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#car#slate#more#vehicle#truck#range#miles#don#still#cars
Discussion (301 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
Pretty interesting as far as cars go. I think all of the customization options are really smart, but we will see if that is enough for the average consumer. The number of relatively inexpensive options and ability to customize various details rivals some high end car configuration systems, Porsche is famous for letting you customize every detail.
The way Slate has designed their vehicles, they are making it very easy to change just about anything with the vehicle. I can see this being very popular with young people who cannot afford a lot of car, but still want a highly customized and personalized vehicle that they identify with. We will see if all of the other factors work out in Slate's favor.
Oh man, that is ... a lot labor. I can't imagine many people are going to want to do it
Mind you, when ordering a lease car for the first time recently, I did notice that I was paying a premium for non-bland colours. I suspect the weird financial structure of new cars has - they're often not bought to hold, but leased - has a lot to do with the blandness.
Gen Z & A value uniqueness and authenticity. I think the customization options will resonate a lot with them.
I just wish they had also released a smaller body, so you could build something close to a regular hatchback (like a Golf or Mazda 3)
Any mass-market car has practically the same color options. Wraps have existed for a looong time.
It isn't an option here. When you go to pick a wrap it directly states:
> 2 people required. 12-16 hours. A big commitment for a DIYer. We'd recommend professional installation if you're not sure you can tackle it.
The only difference is you're shopping around at wraps at purchase time, you still need to either put it on yourself or find your own shop to install it post-delivery. No different than you driving any other car off the lot and going to the body shop down the street and having them wrap it for you.
People have other colour choices, but they're constantly choosing the most spectacularly boring, neutral colours possible.
The colour thing is neat, but I'm not sure it's going to be a big deal. It might actually lead to the paradox of choice where people basically feel even worse about their options.
https://magazine.northeast.aaa.com/daily/life/cars-trucks/au...
https://www.ppg.com/en-US/autocoatings/color/history-of-colo...
I mean I see the inverse as true, and entry level vehicles seem to have the most colour diversity in their sales. It is cars like the Nissan Versa where you see real colour variations.
Very good point, that will be interesting to see
Wraps are typically pretty easy to remove. Far easier than removing a paint job.
It's actually a little depressing if you're sitting in traffic, just watch the cars go by and see how few of them actually have a unique color. And most of the exceptions are something like an almost gray blue.
For my part I've found new car styling hideous with little difference between brands my entire adult life. Probably for nostalgic reasons I like the sharp geometric shapes of cars from the 1980s which largely disappeared with a focus aerodynamics for gas mileage. So I'm usually satisfied with whatever color is on the lot since I hate the look by default anyway.
So $0.12 per mile saved in fuel costs implies about 80k miles for break-even.
This excludes costs of servicing, which should be higher on the gas car.
[edit typo'd an extra 0 it's 80k miles for break-even]
[edit2]
After looking up my energy bill I pay $0.27 so it's between 10 and 11 cents per mile saved. Break-even is still under 100k miles.
$35k - $26k = $9k
$9k / $0.12/mile savings ~= 75,000 miles breakeven
Southern California Edison on the time-of-use plan, charging during "Super off peak." Note that nowhere on the bill do they show one number for how much you pay per kWh. These numbers will change next month as we go from "Winter" to "Summer"
Delivery charges: $0.17664
CCA Cost responsibility surcharge: $0.02007
Nonbypassable charges: $0.00644 + $0.00591
Fixed recovery charge: $0.00619
Generation charge: $0.05958
Unless I typoed something again (oops 800k) that works out to $0.27 for the cheapest I can pay in winter. I compared last fall and this was by far the cheapest plan offered to me for overnight charging.
(My car averages 3.3 miles / kWh, so ~$0.055 / mile assuming 100% charge efficiency... I'm using a 120V outlet so it's probably 75-80% charge efficiency, pushing the cost to ~$0.068 / mile.)
At the same size (17"), going from steel to alloy improves performance but reduces durability. Larger wheels (20") are generally a downgrade for performance and ride quality.
Engineering Explained has a video on this topic: NYvKxsYFqO8
- wider wheels are marginally less efficient but almost negligible
- rims with larger diameter have larger air resistance. Probably because the rim patterns intersects the air in weird ways but it's not explained. Tire walls are relatively smooth, so tires with higher aspect are way more aero-efficient despite having more marginally lower rolling resistance.
