Can a $25K pickup with crank windows change the EV game?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Support for Here & Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com.
WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

**Peter Faricy** (0:21)
We can design, engineer, assemble, all American, and it's affordable, and it's something that people love.

**Chris Bentley** (0:27)
And it's an EV. Slate Auto wants to shake up the industry with an electric truck starting at 25 grand. But is it too late for Detroit to catch up to the rest of the world?
It's Wednesday, July 22nd, and this is Here & Now Anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley.
In just a few minutes, we'll hear about a quote, unprecedented cyber incident at OpenAI. The company says two of its artificial intelligence models broke out of the sandbox they were being tested in and got access to another company's data. What OpenAI's accidental hack means for cybersecurity coming up at about 10 minutes. But first, the global auto industry is going electric. But you wouldn't know it from looking around the US. EVs were about a quarter of global auto sales last year, more than twice the share in the US, and up substantially from the year before. One of the big global players is the Chinese company BYD. It's got several budget models under $25,000.
The American government is effectively blocking those cars from being sold in the US, with a 100% import tax. But some American automakers want to build their own. As Scott Tong reports from Michigan, they think there's an appetite for low-cost cars that run on batteries instead of gas.

**Scott Tong** (2:07)
One of those companies is a startup in Michigan, where I reported last week with Here & Now producer Julia Corcoran. It's called Slate Auto.
At Slate's administrative and engineering headquarters outside Detroit sits its electric pickup. It's called the Blank Slate. Get it? It comes out later this year. Here's Slate Auto CEO Peter Faricy.

**Peter Faricy** (2:31)
New car prices are over $50,000, but even used car prices are over $30,000 to $35,000. So it's quite difficult for working families and working individuals to afford a vehicle at all, let alone a new vehicle.

**Scott Tong** (2:47)
And when you say affordable, give me a number. What's affordable?

**Peter Faricy** (2:50)
Well, if you take a look at the median income in the US., most financial analysts would recommend you keep your car payment on a loan to something in the $400 range. At $50,000, most people would have a car payment in the $800 plus range. We're going to have this two-door Slate truck available for sale for $24,950.
That truck will allow you to have a loan payment that's in the $400 range.

**Scott Tong** (3:21)
Faricy says Slate Auto started from scratch with a team of leaders not just from the auto biz, but also Silicon Valley and e-commerce. They rethought the whole design, rethought the whole concept of manufacturing an electric vehicle. What did they eliminate from the process?

**Peter Faricy** (3:36)
So one of the most famous choices we made was we don't have a screen in a Slate. We don't have an infotainment system.
Many people were quite excited about that because they end up using their phones or their tablets in their own vehicle today.
And they're excited to save the money of paying for an infotainment system that they don't use.

**Scott Tong** (3:55)
So, ballpark, what do you save by not having the entertainment system?

**Peter Faricy** (4:00)
Roughly a few thousand dollars in your vehicle price. And on the architecture of the vehicle, just to give you an order of magnitude, we have less than 900 parts in a Slate.
Some of our competitors will have 4500 parts in their vehicle. That makes it much more expensive to design, much more expensive to assemble, and very expensive for the consumer to afford.

**Scott Tong** (4:23)
Slate Auto's PR team says they borrowed from the California chain In-N-Out Burger. You start with a blank patty, add a bun if you want, add cheese if you want, lettuce and tomatoes, you get the idea.

**Peter Faricy** (4:34)
You can actually start with something very affordable, and slowly over time, add the accessories and add the features you want.
All of our trucks go between three form factors, and this is an exclusive. No one else is doing this in the world. You can buy our trucks as a square back SUV, or the fast back SUV, which is more fashionable, has a slanted rear window, or you can buy the base slate pickup that we're looking at right here.

**Scott Tong** (5:00)
By the way, with the original Ford Model T, the founder Henry Ford said you could buy it in any color you want so long as it's black. Well, the blank slate comes only in gray.