck’s side windows let them visually follow the leaned-back shape of the camper over the cab and parallelogram-shaped windows of the camper that pay tribute to the old Chalet.

To hide the access doors and exhaust vents on the back of the camper, I just painted the whole area black. You’ll also notice that I do not have redundant taillights as on the original Blazer Chalet; the Bronco-looking stock fixtures from the Slate fit into recesses on BakPak’s tail. There’s also a third brake light above the door with white LEDs as well to act as a “porch light” or supplementary reversing light. Body-colored plugs would fill the rear side markers, which could get repositioned in the BakPak add-on.

Here’s one thing that a lot of people aren’t aware of when they look at pictures of this new Slate pickup: the thing is really small by today’s standards. It’s around two feet shorter than the Ford Maverick four-door unibody truck, but the people that go on forever about how “we need a little pickup the size of a 1980s Toyota or Nissan” will be happy to know that the Slate is exactly the same length of the smallest 1987 versions of those two standards.

What this means is that we have a lot less room to work with than on the K5. It’s around 9 inches narrower, and the “bed” is only five feet versus the Blazer’s six. Still, we can use the same layout as that you see in the pictures above of the Chalet with a few changes.

The BakPak camper would have a sink and stove kitchenette area like the Blazer Chalet, though it would get a bit more compact. The same holds true of the storage area on the other side of the camper, though I think that with today’s products, we could find a way to get an optional slide-out cartridge toilet in there somewhere. By far the biggest change would be with the dinette area. This would have to shrink down to a two-person restaurant-style space instead of the four accommodated by the Blazer, and the narrower width of the Slate means that it would only work as a sleeping area for one or two children.

The upper bunk area will be mandatory, created by folding out the mattress that usually sits on top of the Slate’s cab and letting it rest on built-in supports (which is why there are no windows above the windshield on the camper). You could still partially access the kitchenette and storage areas at the back when the mattress is deployed.

A rear-mounted spare tire is offered as an option on the Slate, but that will obviously block the camper’s door. The Blazer Chalet offered the solution of a front-mounted spare, though I don’t really like the look of that on the Slate, and would likely be sternly frowned upon by the NHTSA. Run flats are probably the way to go here.

Would this thing move under its own power? That’s a good question – but then again, the original Toyota Chinook camper only had around 100 horsepower to work with, and you know that several mini trucks back in the day got by on sub-60 horsepower diesel mills. Performance won’t be part of the game here by any means, but they had plenty of fun in the seventies and eighties going slow.

Is It The Right Clean Slate To Start With?

To make an inexpensive camper, you need to start with a cost-effective vehicle; the Slate just might be that machine to attract van-lifers who want something with a bit more room.

The only issue with our Slate camper is that, unlike the Blazer Chalet, it can only spin its rear wheels; you can forget any ideas you might have of going where the old K5 could. If you want to go off-roading, you’ll need to put the BakPak camper unit into the back of an old Japanese truck with four-wheel drive. Actually, those ancient pickups had six-foot beds instead of the Slate’s five-footer, so the BakPak might fit without even overhanging the back.

Anyone out there got a rust-free Nissan Hardbody or Marty McFly SR5 to spare?

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