Same conclusion: interesting, but not necessarily interested. Hope they go places though.
My boss's have been asking me how life is with my Ford E-Transit, but it doesn't have enough range for most of our site technicians which end up driving 200-300 miles a day.
The Transit Connect is discontinued in North America and was only ever a plug in hybrid here (outside a 500 unit collaboration in the early 2010s) but maybe one of the newer electric variants of the Transit lines will make its way over some time (e.g. looks like the Ford E-Tourneo Courier is an all electric in Europe).
But, is that likely? Most people buy cars on credit and won't have $10k cash to spend on those bits later. I guess they could put it on Visa, but that's a terrible financial choice.
Can we stop being so out of touch and/or deluding ourselves to believe $35k is “pretty inexpensive” for people not living in a bubble; whether that is the Americas bubble or the tech bubble within the bubble or the urban bubble within that; let alone for a tiny two seater electric truck that has a 200 mile range.
The 45th percentile, i.e., the bottom 90% have a median income of roughly $40,000. $35,000 for a enclosed covered or even hatchback type mini SUV is not reasonable and you know very well when they come out with that, it’s going to be at least $40,000. None of that is inexpensive or even pretty inexpensive. That’s just rationalization and coping, trying to convince ourselves and others of things that are incongruent.
“Pretty inexpensive” would be an enclosed bed version that cost $22,000 maybe.
For additional context; the industry standard measure of income to cost ratio has risen from 9.3 weeks of household income gross pay for a baseline vehicle, i.e., civic, in 1973 to, 16.5 weeks of gross pay in 2024; and that’s based on the fraudulent official inflation numbers.
Yet more context, a civic can seat 5 people and still has a range of 450 miles on a tank of gasoline that you can find all over the place, even in far off rural places OSD puppy can carry gasoline with you if need be.
There is no sense in rationalizing and deluding ourselves about the real limitations that still exists that are real and are why adoption is not matching imaginations.
A $35K vehicle will reach $22K on the used market a lot faster than a $60K vehicle will.
The problem with the Slate isn't that cheaper vehicles exist. The problem with the Slate is that you can buy nicer, better equipped vehicles for the same price.
$35k is not outrageous for a new car, but the Slate is supposed to be affordable basic transportation. Slate is selling barebones, stripped down basic transportation for the price of a middle class family car.
$25k is about right for a cheap new car today (you can get a few base models for less than that, but good luck finding one). Median household income is around $83k. So a cheap new car cost went up by 10x but income only went up by less than 5x. Inflation implies it should cost 8x as much, but it costs 10x as much.
Of course the Chevy Nova didn't have ABS, airbags, a touch screen, an automatic transmission, power steering, or retractable seat belts. Car companies could make models without some of these (though most are required by law; can't even have a car without a screen since RVC is mandated). But now they would be competing with used cars that have most, if not all, of these things and cost less.
I can find electricity in far more places than I can gasoline. It even comes out of my walls. Do you have gasoline piping throughout your home?
For practical EV purposes there is not electric everywhere. If there isn't enough at home chargers are hard to find. Sure they are all over - but they are not advertised and not at every exit: you need an app to find them. Using an app is not safe when you are driving so you better have someone else with you to figure out how to find them or plan ahead.
But otherwise... Yeah, That's absolutely amazing to wake up every morning to a full tank/charge
It suppose is "pretty inexpensive" compared to other new trucks you can buy right now. However, my much more equipped, full size truck cost less, inflation adjusted even, than this thing when it was new. Today's truck market baffles me.
But (at least in my experience), that made for a worse product than having factory installation and QA. I bought a brand-new car from a Scion dealer in 2005 and indicated I wanted to add keyless entry. I paid the dealer, they did the install, and I left ... with a car that would intermittently fail to lock some doors with the key fob. I realized shortly thereafter that the dealer had installed an aftermarket system to save money rather than the offical Scion keyless entry system. I complained and eventually got them to install the right system, but jeez, that did not enhance my experience compared to just finding a car that was built in a factory with the options I wanted.
I'm not saying the modular Slate pickup isn't cool. I'm kind of tempted by it. But I wouldn't be surprised if people find themselves with leaky roofs, electrical gremlins and random squeaks and rattles compared to if they just bought some other truck/SUV and left it alone.
