Slate Auto, the electrical truck startup backed by Jeff Bezos, has now collected greater than 150,000 refundable reservations for its low-cost EV due out on the finish of 2026.
The corporate shared the determine in a brand new Q&A video with CEO Chris Barman, the place she solutions questions from these reservation holders in regards to the firm’s plans for self-driving (there are none), or whether or not house owners will be capable of affix a automobile seat to the non-obligatory rear seats (they may).
Reservations are a considerably useful metric for gauging basic curiosity in a brand new automobile, however they’re certainly not a sign of certain success. Repeatedly over the previous few years, we now have seen EV corporations tout reservation figures solely to go bust, both as a result of they weren’t in a position to get by way of the tough strategy of standing up manufacturing, or as a result of they weren’t able to have automobiles on the street.
For Slate, it’s promising that the quantity has continued to climb, which means that new reservations are coming in sooner than any attrition the corporate is likely to be seeing. That stated, Slate crossed the 100,000 reservation mark all the best way again in Might, proper after it got here out of stealth, so it took an excellent seven months to develop the checklist by 50%. And searching ahead, Slate plans to make 150,000 of those EVs per yr on the manufacturing unit it’s refurbishing in Warsaw, Indiana, so it might want to appeal to much more consumers if it plans to succeed available in the market.
Any continued enthusiasm for Slate’s EV needs to be a reassuring signal for the corporate, given the state of electrical vehicles total as of late. Simply yesterday, Ford introduced it’s ending manufacturing of the all-electric F-150 Lightning, the primary main battery-powered pickup truck to hit the U.S. market a couple of years in the past. (It’s being changed by a model with a gasoline generator connected.) The corporate stated the Lightning merely wasn’t making sufficient cash — a reality exacerbated by how Ford was by no means in a position to promote quite a lot of thousand per quarter. Gross sales of different electrical vehicles, like Tesla’s Cybertruck and Common Motors’ Silverado EV, have additionally struggled to remain above that mark.
After all, the Lightning was a sort-of Frankenstein’s monster of a automobile, with Ford shoehorning EV expertise right into a design that was initially meant for gasoline powertrains. Slate’s truck has been designed from the bottom as much as be an EV, and the corporate is hyper-focused on promoting it for a price ticket within the mid-$20,000 vary. The decline of choices from Ford and others could assist clear the best way for Slate to search out early success — that’s, till Ford’s actual shot at a low-cost EV hits the market in 2027.
