It feels like I’m getting asked about the Slate Auto EV every few hours as people seem desperate to know what to think. For such a simple-looking truck, the emotions and questions around its existence are unusually complex. That’s reasonable. This truck is being sold as a repudiation of modern cars, which it is. More importantly, it’s a wholesale rethinking of modern carmaking. That it looks cool is just a bonus.
I wanted to start The Morning Dump on a high note. I want to be excited about things. So much car news has been depressing lately, even though there’s plenty to look forward to.
In other news Chinese automaker BYD’s net income was higher last quarter, which is good news for them. Do you want that good news to be more American? Sure, fine, Foxconn says it’ll start building electric cars for someone in Ohio as early as next year.
Tariffs remain the supermassive black hole around which the universe currently spins, and putting a positive spin on that is a challenge. Here’s one: Japan can maybe get its tariffs removed if it can convince the President of the United States that it isn’t dropping bowling balls on American cars to disqualify them, which it isn’t doing.
How The Slate Auto EV Is Built Is The Most Interesting Thing About The Slate Auto EV
If you were somehow sequestered from the web for the last few weeks, perhaps exploring the Tonga Trench in your personal submersible, then you’ve missed all the excitement around the Slate Auto EV truck/SUV. The TL/DR is that a Bezos-backed company is going to build a Sub-$20,000 (with current incentives) EV truck that you can turn into an SUV yourself, has no paint, comes with crank windows, and offers rear airbags you can install yourself.
Just here, we’ve written about the engineering, the powerplant, the fun wraps, and the whole concept of a DIY car. All of that’s important, and it all seems designed to get people to talk about it so that they, eventually, plunk down $50 to maybe buy one at some point in the future. I put in my own $50, as much out of curiosity as sincere intent to purchase.
I think all the hype around the vehicle is deserved. This is a genuinely new idea backed by an individual who can afford to see it through the difficult early stages. What’s most fascinating to me, though, isn’t what it is but how it might actually come to exist.
The car didn’t become the car, really, until it could be mass-produced. The Model T was far from the first automobile, but people think of it as the first and most important vehicle because of Henry Ford’s moving assembly line. The same could be said of the Toyota Corolla and the Toyota Production System, which allowed the Japanese automaker to expand rapidly and efficiently to compete with more established automakers.
More recently, “gigacasting” became an industry obsession as Tesla went from making Roadsters essentially by hand to building massive production facilities that produce enough Model Ys to replace the Corolla as the most popular car in the world. Gigacasting and Gigafactories became key, with giant casts reducing the number of parts required to make a car.
It’s a very Musk-ian view of production, relying on a huge sci-fi scale to achieve corporate dominance. The Bezos-backed Slate Auto has a completely inverted concept. For all the talk of how electric cars are simpler and require less complex drivetrains, the actual electric cars you can buy are enormously complex and expensive. They’re also all produced in factories that look a lot like existing car factories.
Slate Auto’s first plant doesn’t sound anything like a modern car factory. Right off the bat, there’s no paint. Just last year, Toyota invested $922 million to build a new paint shop at its Kentucky plant. Painting cars is one of the hardest parts of making a modern car, and Slate Auto has entirely done away with it.
How? The body panels are dent- and scratch-resistant injection molded polypropylene composite material. Basically, it’s plastic, just like the old Saturns. If you want color on your truck, you can just wrap it, or Slate Auto can wrap it for you. This is theoretically way simpler.
It’s way more than that, though, and Tim Stevens writing for The Verge captures a lot of what’s interesting to me here:
Vehicle factories tend to have high ceilings to make room for the multiple-story stamping machines that form metal body parts. Injection molding of plastic is far easier and cheaper to do in limited spaces — spaces like the factory that Slate has purchased for its manufacturing, reportedly near Indiana. “The vehicle is designed, engineered, and manufactured in the US, with the majority of our supply chain based in the US,” Snyder says.
The simplification goes simpler still. Slate will make just one vehicle, in just one trim, in just one color, with everything from bigger battery packs to SUV upgrade kits added on later.
“Because we only produce one vehicle in the factory with zero options, we’ve moved all of the complexity out of the factory,” Snyder says.
Making cars is hard and expensive. At least it is if you make it the old-fashioned way. At one point last year, Rivian lost $39,130 for every car it sold, which seems bad until you find out that Lucid was losing $341,604 over the same period. Both the Rivian R1S and Lucid Air are almost certainly better vehicles than the Slate Auto EV, but there’s no way to make them as cheaply.
