The 2027 Slate Truck: The $24,950 Electric Pickup That Skipped the Radio and Kept the Point

There’s a kind of new car reveal that goes like this. A well dressed executive stands on a stage in a big city hotel ballroom, gestures at a rotating platform, and announces that his company has reinvented the wheel. It uses a proprietary AI, an over the air update ecosystem, seven touchscreens, a subscription for the heated seats, and it starts at seventy nine thousand dollars.

The Slate Truck reveal was not that.

Slate’s pitch is a $24,950 electric pickup made in Indiana that has crank windows, no touchscreen, no radio, no glove box, and does 205 miles on a full charge. It’s a working truck sized like a working truck was sized in 1994, before every pickup started aspiring to be a luxury SUV with a bed you never used. Pre-orders are open (and Slate says delivery windows are filling up), customer deliveries have not yet started, and the automotive press has been riding shotgun in it for months now, mostly coming away smiling. Whether you buy one or not depends almost entirely on how comfortable you are with the idea that a car doesn’t need to include everything by default. But before you decide, you probably want to know what Slate actually built.

What Actually Comes in the Box (Or Rather, Doesn’t)

Let’s start with what you get for $24,950.

You get four wheels, a single 135 kilowatt electric motor driving the rear, a 65 kilowatt hour lithium iron phosphate battery, a five foot pickup bed with a working tailgate, and a two seat cab. Standard equipment includes power door locks, cruise control, and forward collision mitigation. That’s the safety and convenience list. That’s the whole list.

The windows crank. The dashboard has physical buttons for the essentials. There is no radio. There is no factory touchscreen. There is no glove box. The paint is unpainted composite panel by default, meaning the truck is a sort of textured neutral gray until you decide otherwise. Slate calls this Blank Slate. The name is not subtle.

Now, before anyone panics, Slate isn’t preventing you from having any of these things. It’s making them optional. Want a stereo? Buy one from the accessories catalog. Want a wrap in Baby Blue or Splatter? Order it. Want a rear seat kit that converts the truck into a five seat SUV? That’s a thing you can add. The truck is a canvas. You paint it, or you don’t. Slate is happy either way.

The philosophy is what Detroit’s cheap car divisions gave up on twenty years ago. You buy what you actually need. Not what a product marketing team convinced a focus group they might want someday.

The Powertrain and What It Actually Means

Single motor rear wheel drive. 135 kW of power (roughly 181 horsepower), 264 newton meters of torque (about 195 lb ft), zero to sixty in about eight seconds, top speed limited to 90 mph. Battery is a 65 kWh lithium iron phosphate pack, 63 kWh usable.

This is not fast. It is also not slow. Eight seconds to sixty is what a mid trim Toyota Corolla does. It’s a full second and a half behind a base Chevy Bolt EV (which does the run in around 6.5 seconds), but faster than plenty of gas commuter cars people are perfectly happy with. Nobody thinks the Corolla is a slow car. What it isn’t is fun in the way a Rivian R1T is fun. The R1T does zero to sixty in three seconds, has more than 800 horsepower, and can climb a boulder. It also costs three times as much and weighs more than a small house.

The lithium iron phosphate battery is worth pausing on. LFP is cheaper than the nickel manganese cobalt chemistry that dominates the premium end of the EV market. It’s also more thermally stable on paper — LFP has a higher thermal-runaway threshold than NMC and doesn’t release oxygen the same way when it decomposes, which is why manufacturers frame it as the safer chemistry. Real-world crash-fire data for LFP versus NMC fleets is still thin, so treat this as a chemistry-level advantage rather than a proven crash-outcome guarantee. It handles being charged to 100 percent without degrading the way NMC packs do. And it’s less energy dense per kilogram, which means a given kWh of LFP weighs more than the same kWh of NMC — part of why the Slate rings in at 4,048 lb curb weight, heavy for its footprint if not quite Tacoma territory. LFP is the right choice for a truck at this price. It’s what Tesla puts in the base Model 3 and Model Y. It’s what BYD builds most of its cars around. It’s not a compromise. It’s a different point on the same set of trade offs.

