I Just Came Back From The Slate Reveal And I’m Totally Buying Into Their Bullshit

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I’ll be honest with you: I’m exhausted. I got on a plane early this morning, ended up in LA, and then almost immediately went to the Slate launch event. So maybe keep that in mind as I relay my somewhat stream-of-consciousness thoughts and reactions about this truck and what it is and what it means and how it fits into the greater automotive world. Remember, this company spent lots of (presumably) Jeff Bezos’ money (I heard to afford the crash testing he had to hock his saxophone) to put on a big show, and the whole point of that show was to convince me and several hundred of my close auto journalist and social-media influencer friends that what Slate is doing is something remarkable. And, dammit, I think they may have actually convinced me.

Normally, I do so much eye-rolling at these product launches I have to fill eyedroppers full of WD-40. But that’s because most product launches are about crossovers or SUVs or trucks that are described with words like “dynamic” and “premium” and “tech” and are comfortable, expensive family-haulers that somehow have more horsepower than a glue factory and can go from a Target parking spot to 60 in under five seconds. They’re cars with massive acres of touchscreens, through which you have to do absolutely everything. Even opening the glove box or adjusting the airflow.

They’re expensive and sophisticated machines and I am absolutely sick of them, all of them, all of their pompous modernity and refinement and seriousness and complexity. They’re exhausting.

But the Slate isn’t like that. And, even better, that seems to be the whole point of these vehicles, right from the get-go. The event started with the CEO of Slate (which, we were assured, was never an anagram of Tesla), Chris Barman, reminding everyone how much the average car payment is in America ($742/month), and then she noted that based on income, that average really should be more like $400. But cars are expensive right now. And no one seems to care; they just keep adding more tech and more features and the prices keep going up and up, but is the experience of having a car really getting better?

Slate doesn’t seem to think so, and they seem to have created a car – or, I guess, truck – that honestly does seem to be the opposite of what everyone else is doing. They genuinely appear to have made something deliberately simple and stripped down, everything unnecessary removed, but also with plenty of provisions to add features in a modular way, at your leisure, and that includes adding body components to transfer the single-cab pickup into an open jeep-like car or two variants of SUVs, called, in a very Volkswagen Type 3 way, the Squareback and Fastback.

We’ve gone into the details about the Slate in other posts, so I won’t re-hash all that, but I will give you some of my visceral gut impressions I had while encountering these (prototype still, not even quite pre-production) trucks in person:

The Size

The size is just perfect, I think. It feels roughly old Ford Ranger-sized. These could make fantastic replacements for all the ancient Toyota and Nissan small pickups that are still being used as gardener’s trucks in the LA neighborhoods like the Hollywood Hills or Silverlake, where a big F-150 is just too cumbersome to wind those roads.

The Exposed Fasteners

Hell yes. I’ve been craving a modern car not ashamed of the fact that it’s held together with actual fasteners instead of magic and adhesives and silly little modesty plugs. Nearly every panel had visible, accessible fasteners, which should mean that repair and replacement of parts will be vastly easier than on most cars. Which means repairing accident damage should be cheaper, too, which is extremely important.

Those Crank Windows

I suppose if the Slate has a symbol, it’s this. Just having a manual window in a car now is like an act of defiance, and I’m here for it. This crank spits in the face of the very concept of “premium,” which has been destroying the soul of the automobile for decades. Not everything needs to be powered. It’s not hard to roll down a window; in fact, I think it’s good for one’s character, and it works if the car is on or off, has no wiring or motors, and if someone gets a finger chopped off in one, it was intentional.

The Absence Of A Touchscreen

Outside of a rash in my groin, I can’t remember the last time I was so excited by the absence of something. There’s no big center-stack infotainment screen here, just a mount for your phone with USB power, because your phone has all the crap you want on a center-stack screen already: your music, your maps, your messages, your whatever.

All of the time and engineering that goes into carmaker-designed operating systems for these touchscreens must represent one of the greatest ratios of effort to not-give-a-shittery in the history of mankind. I aggressively and deliriously do not care about any carmaker’s UX for these screens, because they all sort of suck and there’s almost nothing that they do that I wouldn’t just rather do on my phone.

And, if there’s no screen, then there’s no way to put HVAC controls or glove box releases or other bullshit in some menu on the screen. And that’s a good thing.

The backup camera shows its feed on the small instrument cluster LCD screen, and that’s just fine.

Both the center and passenger side dash panels open up for storage or to house speakers. It’s great.

The Taillights And Other Lighting

They’re pretty good! The side markers seem to be pleasingly from some catalog, and I kind of wish the taillights were just some parts-bin something, but as they are, they’re not bad, being roughly shaped like old Ford Econoline/Bronco taillights. Some of them appeared to have a little fresnel lens inside them, like a miniature lighthouse:

Up front, the round lights give a nice, friendly look to the car’s face, though I think they could have gone even more basic and used sealed beams, but oh well.

Also cool is the fact that you can change the whole look of the indicator lights by just swapping that gridded cover with one with other designs. Just four screws! That center grille panel can be changed out as well, along with a bunch of other parts:

The Door Handles

These things are dead ringers for old AMC handles, as used on the Pacer, Hornet, Gremlin, and so on.

What About People Who Live In Apartments?

This is going to be one of the cheapest cars on the market –with the EV incentives– certainly the cheapest electric car. This means this should be popular among people without so much money to throw around, which often means people who don’t yet own their own homes. Many of these people may live in apartments. Where are they supposed to charge these? Home charging is a huge benefit for EVs, and without it, the EV use case gets more tenuous. This needs some sort of solution.

Can This Become A Classless Vehicle?

Let me start by saying “classless” is good here. You know how certain iconic people’s cars managed to take on a certain kind of classless appeal, where they could be owned by a broke student or a bigshot celebrity? Think Paul Newman and his VW Beetle or Peter Sellers and his Mini. Well, I think the Slate has a chance to become something like that, if they play their cards right.

Is a Rivian cooler than a Slate? An F-150 Lightning? A Cybertruck? I don’t really think so. I have a feeling these minimalist machines may have their own humble cachet.

The Cargo Area And Usefulness

In pickup mode, these have a five-foot bed, enough for big sheets of plywood:

Even with the rear seat in place, there’s still a good amount of cargo area:

Plus, it has what seems to be a pretty usable frunk, which is great, because you often want some kind of secure, enclosed storage.

Okay, I Gotta Get Some Sleep

There will be much more to say about the Slate, I’m sure. It may not be as cheap as I’d like, and I’m not totally convinced a battery-electric vehicle only was the way to go here, but I’m definitely excited by the underlying ideas of this truck, and I think the industry has needed something like this for a long, long time.

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