Over at TechCrunch, Sean O’Kane has identified the likely facility in Warsaw, Indiana, likely to be used by the company:
Slate Auto, the buzzy new EV startup that broke stealth this week, is close to locking in a former printing plant located in Warsaw, Indiana as the future production site for its cheap electric truck, a review of public records shows.
The company is expected to lease the 1.4 million-square-foot facility for an undisclosed sum. Economic development officials told local media earlier this year (without naming Slate) the factory could employ up to 2,000 people, and that the county offered the undisclosed company an incentive package.
It’s probably possible to turn an old printing plant into a facility that makes modern cars, but my guess is that it would be so expensive that most automakers wouldn’t even bother. If Slate can take an existing space like this and make it work, then we could be looking at a new paradigm in carmaking.
And why stop at a truck? If this same form factor is successful, Slate Auto can find another facility and make a sedan, or a three-row SUV, or just about anything. Tesla and many other automakers are betting that anyone who can’t make a car with high processing power produced at scale with huge casts won’t survive. They may be right, but what if they’re not?
BYD Made 3x The Income Tesla Did Last Quarter
I try not to get too caught up in the horse-race aspect of modern business reporting, where one quarter’s result is extrapolated out into the future, only to be reversed three months later. It’s totally possible Tesla rights the ship and sails ahead of BYD next quarter, or that BYD is itself surprised by a Chinese rival lurking below the surface.
Every trend starts with a single data point, and at the moment, it seems like smooth sailing for BYD as Tesla flounders.
BYD Co.’s net income in the first quarter jumped to 9.15 billion yuan ($1.3 billion), overtaking Tesla Inc. on another key metric and signaling a robust start to the year for China’s no. 1 selling car brand.
Shenzhen-based BYD’s net income was higher than the 8.1 billion yuan projected by analysts. While the carmaker’s sales of 170.36 billion yuan for the three months ended March 31 were up 36% year-on-year, they fell short of analyst expectations. Tesla reported net income of $409 million for its first quarter earlier this week, much lower than what the market had been looking for.
Considering the first three months of the year are generally the slowest for Chinese automakers, with the period containing the long Lunar New Year holiday, BYD looks set for a strong 2025. Its car sales for the quarter were just shy of 1 million units, putting the Chinese behemoth well on track to achieve full-year sales of 5.5 million, including 800,000 exports.
All of these nautical metaphors are making me hungry. Would it be bad to have a shrimp cocktail for lunch?
Who Is Foxconn Building A Car for?
Most recently, Taiwanese mega-conglomerate Foxconn showed up around here as the company that almost-maybe-sort of-could have bought Nissan. Before that, Foxconn was maybe going to make cars for Fisker and trucks for Lordstown Motors in the former GM facility it purchased in Lordstown, Ohio. That didn’t quite happen, and the whole thing was a bit of a disaster. Making cars is hard!
Whereas Tesla is going big and Slate Auto is going small, Foxconn is hoping to do what it does with phones and be a source of contract manufacturing. According to this Automotive News report, Foxconn is going to be making its Model C electric crossover for… someone.
The company is rapidly refurbishing a former General Motors plant in Lordstown, Ohio, as a U.S. production hub. The plant, which has capacity for hundreds of thousands of vehicles when fully tooled, could be pumping out vehicles as early as next year.
Speaking on the sidelines of Taipei’s big mobility show this month, Jun Seki, the Nissan veteran who now runs Foxconn’s nascent electric vehicle business, said Foxconn is well on track.
The company has a U.S. client, and the customer will start selling the Model C this year, he said.
Seki declined to name the customer, keeping with Foxconn’s canon of confidentiality as a contract manufacturer. But the U.S.-spec crossover grabbing eyeballs at this month’s Taiwan 360° Mobility Mega Show foreshadows what’s in store. It has a wavy side crease, funky hood air vent, wraparound headlamps, panoramic sunroof and huge vertical infotainment screen.
I have more questions than answers on this one, unless someone wants to help me out below.
President Trump And The ‘Bowling Ball Test’
It’s not often I get to “embed the truth” on this website, but that’s what President Trump’s own social media network allows me to do. Literally, that’s what it says when you try to embed a post: it says “EMBED TRUTH.”
There’s some irony to this, as we’re entering Day 17 of the 90-day pause with none of the 90 promised trade deals in sight. Perhaps one can be worked out with Japan, as the President recently noted that “Japan’s bowling ball test” is a form of non-tariff “cheating.” Japan should be able to easily get rid of it as it doesn’t exist, though I suppose the point is to highlight what he says are Japan’s “Protective Technical Standards.”