But car batteries, brake pads, tire pressure sensors are all becoming increasingly software-locked in. We're lacking open standards for this stuff.
I can charge it at home. The tire discounters by me charges $15 for a rotation if they didn't sell you the tires, and they do the inspection to see if there's anything they can sell you.
It's less that the oil change costs that much and more that they don't want you to show up with a car they've never seen for an oil change when they can make more doing other work in that bay. So it's priced to keep people out rather than to draw people in.
Most people who buy a car would never be bothered to "tweak" it later, upgrade, add stuff. Modularity also constrains the design and could add some reliability issues.
The biggest benefit would be home repairability so I think that's a big driver for why other manufacturers don't do it. EVs already require less maintenance so that's lost revenue.
P.S. Looking at the options on the site, other than the body style everything else is just as easy to have on any other car. Most of the customization is purely esthetic (wraps, decals, rim options, light plates) and even the practical options like light bars or roof racks are common in the OEM world for any classic brand.
If the customization can be done after the fact it lowers the risk of buying.
Makes sense to me.
Want an open air 5 seater in the summer and an enclosed pickup the rest of the year, except for November when you really want an SUV? Sure, no problem.
https://kagi.com/search?q=gmc+sbc
Everything about modularity seems awesome, but you can see panel misalignment in several shots. Are the component tolerances really going to be that low?
That said, given the price point and the new-ness of the manufacturer, there's all but certainly going to be fit & finish issues.
I know why, the market is nostalgia and it wouldn't sell well if it looked more like a mini kenworth which has a hood that slopes down and in and less like a pickup truck.
That low range is going to turn off a bunch of buyers. I doubt another 10-20 miles of range would capture more buyers than a non-traditional shape would turn off. But I wish the market was that rational.
300-350 miles would be a lot better. That would cover most of my trips (and allow for some payload) with a little bit to spare before I needed to stop to charge.
I guess the price isn't too bad. I still remember something like a Toyota or a Ford Ranger or Chevy S10 selling for under 10K new, but inflation and all... probably not terrible for a compact truck in 2026.
200 miles more than covers all of the driving I do on any normal day. Today is an exceptional day, and I'll be driving a total of 120 miles for work. The Slate would cover that just fine with a ton of breathing room.
I do take far longer trips than that for pleasure, but they're rare.
I think if I only had an EV to drive, and that EV could only do 200 miles on a charge, then I'd be able to figure out how to make these <5% events work for me.
(I can use a break after a couple/few hours on the road, anyway.)
If the company is still around 5 years from now, I could see myself getting one of these to replace our current "compact" (but still enormous) SUV.
I love that it is a bare-bones basic vehicle that can made to be whatever you need it to be and that it does not have all the factory owner tracking bullshit in new cars today.
I can see this being useful to my wife and I both as a small truck and as an SUV. For the things that we do every week this vehicle would work fine and would replace our Ford Ranger. It might be able to replace our 90's F150 too.
I do most of my own maintenance so a vehicle that comes with factory manuals at no cost is far superior to any other that I have owned. I have bought factory manuals for all of our vehicles so that I can minimize downtime when doing maintenance. I would also take advantage of a service network in the event that I had more projects than time, which is increasingly the normal case at my house. With that network I could spend my time on things that have the highest impact.
The vehicle's range works fine for my wife and I. As a vehicle for our kids off at college it is not as attractive. The distance from our house to campus is just under the stated range of the Slate so anything that prevented the vehicle from hitting maximum target mileage would cause it to fall short and I would need to tow or trailer it the rest of the way home. That would be a drag (haha, I made a pun). Adding the ability to run from an external battery would be a huge plus since that would eliminate range issues.
I wonder how difficult it would be to add connections and charge circuitry for an EcoFlow or Jackery battery bank so that it could be carried in the cargo compartment and serve as a backup.
I would also probably use solar panels to keep it topped off while in my driveway. I think the existing EV chargers manage that well today.
This feels much more like a spiritual successor to that truck than the actual new Ranger or Maverick. I’m really hoping this succeeds so that they’ll be around to replace our Dakota when it dies!
The only reason it takes an EV to get this is CAFE.
I love the Tacoma for a lot of reasons, but that Ranger really had a lot going for it in the summer.