Range, Charging, and the Question of What You Actually Do With It

Slate says the pickup will do 205 miles on a full charge. That’s an estimate based on the EPA test cycle, not an official EPA rated figure yet.

For context, that’s less than most modern EVs. A Model Y goes around 320 miles. A Rivian R1S goes 400 with the max pack.

For a lot of buyers, this is going to be the reason they don’t buy a Slate. And that’s fine. This truck isn’t for someone driving 300 miles a day. This truck is for someone who drives thirty. According to Federal Highway Administration data, the average American driver covers around 40 miles a day, and even if you double that, you’re still under half the Slate’s range every single day. Slate is betting that the buyer who wants the cheapest possible pickup isn’t the same buyer who does regular road trips.

Charging is straightforward. NACS is standard, so you can plug into Tesla Superchargers directly without an adapter. On a household 120 volt outlet at 1.9 kW, going from 20 to 80 percent takes about 17 hours. Plenty for an overnight top up if you drove less than 100 miles that day. On Level 2 at 11 kW (a NEMA 14-50 install job), 20 to 100 percent takes about four hours. On a DC fast charger at 120 kW, 20 to 80 percent is about half an hour, which is a coffee and a bathroom break.

None of this is class leading. But none of it is dysfunctional either. It’s exactly what a $24,950 electric truck needs to be able to do, and Slate hasn’t cheaped out on the fundamentals.

The Bed, the Payload, and the Actual Truck-ness of It

You’re not just buying a small car with a hat on. The Slate Truck actually works as a truck, at least for the loads most Americans actually haul.

The bed is 60.5 inches long. Drop the tailgate and you’re at 80.7 inches, which will swallow standard 4 by 8 sheets of plywood laid on the tailgate. Bed width between the wheel wells is 43.9 inches, which will NOT swallow a sheet of plywood flat. This is the same trade off every compact pickup has ever made. You lay it on the tailgate, or you leave it at the store.

Payload is 1,550 pounds. That’s more than a base Ford Maverick can do. It’s competitive with mid-size trucks, though most full-size half-tons still out-rate it. If you need to move mulch, gravel, drywall, or your friend’s IKEA delivery, the Slate is legitimately rated to do it.

Towing tops out at 2,000 pounds. That’s about a jetski or a small utility trailer. It is not going to tow a boat, a horse trailer, or a camper. If those are your use case, this is the wrong truck. Say it out loud and move on.

Ground clearance is 7.8 inches, which is a little less than a Subaru Outback (8.7 inches) and about the same as a typical crossover. Meaning the Slate will handle dirt roads and light off pavement without drama, but you’re not going rock crawling. The wheel and tire spec is 17 inch steel wheels wrapped in 245/65R17 all season rubber. Which is another way of saying replacement tires will run around $150 apiece, not $600 apiece like on a Hummer EV. Little things like this add up over five years of ownership.

The SUV Trick

Here’s the wild part.

Slate designed the truck so that you can, with an accessory kit, convert the same vehicle into a five seat SUV. Same wheelbase, same motor, same battery. You add a rear roof section that extends over what was the bed, install a second row seat, and now you have an SUV. Curb weight goes up (to 4,335 pounds). Range presumably drops proportionally. Cargo behind the second row is 34 cubic feet, and 58.4 cubic feet with the second row folded. Frunk holds another 7 cubic feet up front.

Nothing else on the market lets you do this. Not the Fathom, not the Silverado EV, not the R1T. This is a design decision that only makes sense at Slate’s level of pared down engineering, because it depends on the truck starting out as basically a chassis and a body kit rather than a monocoque with everything welded together. It’s clever, and it’s the closest thing to a real product differentiator Slate has that isn’t just about price.

For a family that needs one vehicle that hauls sometimes and carries people other times, this convertibility could be genuinely useful. For everyone else, it’s a fun proof point that Slate is building something structurally different from a traditional truck.

Safety and Driver Assistance.