From the Financial Times, which is on the bowling ball beat:
The US president first referred to the test in 2018. “They take a bowling ball from 20 feet up in the air and they drop it on the hood of the car. And if the hood dents, then the car doesn’t qualify,” he said. “It’s horrible, the way we’re treated.”
On Sunday he again cited the test on his Truth Social platform as an example of “protective technical standards”.
Japan does not carry out such tests on its cars, although one carried out in the country and elsewhere does entail hitting a car with a rounded object at a speed of 35kph, to simulate an impact with a pedestrian. In the test, a dent in the bonnet typically indicates good shock absorption and a potentially less deadly impact.
Unrelated: America lags behind the rest of the world when it comes to pedestrian safety (see: the existence of the Cybertruck); perhaps we should also raise our standards?
What I’m Listening To While Writing TMD
My daughter had a dance recital this weekend, and she performed to Billy Joel’s “Vienna.” It was beautiful, but also bittersweet. As the song reminds you, growing up happens so fast. Maybe too fast. Don’t be in a hurry.
The Big Question
Assuming the Slate truck/SUV sells at volume around its projected price, what should Slate Auto build next?
Photo: Slate Auto
I could see being a 2 door and possibly not enough room in the back seat for a rear facing child seat as deal breakers for plenty of people, so a slightly larger 4 door slate truck/SUV (maybe even big enough for a 3rd row like the Model Y) would likely be the best bet.
As a counterpoint, it is nice to see a company focus on those like me who are married with no kids and very few friends. 75% of my fleet is 2 doors.
So one thing I haven’t been able to reconcile is that the Slate EV still feels pretty expensive compared to a lot of Chinese EVs on sale here in Australia. The Slate’s US$27,000 target price translates to around AU$42,000 here, that’s actually pretty uncompetitive against a range of cars from manufacturers like BYD or GWM who are also offering reasonably well-featured cars to boot – things like built in infotainment and electric windows. Is China really subsidising their car industry that aggressively? Is their labour that cheap? Or have they cracked the automation challenge better than anyone else – perhaps another way of making cars cheaply? Or is the Aussie dollar just that weak vs the greenback at the moment? I’m not sure what the answer is but I suspect it’s a complex combination of the above – it would be interesting to find out.
As an automaker employee in the US, things get massively cheaper when you remove two giant hurdles. 1 union labor (UAW and it’s costs), and 2 environmental requirements. At least from the data I’ve seen, assembly labor cost for the Chinese vehicles we’ve torn down is significanly higher than our own in terms of man hours, but the financial cost of that labor is a small percentage in China vs domestic.
Basically, they’re building cars less efficiently than we are, but the cost per worker is so much cheaper we still can’t really compete. Once you factor in plant pollution measures China doesn’t really care about, it shouldn’t be surprising how China can make vehicles domestically for so little money.
Same thing, but;
4 ft bed
Lowering kit stock
2 in lower roofline
More raked hood
More laid back seating
Keep as many parts common as possible
So, basically a Miata with a small bed.
a Mi-Uta
Perhaps they build a quick charging network…..
does anyone know if the Slate has passed crash testing?
Or is it being waived as part of the 40 million dollar documentary fee paid to Melania?
Just a useless comment, but it fits you
Sorry you took it personal And got triggered so easily
sorry, bub, that stuff doesn’t work around here
Maybe a loud exhaust or coal rolling diesel will help cheer you up?
It’s amusing how bad your guesses as to my ideologies are, but it’s a huge part of the package of fail you offer society
“If you were somehow sequestered from the web for the last few weeks…”
I’m just back from visiting family in Ireland in a farmhouse with no internet, or electricity in the bedrooms to charge phones at night, or washing facilities larger than the sink. It seems I’ve missed out on the Slate thing a bit. Is it coming to Europe? I like two seat RWD cars, and I like cheap too.
If they could do a bolt-on lift-back coupe body next that’d be ace.
“Unrelated: America lags behind the rest of the world when it comes to pedestrian safety (see: the existence of the Cybertruck); perhaps we should also raise our standards?”
You kill loads of pedestrians and cyclists, yes, you should probably do what the rest of the civilised world does about that.
Your coffee comes with a warning about it being hot, but you sell razor sharp cars with no deformable pedestrian impact zones. It’s inexplicable.
The inmates are running the asylum. Dang! just realizing it has been 27 years since six friends and myself took advantage of an unbelievable cheap airfare deal to Shannon airport, rented two cars, and only booked our first night at a b&b in Doolin. Stayed a week traveling around, finding b&b s and walking to all the pubs. Good times were had by all.
