The Slate Truck arrives and looks like something your grandfather, or great-grandfather, would recognize as a pickup truck — apart from the plug.
“The design brief was totally in line with what you see here,” said Tisha Johnson, head of design for EV startup Slate Auto. “There was such a clear vision.”
Certainly, that vision is unconventional and simple. In fact, simplicity is the entire pitch. And no wonder. In choosing Johnson to lead Slate, the company chose someone who spent nearly 17 years at Volvo, following a stint at Mid-century modern minimalist furniture manufacturer Herman Miller. Neither is known for its overwrought flourishes.
What You Don’t Get Is Key
What Slate Auto has produced is an electric pickup stripped down to essentials. Two doors. A powerplant. A steering wheel and basic controls. No giant touchscreen capable of displaying the GDP of Belgium. No seats with 17 massage settings and a doctoral thesis worth of on-screen menus. No chrome-plated grille large enough to ingest migrating waterfowl. Just a basic electric truck designed to be affordable and customizable. It’s the automotive equivalent of a restaurant proudly announcing that it serves water. It’s so stripped down, it makes an Amish buggy look over-equipped.
“We really were able to start from a fresh white page, and so that for us, allowed us to say, okay, what is going to be best for the product to be delivered as people want it? So that told us it needs to be very, very reductive in every way.”
Slate’s Perfect Size
Johnson and her team knew that the truck’s footprint would need to be small. The reductive thinking led to a design with two doors, as most trips are taken with one or two passengers.
“We see it all the time. So often, the impetus for a designer, a company is that we’ve got to have four doors. But you’re talking about a reductionist vehicle, something simpler. Two doors make sense from a cost standpoint.”
Slate: Built Simply
But Johnson’s vision for simplicity is more than a reductionist vision. It also guides so much of the truck’s construction. You’ll see exposed screw heads, making it very simple to remove one of the truck’s composite body panels, rather than stamped sheet metal. “We certainly are thinking about cost of production,” Johnson said.
The Slate Truck’s cabin follows the same reductionist design philosophy as its exterior.
“When you open that door, what you don’t see are, you know, it’s not corrupted by a bunch of large formatted screens that take up a ton of space, that have a bunch of content that people never use. Instead, you bring your own tech. So, you open that door, you see a nice, clean, clear interior, and then a place to put your phone or your tablet right next to the steering wheel, and off you go.”
The Slate Is a Blank Slate
Slate designers gave the Slate Truck coach lines that run throughout the body to make the truck the perfect blank canvas for wrapping vinyl wrap sheets. The wraps offered by Slate are smaller, so you can wrap the vehicle yourself, rather than needing a shop to do it.
“We like to say we built it, you make it.,” Johnson said.
And that’s important. Unlike other trucks, when a new Slate comes off the line, it’s not painted. There’s no paint facility at Slate’s factory. All trucks come off the line colored, appropriately, slate gray. “It’s very carefully, tuned to be best basis for any personalization that you’re going to do with a vinyl wrap.”
If that sounds like to big a job, you can start small.
“You can start with a very small decal kit. We have these spots where a decal design fits it perfectly.”
So, you can customize your truck a little bit at a time.
The Upshot
America is drowning in feature creep. Your refrigerator needs Wi-Fi. Your washing machine demands software updates. Meanwhile, your coffee maker is building an advertising profile on you between brews. We’ve reached the point where a chair that simply functions as a chair feels revolutionary.
That’s what makes Slate so interesting. Drive it today. Plug it in tonight. Wrap it and customize it over the weekend if the mood strikes. Or don’t. The point is that it starts as a tool, not a lifestyle subscription.
And the price? Its opening price lands below 97% of the new-car market and nearly $2,000 less than the average used car.
For decades, automakers competed to see who could cram the most stuff into a vehicle. It may take a blank Slate to remind everyone that sometimes the most radical feature is knowing when not to.
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