In a bustling studio in Long Beach, an ambitious team of designers is trying to reinvent the way electric cars are made.
Slate Auto has assembled a team of electric vehicle engineers from Tesla, Rivian and elsewhere to develop America's cheapest electric car. In a warehouse next to hardware stores and a Western-style bar, designers have built clay models and prototypes of a customizable electric car that can cost half the price of competitors.
The company, which has raised more than $700 million from Amazon's Jeff Bezos and others, says it will have a truck on the market next year for about $25,000.
Various customization options for the Slate truck are shown.
(Myung J. Chung/Los Angeles Times)
How does the company plan to keep the price so low?
Buyers will start with a blank slate—a simple truck without power windows or even paint—and then can customize it however they want.
They may pay extra for power windows, speakers, color film or paint. The $5,000 kit even turns the truck into an SUV.
In order to keep costs as low as possible while making it easy to use different options, just like LEGO, complex design was required, so the company decided to open its design studio in Southern California.
The region is full of specialists.
Although Slate is headquartered in Troy, Michigan, and the cars will be built in Indiana, much of how they look and are assembled will be assembled in the Los Angeles area, said Jeremy Snyder, Slate's chief commercial officer.
“The presence of designers on the West Coast, especially in Los Angeles, has been a huge part of the auto industry for a very long time,” he said. “Having that talent pool here was really important.”
The Slate SUV is among the available configurations.
(Myung J. Chung/Los Angeles Times)
If enough consumers like the idea, company executives hope their unique business model will encourage widespread adoption of electric vehicles.
Skeptics say it remains to be proven that American consumers actually want a car that's broken down to the bare minimum, but thousands of potential EV owners have already expressed interest.
More than 150,000 potential buyers have paid a $50 deposit to reserve a spot in line to purchase the truck as soon as it hits the market.
Much of that demand is coming from Los Angeles, Snyder said.
“Los Angeles has played a critical role in the zero-emission auto industry,” he said. “I think it will play a very important role in the production of Slate cars.”
The company's first deliveries are expected at the end of 2026.
Slate is entering the electric vehicle market at a difficult time, as demand for clean vehicles has declined under the Trump administration. The president has rolled back many tax breaks and rules that were created to encourage more consumers and businesses to adopt electric vehicles.
Slate is an EV startup that makes electric trucks and SUVs, where customers buy only the features they want. A manual window crank comes standard in the Slate truck. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
The EV company Rivian laid off more than 600 workers in October, and Tesla sales have slid this year.
Tesla has shown how tough it is to build a business around an affordable EV by putting its own affordable vehicle plans on the back burner.
These days, Elon Musk seems more focused on developing humanoid robots for the masses than on an affordable EV.
Slate thinks that for a radically reduced price, there will be demand. It is imagining that there are customers who don’t need four doors, the size or the power of a standard truck or the autonomous driving tech of a Tesla.
Slate’s big bet is that a radically reduced sticker price and a new kind of business model can rekindle excitement about the industry. The company is hoping that customers will be thrilled to save the money and then splurge only on the features they want.
“We’re going to make the truck, and then after that, you make it yours,” said Slate’s head of communications, Jeff Jablansky.
Slate trucks have a steel frame and external plastic panels that can be wrapped in any color. If customers want to paint their vehicle, they can do it themselves or take it to a partner shop.
The standard version will have an electric range of 150 miles. That can be increased to 240 miles by paying more for a bigger battery.
And those are some of the most obvious options.
Slate’s online customization tool gives customers the freedom to design their EV however they want. Jablansky said potential customers have created more than 10 million different configurations of a Slate truck online.
Slate hopes that if it can make EVs more affordable to buy, a new group of consumers will get to experience that EVs also often cost less to own and maintain.
“The entire company was built around this idea of the affordable vehicle,” Snyder said. “We scrutinize every accessory in the same way that we scrutinize the vehicle to keep prices as low as possible.”
Slate trucks have a steel frame and external plastic panels that can be wrapped in any color. If customers want to paint their vehicle, they can do it themselves or take it to a partner shop.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
Although only about 25 of Slate’s 500 employees work out of the Long Beach studio, it has a disproportionate effect on the company’s product.
To trailblaze and succeed in the harsh EV market, the company decided it needed a presence in California, as well as near the traditional heart of car building in and around Detroit.
“We knew we needed to have a presence in both places to really understand what people wanted,” Jablansky said. “Some companies say they’re a California company, some say they’re a Detroit company. We need to be an American company.”