Standard safety equipment includes forward collision mitigation, which is what all new cars are effectively required to have. Beyond that, the Slate is not competing in the ADAS arms race. There is no lane centering system. There is no adaptive cruise control. There is no hands off highway aid. There is no self parking, no automatic lane change, no automatic emergency braking beyond what the collision mitigation covers.

For some buyers, this will be a dealbreaker. For others, it will be a relief. There is a real audience that thinks modern cars have become too eager to intervene, and Slate is quietly building for that audience. If you want a truck that trusts you to drive it, this one does. If you want a truck that will steer itself, look elsewhere. Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) and Ford’s BlueCruise are both real things you can buy on other cars. Neither is available here.

None of this means the truck is unsafe. It means the truck offers the standard equipment and doesn’t oversell you on the extras. It’s a philosophy consistent with the rest of the vehicle.

Made in America (For Real, Not for the Sticker)

Slate builds this truck in Warsaw, Indiana, in a plant that used to be a Chrysler paint facility. The company employs Americans, sources what it can domestically, and prices its truck at a level that used to be normal for a domestic pickup and is now considered radical. Which tells you something about how normal has drifted over the past twenty years.

Whether this matters to you depends on how much you weigh domestic manufacturing when you shop. For some buyers, it’s decisive. For others, it’s a nice bonus but not a deciding factor. Either way, it’s a real, verifiable claim, backed by the physical existence of an operating factory in Indiana.

Slate is also, importantly, a startup. Jeff Bezos is the anchor investor, which means the company has more runway than the average car company launching a first vehicle, but it’s not yet a proven institution. If you put down a pre-order today and the battery has a problem five or six years into ownership, Slate needs to still exist as a company for the warranty to be worth anything. Ford has been around for 123 years. Slate has been around for less than five. The math on institutional durability isn’t the same, and it would be silly to pretend otherwise.

Who This Truck Is For

The Slate Truck is genuinely well suited to a specific person. That person is probably somebody who drives less than 100 miles on a typical day, has home charging or can install home charging, wants a cheap second vehicle for hauling and errands rather than a family’s only car, doesn’t want another touchscreen in their life, doesn’t tow more than a small utility trailer, prefers physical buttons to menus, likes the idea of paying less up front and adding only the accessories they actually want, is comfortable being an early adopter of a startup brand, and most importantly, thinks the fact that cars now cost more than a house down payment is genuinely absurd.

If that’s you, the Slate is one of the most interesting new vehicles on the market. It’s cheap in the way things used to be cheap, without the cynical corner cutting that usually accompanies a low price tag.

Who This Truck Is Not For

The Slate Truck is genuinely bad for another specific person. That person is somebody who regularly drives more than 200 miles in a day, needs to tow a boat or a horse trailer or an RV, lives in an apartment with no reliable charging, wants a truck that comes with a stereo and a touchscreen and heated seats, prefers hands free highway driving, wants a real dealer network for warranty and service issues, isn’t comfortable buying a first year vehicle from a startup, or expects a truck to also be a rolling entertainment system.

If any two of those describe you, the Slate is not the right truck. A Ford Fathom (when it ships in 2027), a used Chevrolet Silverado EV, or a used Rivian R1T would probably serve you better. See our 2026 Used EV Buyer’s Guide if you’re shopping the used side.

The Bottom Line

The Slate Truck is not the best truck money can buy. It’s not trying to be. It’s the cheapest new electric pickup you can buy in America, by a wide margin, and it’s not cheap in a way that feels like a scam or a compromise. It’s cheap in a way that feels like somebody at Slate looked at the modern car and asked, out loud, why any of us are paying $65,000 for a full size pickup to commute in.

Slate’s answer is not to build a better $65,000 pickup. Slate’s answer is to build a $24,950 pickup that does the specific things a lot of drivers actually need a pickup to do. Whether that’s you depends on your driving pattern, your comfort with a startup brand, and whether you actually miss having a radio.

For a lot of buyers, the answer is going to be no. For a specific and probably larger than expected group of buyers, this is going to be one of the most sensible new vehicle purchases of the decade.