Slate Auto is making a contrarian bet on the American EV market: strip the truck down to essentials and sell it for under $25,000. The result is a two-door pickup shorter than a Honda Civic, with hand-crank windows, a 65 kWh lithium iron phosphate battery, and a quoted range of just 205 miles. That’s nearly 120 miles short of the base Tesla Model 3. But Slate isn’t chasing Tesla. It’s chasing the roughly half of Americans struggling to pay for basic necessities, in a market where the average new vehicle now costs around $50,000.
The strategy looks less reckless when you examine why the Ford F-150 Lightning failed. Ford discontinued the electric version of its best-selling truck in December 2025, just four years after launch. The base model started around $40,000 in 2022 but topped $54,000 by its final year, largely because its battery—nearly twice the capacity of Slate’s—was needed to hit an almost 300-mile range. Slate’s founder clearly saw this as a trap: range obsession drove prices beyond what mainstream buyers could stomach, especially after the second Trump administration slashed EV tax credits.
The data suggests Americans dramatically overestimate how much range they need. The average driver covers under 35 miles a day, and nearly 90% of personal trips are 20 miles or less. One recent study found EV owners typically use less than 20% of their battery’s range on a daily basis. China has already validated the affordable, shorter-range formula: its 40 million-plus EVs average just 247 miles of range, compared to 329 miles in the US, and roughly half of new vehicles sold there are now electric.
Slate has real money behind it—nearly $1.4 billion from investors including Jeff Bezos across three funding rounds—and a factory targeting 100,000 vehicles in year one with preorders already numbering in the thousands. Deliveries start late 2026. Ford, notably, is working on its own small electric truck expected around $30,000 in 2027, a tacit admission that the Lightning’s size and price were the problem. The real test isn’t whether Slate can build the truck; it’s whether American buyers can unlearn decades of range anxiety when the price tag is right.
