For anyone curious, if you made a similarly sized gas-powered pickup with an i4 engine, it would be penalized more than a full-sized pickup for being too fuel inefficient, despite likely getting much better mileage than an F-150 because, since 2011, bigger cars are held to a lesser standard by CAFE[1].
Automotive industry is one of the biggest scams on planet earth. One of my favorite cases recently is how Suzuki Jimny is banned in Europe and US because of emission standards allegedly, so the little Jimny is emitting 146g/km but somehow there is no problem to buy a G-Class that is emitting 358g/km oh and surprise surprise Mercedes are going to release a smaller more affordable G-Class [1].
Manufacturers must hit a level of CO2 emissions on average across their whole fleet. As such, Suzuki is choosing to discontinue the Jimny because of the tougher fleet average targets starting in 2025.
Overall you’re right that it’s a bit of a fix; Mercedes ‘pools’ its emissions with other manufacturers/brands. It currently pools with Smart, but may also pool with Volvo/Polestar? [0]
It’s such an obvious approach to ‘game’ the targets, it’s a wonder the EU didn’t see it coming when they introduced the scheme.
[0] https://www.schmidtmatthias.de/post/mercedes-benz-intends-to...
This is why its so important to be super careful with how you write regulation - because even if the intent was good, it's so hard to both anticipate unintended second- and third-order effects, and it's so difficult to update after you've pushed to production.
Just like code, regulation isn't intrinsically valuable - it's a means to an end, and piling lots of poorly-written stuff on top of each other has disasterous consequences for society. We have to make sure that the code and law that we write is carefully thought out and crafted to achieve its desired effect with minimal complexity, and formally verify and test it when possible.
(an example of testing law may be to get a few clever people into a room and red-team possible exploits in the proposed bill or regulation)
> This is why its so important to be super careful with how you write regulation - because even if the intent was good, it's so hard to both anticipate unintended second- and third-order effects, and it's so difficult to update after you've pushed to production.
It seems that the goal is to pressure automakers to improve the efficiency across their entire line instead of simply banning low-efficiency models altogether.
If an automaker discontinues a low-efficient model in order to have access to a market, isn't this an example of regulation working well?
> so the little Jimny is emitting 146g/km but somehow there is no problem to buy a G-Class that is emitting 358g/km
This is an example of a manufacturer discontinuing a more efficient vehicle while continuing to sell a larger vehicle that is significantly less efficient.
That's the opposite of what you want. So, no, this is not an example of regulation working well.
This refers to two different manufacturers, with two different approaches.
To meet the overall tougher targets (95g/km average) Suzuki is discontinuing certain models which release higher levels of CO2 to reduce their average. This is presumably the intention of the regulation - to drive manufacturer behaviour.
Mercedes is, OOTH, pooling with other manufacturers who presumably have emissions to spare, and likely paying them royally for it[0]. They're not alone in this approach, but some would argue it's against the spirit of the regulation, even if it ultimately complies with the letter.
If we Zoom out and look at the net-net efficiency, is there a Steelman argument? I’m wondering if this is a locally based optimization that provides manufacturers with more flexibility to optimize across their fleet.
I don't quite understand. Even if the intent was to to provide manufacturers more flexibility, the fact that a much more efficient line was discontinued as a result of the regulations implies that the result was less efficiency.
Maybe I misunderstood. Could you explain your idea in more detail?
I don’t see the issue in that though. If the target was to keep the average emission down across the entire country and if inefficient brand A decided to merge with efficient brand B to keep the average down that seems like it still adheres to the spirit of the law
The spirit was surely be too accelerate efficiency by ensuring all manufacturers improve. That has been negated; reducing the necessary efficiency for some manufacturers just because others are doing well.
It's like if you allowed multiple people to mix blood samples for a DUI check. Sure, there'd have to be less drinking over all, but some would still be drunk af and the effectiveness of the law would be greatly reduced.
Reasonable criticism of the analogy, but the point was/is that this chicanery weakened the effect of the legislation allowing more CO² than would otherwise have been the case. Thus, the spirit of the law was not respected.
Especially in Germany, which has several major manufacturers (Daimler-Benz, VW, BMW) that are important to the economy. Additionally, VW is part owned by the government of one of the states, which is why they are frequently favored by the government. Despite various scandals at VW, there are rarely any serious consequences for the company, because the government always finds a way to make trouble go away.