I’ll take a Slate brown diesel manual wagon…gas is ok too
Assuming the Slate truck/SUV sells at volume around its projected price, what should Slate Auto build next?
Wagon.
+1 wagon. Let’s get the crank window shooting brake Miata we all claim we want
Probably pedestrians could be educated to be a bit more cautious. We have this shroud of unaccountability for pedestrians exercising fantastic carelessness for their own safety. I have seen several deaths and major injuries in my area. I am unsurprised by the increase, as we have encouraged sanctimonious dipshits to assert their rights to walk wherever the fuck they damn well please. Phones, earbuds, fantastically stupid people, and righteous indignation are why pedestrian deaths are up.
*deleted because i want to support constructive comments on this site*
Good job not feeding the troll.
That’s provably false. Higher hoods (to give only one factor) have a clear and measureable influence on the likelihood of a fatality in a pedestrian strike.
Which is easier: fixing people being stupid righteous easily distracted idiots, or adding a bit of deformable impact zone to a car?
Sounds great in theory.
Instead, we’ll push fuel efficiency regs such that every vehicle is a crossover or taller (light truck category), raise the hood so you can’t see children to 10 feet in front of the vehicle (pedestrian protection zone), and then mandate emergency stop systems that people abuse. Then we’ll wonder why more people get hit by vehicles and double down on all of it!
taking the seemingly easy fix is, in part, what’s making this problem worse.
the solution is better drivers training, cars that are easier to see out of which will necessitate lowering the belt and hood lines, special impact zones for the times a pedestrian gets hit, and maybe, just MAYBE, we start holding idiots accountable.
walking / biking down a unlit road in the middle of the night wearing all black with a headphone in each ear on the wrong side of the road should net you a ticket even if you get nailed by a car.
Sadly, the average pedestrian pays little attention to vehicles, and half pay less attention. The average driver is a bad driver and half are worse. What could possibly go wrong here?
I reeeaaaally hope this sweet little truck thing makes it to production and is successful! It also seems like this is a good climate to start making it here considering The Tarif War, so hopefully we also end up with some extra jobs… I know where my first 50 dollars is going come payday!
Foxconn already sells their car as a Luxgen in Taiwan. Luxgen is Yulon’s domestic brand, and Yulon contract-made Nissans for years. So my best guess is Nissan.
Considering the enthusiasm for a small single-cab truck many of us have wanted but have been told we are wrong to want… I guess their next the next thing should be a small sedan with a wagon option.
More like “been proven to not sell” I love single cabs as much as anyone, but the proof is in the pudding… they spend a lot more time on the lot than their 4 door siblings. Although I’ve always wondered if it’s price related or the newer demographic of who is buying trucks now or maybe a mix of both.
I am sure there are demographic and economic reasons and I don’t think that all the major manufacturers are wrong – realistically when you are selling a quarter of a million versions of a vehicle per year it makes sense to standardize – it’s just disappointing to those of us who might want something different. Like for example, a wagon!
Trucks used to be work tools. Back when they were priced as such.
Now that trucks cost far more than sedans, it’s obvious that they need to have four doors, because they’re now primary family vehicles instead of utility vehicles.
When I bought my first new three door hatchback, I could’ve bought a base model, full sized single cab truck for only about 10% more than the fully optioned hatchback.
I love so many of the choices Slate has made in their engineering, I just have reservations that they’ll be able to sell enough of them. Partly, this is because I like it since, if I like it, most people won’t. On that note, I want a compact sport wagon!
I have no idea how people can believe the obvious bullshit spewed by the orange moron. Which of Japan’s own cars would pass such an obviously made up test? The other thing is that I would think the meatheads who would believe this narc would want their cars to pass a bowling ball test.
I really like the idea of Slate, and if I didn’t have such a long commute and in a place that gets actual winter, I would be in line to buy one.
I have a question that I have seen no one touch on yet: does Slate expect some outsized dealership system to handle all the accessories? About 5% of people will really do these things themselves (probably that is the Autopian commenters) but the rest of people will need it done by someone else. Or does Slate expect a series of independent shops to do everything? Didn’t we just read about the Bigfoot Cruiser (props to Mercedes for another great article!)? Safety concerns abound with asking these kind of accessories to be installed by randos.
I would assume that, upon purchase, you can choose to have the mods shipped to you with the car separately. Or you could choose to, for a fee, have them shipped to an Authorized Slate Assembly Place, who would assemble your IKEACAR and ship it to you.
