Slate’s electric truck: all the news about the ultra-minimal EV

We now know the price of Slate Auto’s affordable American-made electric truck, almost a year after the company warned it wouldn’t hit its initial “under $20,000” target price. The no-frills pickup starts at $24,950 — matching the revised mid-$20,000 price range it promised last year, after the Trump administration announced it was putting an end to the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.

Preorders for the Slate truck are going live today, with production scheduled to begin in autumn 2026. Customers can pay a $300 non-refundable deposit within the next 30 days to lock in a delivery date, which is expected to start in “late 2026.” On its website, Slate says customers can still preorder after the 30 day window, “but your delivery window will shift to a later time slot.”

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With its new pickup, Slate Auto is making a simple bet: price matters more than almost anything else. The company announced today that the American-made electric truck will start at $24,950, placing it squarely in the mid-$20,000 price range it had originally promised and making it the least expensive pickup truck and EV available today. At a time when the average new vehicle costs nearly twice that amount, Slate is pitching something that has become increasingly rare in the modern auto market: a genuinely basic new vehicle that doesn’t look that way.

To hit that price point, Slate stripped away features many drivers now take for granted. The truck doesn’t come with a touchscreen, stereo, or even speakers. Instead, it includes a dash mount for your phone. The windows use manual hand cranks. And unlike many new vehicles marketed around increasingly autonomous features, a Slate requires you to do all the driving yourself.

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Slate Auto, the EV startup backed by Jeff Bezos, raised $650 million to fund its effort to build an affordable electric pickup truck expected to start in the mid-$20,000s. The company plans on delivering its first EV later this year.

The Series C round was led by TWG Global, headed by Guggenheim Partners founder and LA Dodgers owner Mark Walter and financier Thomas Tull. Slate didn’t disclose its latest investors, but both Walter and Tull were investors in Re:Build Manufacturing, a Bezos-owned company from which Slate spun off last year. The company also didn’t disclose its latest valuation, but was at $1.2 billion as of January 2025, according to Bloomberg.

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The first thing you notice about the Slate Truck is its size. It’s small, surprisingly so. In a country where trucks often come with their own zip code, Slate’s pickup is refreshingly puny, measuring 174.6 inches long, 70.6 inches wide, and 69.3 inches tall, with a curb weight of approximately 3,602 pounds (1,634kg). As a reference point, it’s nearly the same size as Marty McFly’s 1985 Toyota SR5 from Back to the Future.

But inside, that diminutive feeling disappears, as I found myself with ample amounts of head- and legroom. As a relatively tallish guy (over 6 feet) who often feels cramped in most vehicles, I couldn’t believe the amount of room I had in such a small truck.

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Alright, we get it. Y’all are excited about Slate. We thought the little Slate Truck was cool, but based on the number of clicks and comments on our Slate Auto articles so far, you’d like to know more. Many of you wrote in with questions and more than a few people raised some doubts.

So, we wanted to address as many of those as we could. Here’s your one-stop shop for Slate answers based on your questions — plus a few of our own.

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At last month’s rapturously received Slate debut, it took an executive’s quip that “Slate” and “Tesla” use the same five letters to shift my brain into high gear. I’ve covered the EV world for 15-plus years, and I virtually never spend time on counterfactuals. There’s quite enough to cover in the real world.

But … I’m of the opinion Tesla could, and should, have launched a small, simple, cheap compact pickup truck—in other words, what Slate debuted—rather than the pickup it did produce, the Cybertruck. That expensive and polarizing vehicle has been, to put it bluntly, a sales disaster. Over 18 months, Tesla has sold only about 50,000, versus projections of many times that volume. Worse, while EV crossover utilities sell tens of thousands a month, the more expensive EV pickup trucks to date have not.

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Since Slate Auto came out of stealth mode last week, the internet has been abuzz with speculation about the finer details of the ultra-barebones electric Truck, which is set to cost just $20,000 when it enters production next year -- assuming our federal EV incentives are still in place by then.

One of those questions was where Slate will build the thing, with a TechCrunch report suggesting a factory in Indiana. Today we can officially confirm the details. Slate Auto will retrofit an existing 1.4 million square foot factory in Warsaw, Indiana, where the company plans to eventually produce 150,000 Trucks annually.

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The generally accepted way to launch your new car company is by building something fancy and expensive. Call it Founder’s Edition or name it after a precious metal, hope people pay for the privilege of exclusivity, and go from there. Slate Auto is doing… the opposite. The three-year-old company just announced its first vehicle, and it’s building a sub-$20,000 pickup with no stereo, no paint, and practically no options at all. It’s nothing like anything we’ve seen. And yet, at least according to the initial reaction to the Slate Truck, it might be exactly what we’ve been looking for.

On this episode of The Vergecast, freelance tech and auto journalist Tim Stevens joins the show to talk all about the Slate Truck. He tells us how the company’s manufacturing process works, why it’s placing such an emphasis on customizability, and whether Slate’s big bets can actually pay off. The car is supposed to be available sometime next year, and there are reasons to be optimistic it’ll hit that goal.

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Ask just about anybody, and they’ll tell you that new cars are too expensive. In the wake of tariffs shaking the auto industry and with the Trump administration pledging to kill the federal EV incentive, that situation isn’t looking to get better soon, especially for anyone wanting something battery-powered. Changing that overly spendy status quo is going to take something radical, and it’s hard to get more radical than what Slate Auto has planned.

Meet the Slate Truck, a sub-$20,000 (after federal incentives) electric vehicle that enters production next year. It only seats two yet has a bed big enough to hold a sheet of plywood. It only does 150 miles on a charge, only comes in gray, and the only way to listen to music while driving is if you bring along your phone and a Bluetooth speaker. It is the bare minimum of what a modern car can be, and yet it’s taken three years of development to get to this point.

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