The modular design is cool though.
They list some details on the Specs page[1]. They quote 200 miles of range, which is not great especially for a small car. They list a 20-80 charge time of 30 minutes so it's probably a 400V architecture, which is becoming outdated as 800V architectures and chargers exist now.
Seems like a fine about-town car, but probably not a great one for road trips. I think that probably aligns with the NVH[2] expectations you should have for a car of this price.
[1] https://www.slate.auto/en/specs
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noise,_vibration,_and_harshnes...
A 200mi range means you can comfortably commute an hour to work each day, and then get back and "drive around town" in the evening without any worry.
The flip side of that is over the holiday weekend I drove more than 250 miles to go visit my folks for Father's Day, which is just a couple of hours driving each direction. That's not even a long drive, that's a fairly normal weekend mini-roadtrip. It's not unusual for me to sometimes drive to the office in the next city over for meetings, and that's 116 miles from my house, where I work from home hence having significantly shorter typical driving experiences than most Americans. That next city over is a place where quite a lot of folks work and commute daily. 200 miles is definitely on the short side of acceptable range in the US.
Maybe it's just a Texas thing, but driving a hundred miles or more in a single direction is a typical behavior for many people under a variety of circumstances when you expect to return on the same day. This state also has the largest market for truck sales in the US.
200mi is definitely acceptable in the US, but it's on the low end of the acceptable spectrum.
Very surprising it doesn't say the battery capacity anywhere and has no option for a bigger battery
Well you quoted a hybrid, which needs fuel. At current local electric rates ($0.07/kw) I can fully charge my E-Transit (~68kwh usable in the battery) for $4.76. Then I can go around 130 miles before coming back home to charge.
Vastly cheaper than a gas van, but lets look at the Maverick which gets even better economy.
Most gas stations I drove by today were $3.15 to $3.39 for 87oct gas. Self reported fuel economy for the Hybrid Ford Maverick on a few sites maxes out around 37mpg combined.
That means for a Slate truck with the larger 84kwh battery you'll be spending $5.90 for a full at home charge in my area which will get you ~240 miles. While if you bought a Maverick you'll be getting around 70 miles for the same cost.
This is all before we even factor in maintenance differences.
EDIT// They dropped the 84kwh battery, but my point still stands.
China will sell you fully kitted hilux equivalents with japanese engines for 10k. Even toyota is making 10k trucks in thailand.
US manufacturers are just not ready to face free market competition these days. They're entirely reliant on tariffs protecting them.
I’m not really sure what the solution is at this point. We can’t just drop the tariffs, as that will decidedly end almost all manufacturing that has been propped up by them. On the flip side, the current administration’s recent erratic application and resulting litigation in this area have created an environment where no one in their right mind would invest in building out new capacity. The winds have demonstrated that they are too likely to shift again.
I hope someone can swoop in on this thread and explain how it’s all going to work out. Because I just don’t see it anymore….
And that makes me sad, because I want to love the Slate. Seems great. But I can’t see past how the pricing is tantamount to systemic theft, knowing that it has been artificially inflated by such protectionism.
[PAGE] https://www.slate.auto/en/specs
[IMAGE] https://images.ctfassets.net/20dhmw20vttc/2wmiW5shOfgAKsd1nF...
https://insideevs.com/news/799667/slate-truck-lfp-battery-ra...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Transit_Courier#Tourneo_C... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citro%C3%ABn_e-Berlingo
Of course I'm waiting for real world reports, but I'm not going to rule it out yet.
"Just fine" lol. Alright let's go straight back to being 16 years old and doing ghetto shit for the sake of it.
AWD is ubiquitous nowadays. Can get it on entry level vehicles as an option. Electric vehicles are way simpler, as in they could simply strap a motor to the front wheels without much complication.
I already have a 4WD SUV. 4WD is simply superior in the snow, even if I could suffer and survive with RWD.
Compared to Ford or GM's EV trucks? It's almost 1/3 the price...
The closest comparison is like the Ford Maverick, and that starts at 29.
A new 4wd kei style truck is ~10k, with a bigger bed. I know its apples to oranges, but damn do I hate the ridiculous regulatory capture around small vehicles and trucks we have in the US.