Everything seems like a literal bolt-on mod. I can do bolts. If the air bags are plug and play as well, I can plug stuff in. Just don’t ask me to touch anything with the batteries or motors and I’m cool with not having to pay a mechanic or body shop again.
For me personally (and I suspect a large number of people here on The Autopian), I would have no problem getting things shipped and me bolting it together. My concern is for the large amount of people that have no tools or struggle with IKEA furniture (there are a lot of them out there). They will need help, and I suspect this will be a fair number of people who end up buying a Slate.
They supposedly have a national body shop or repair chain lined up to be their preferred service centers, but haven’t said which one.
Based on what Amazon has done with their in house air cargo system which is actually quite good my guess is they have someone under contract already like Dodge Jeep who needs the money.
This setup has been a disaster for Ineos so nailing this part will be huge.
Interesting. Slate does seem to be thinking most things through so far, so I am pleased to here they seem to be lined up here as well. Good info!
If we ever harmonize global vehicle standards, can I have the job of dropping bowling balls onto cars? Sounds like fun. Somebody else can do the moose test.
How about they give you a helmet and HANS device and drop you on the hood?
If Expanding the options for the Pickup I think AWD is the next step, preferably with mechanical lockers as an option.
Also I’d like to see a convertible single cab option and an extended cab option with roll down windows (so my doggos can stick their heads out the windows).
Next vehicle should be a proper mini mini van with proper removable rear seats. Make it FWD and put the battery pack up front under the driver and front passenger seat so you can have as low of a cargo floor as possible. Give it loads of seating options, from maxed out seating in an airport shuttle configuration to Captain’s chairs, to no chairs at all (cargo variant). Make it have a removable roof like the pickup so you can easily option it with or without windows, windows that open, etc.
Shape the minivan like the Renault Vesta II hatchback or 2005 Mercedes Bionic and give it reasonably sized wheels(tiny by modern standards), and you could have a 0.19 drag coefficient with very usable passenger and/or cargo capacity.
Imagine a 3,000-3,500 lb minivan that could cruise 70 mph on the highway at 0.200 kWh/mile. You wouldn’t need much battery, so it would be inexpensive to build. With careful attention to design, you could fold down the rear seats and fit inside a refrigerator, a treadmill, a dresser, a king-sized mattress, a stove, or any other such large item. And have three row seating.
Wild speculation here: the foxconn plant could build the apple car. Amazon is getting into cars, apple and foxconn do a lot of work together.
Thant’s basically it, can’t imagine why that would be the case, but it is fun to think about.
The Apple car is dead and buried. Much of it’s software team was moved to their AI teams.
Unless there’s been some new announcement I missed?
Beats me, I just remember the leaks of questionable provenance from years ago when I used to care about that sort of thing.
Apple car is dead. Too bad. They had great engineers, designers, and fabulous development facilities. Would have loved to see a final product out of Apple Design.
I suspect Apple took a good hard look at the self-driving space and current EV adoption environment then decided this was a bridge to far (meaning…they did not want to invest in the manufacturing infrastructure…and could not find a manufacturing partner) and way too little profit at the end of that bridge.
A long wheelbase variation seems like the obvious next step – for a long bed 2 door pickup, a 4 door SUV, and a 2 door high roof cargo truck (like a 1940s panel van).
The Slate model 2 should be mechanically the same, but with a smaller wheel/tire package and an aerodynamic hatchback body on it. If they can reduce aerodynamic and rolling resistance enough to get their 240 mile (in the truck )battery up to 300 miles in car form, they’ve got a winner. Think Saturn SC1 or Geo Storm or Nissan Pulsar NX kind of inexpensive commuter car.
A new CRX, but RWD, would suit me just fine.
Nissan pulsar fits the modular vibe
So, Saturn showed that injection-makes body panels look good and resist dents, and Slate is using them because they’re cheap. What’s the downside?
Body shops/MACCO are pissed at the lost of a possible revenue stream.
In the ’90s, it was journalists who complained about the large panel gaps needed due to thermal expansion and contraction on an economy car built to be cheap as possible to run that would be bought by people who couldn’t care less about slightly large panel gaps if they even noticed while Rolls-Royce had panel gaps that were no better and I don’t recall it being mentioned (BMW—and I’m a hater of the brand if anything—was the best thing to happen to RR).
Automotive journalists will complain about anything. That’s why we have manual transmissions and Fratz-whatever noises in electric cars.
Plastic waste unless they’re genuinely recyclable.