I mean, that's fine, but... I am on your "About" page, that's because I actually want to know about you. How can I trust you with $25k if all I know is "We’re designed in California and Michigan, engineered in Michigan, and assembled in the Midwest. And our team is spread across the entire country, from Washington state to Florida" ?
What's your funding? Who owns you? Who's the CEO? What are the credentials of your engineers? Basically, why should I believe that you can pull this off?
https://www.slate.auto/en/about
Normal people make product-buying decisions based on the product.
None of those things are true for a brand new company. Tesla was infamous for having random things wrong with their cars in the early days which the established car companies had figured out a long time ago. And there's a non-negligible chance the company will end up folding before it can give you your product, or before they can fix the product you got.
The amount of money they have, the character of their backers and their CEO, and the quality of their engineers matters significantly.
A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43794284
High end luxury vehicles are coach built. The Ferrari Luce is a mid end luxury vehicle. Rivian is more like a low end luxury vehicle.
And looking at their website now, I see the same thing unfortunately. Why would someone "preorder" a car that only exists as a prototype and digital art? What proven track record do they have of actually being able to manufacture these, and what independent outlets reviewed it?
I'm sorry, but a lot of red flags immediately pop up for me, I'm confident this is 99% a scam.
"always" is just not true. "most of the time" is true, and it will get less and less as time goes by.
Generators are also much more efficient at converting fuel to electricity. They don't have to provide pretty good power output at all RPM's, they are much more fine tuned. There are also emission reduction options that are economical at the scale of a power plant, but not when attaching to millions of cars.
> no oil and fluids, no oil or engine filters, water pumps, spark plugs, valves, seals, etc etc
Those are cheap though.
You still have tires, shocks, and the general body wearing out from use.
Our car (2025 Ioniq 5) gets about 3-4 miles of range per hour on a 120V outlet. If you're home for 10 hours overnight, that's at least 30 miles of range each day. Some random article I found[1] suggests the average commute is about 42 miles. So if you include some extra time on weekends, a 120V outlet easily matches the average commute distance. If you drive less than that, or are home more often due to WFH or whatever, then a 120V outlet is definitely enough.
In reality, probably people drive significantly more than that, eg for shopping and seeing friends and shuttling kids around and whatever. So in the end I do agree with you, lots of people will want to get a 240 line to their garage. But an existing 120V line is probably genuinely enough for a whole lot of people, too. It is for my wife & me.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2024/03/24/average-commute-distance-us...
In Seattle, we also went from flat 13.4c/kWh to a new variable rate with 8c/kWh available from 12-6am. My electric bill just dropped by about 30%.
It really is under appreciated how much less stressful EVs are to own on a day-to-day basis until you have one. Never worried about gas prices, it's always "full", don't have to deal with crazy people bumming money at the gas station, &c.
So when they think about owning an EV, they focus really hard on "gas station mentality" things like "how long does it take to fill" and "how far can you go between fill-ups?".
Once you own an EV (and have a home charger) you pretty quickly forget about those things shy of the occasional 300+ mi road trip.
For an around-town daily, the only real reason you wouldn't want to take an EV is because literally all of your options are rolling privacy violations. At least with an ICE you can buy a 2011 panther platform and rest easy.
Thankfully, Slate solved this problem. I don't care that it's a cheapy, uncomfortable shitbox with no range. Please yes, more modern cars that aren't literally made out of spyware at an atomic level.
I’m pretty sure that’s the whole g-damned point of an EV. Who are you thinking needs to be told this?
EVs are a massive serfdom wealth and freedom transfer masquerading as a decade of not having to visit a gas station while hiding the country sized hole that will be needed for all the battery trash.
They are a blight on humanity. China survives them at scale because they are communist and have policies to mitigate economic fallout in one sector by having people supported in others. The USA just makes more homeless people and tells the next generation of high schoolers to enroll in a special work ready jobs pipeline program for whatever the local school board thinks will be left. And their non-employment rate skyrockets.
The problem is we can only guess because we are talking about going to trash in 8-10 years, and most EVs are not near that old. Still signs are good.
oh, wait, that is what Americans do.
And the Slate should have better utility, for anybody who needs a truck/SUV vs coupe. And also comes without the Musk stigma.
Of course most people only need a coupe to begin with. Too bad you can't buy any that are cheap. (that and you mostly only need a coupe, but at least once a week need something more)