And Germany is fairly influential in the EU so they probably extend the protection of these companies to the EU level.
EU politics are basically French, German politics vs smaller countries now, I think. The triangle balance of France, Germany, UK has been replaced by a more centralised but also more diffuse model, although Poland seems to be becoming more important.
Is that weighted for individual car popularity? Because couldn’t you put three push cars in your lineup that you don’t realistically expect to sell and be fine?
If you're talking about the ford transit (I'm just guessing) but maybe the tariff rules changed? IIUC The transit was shipped to the US from europe as a "bus" because it was configured with car seats on board and then they would strip the seats and ship them back to europe. Buses are exempt from tariffs otherwise municipal public transit would be even more in the drink.
This is the Ford Transit Connect. They're known as mini cargo vans and popular with trades and for city driving because they're slightly smaller than a mini van. The equivalent to the Transit Connect was the Ram ProMaster City and Nissan NV200. They all were discontinued within two years of each other.
The Jimny or similar Suzuki models would not be offered for sale in the U.S. because it’s basically the latest iteration of the Samuri, which died there after Consumer Reports falsely claimed that it was dangerously prone to rollover.
The Samuri, sold in India as the Gypsy and used extensively by Indian police, did rollover alarmingly often until the 1993 model when the track width was increased by 90mm.
Yeah but look at it. It's a tall vehicle. Of course it's more likely to roll over. It's tall so that it can go over things. It has a purpose. Don't drive it like a sports car and dont haul your family in it on the daily. People bought utility vehicles and used them as family haulers and then bitched when they rolled over. It's stupid. Drive a car.
It's like complaining that you bought a boat, but the water surrounding them is dangerous and you could drown in it. So we need to make it work on land so that you can take the kids to school in it without drowning.
I think the idea may have been that these would help with bad Indian roads — even our potholes have potholes — but the police neglected to account for having to participate in the odd car chase now and then.
I had rented a barebones Jimny last month when I was in Auckland for the week. Not saying it was prone to roll. But holy hell was it feeling like I could roll that bad boy on some curvy gravel roads. I also loved it.
I don't recognize it as being a Samurai descendent.
Related note: I just saw a Suzuki Sidekick on the road in L.A., in Geo Tracker trim... a rare sight nowadays. It sounded like shit, but with a robust platform a vehicle like that would be just what the U.S. market lacks: a burly SMALL sport-ute.
1. Poorer people tend to drive older vehicles, so if you solely encourage higher fuel economies by taxing carbon emissions, then the tax is (at least short-term) regressive.
2. You can work around #1 by applying incentives for manufacturers to make more efficient cars should lead any carbon tax
3. If you just reward companies based on fleet-average fuel economy without regard to vehicle size, then it would be rather bad for US car companies (who employ unionized workers) that historically make larger cars than Asian and European companies.
4. So the first thing done was to have a separate standard for passenger vehicles and light-trucks, but this resulted in minivans and SUVs being made in such a way as to get the light-truck rating
5. We then ended up with the size-based calculation we have today, but the formula is (IMO) overly punitive on small vehicles. Given that the formula was forward looking, it was almost certain to be wrong in one direction or the other, but it hasn't been updated.
All carbon tax is inherently regressive but that's also trivially fixable. Make it revenue neutral and give every citizen a flat portion of the total collected revenue. Bam, it is now progressive, since on average richer people will spend more on fuel (and therefore the tax) even though it is likely a much smaller percentage of their spending.
Every single one of your ideas has problems that are solved by a carbon tax. Taxes are simple, they accomplish what you want, and they don't have loopholes. A carbon tax will _never_ have the unintended consequence of making emissions worse. Many of our current regulations, including the one I was responding to do exactly that because they actually cause people to buy larger trucks than they otherwise would with worse fuel efficiency.
A carbon tax might not on it's own be enough to solve the problem (especially if you set it to low), but no matter what level you set it, it will help. Thanks to unintended consequences, many of our current regulations are actively counter productive, while _also_ having negative economic and other costs.
All costs are regressive to people with less ability to bear them. By making them not regressive we don't change behavior! It doesn't matter if they're regressive if the objective is to get people to not drive or to burn less gas. Shifting the cost to the rich doesn't change behavior and it doesn't reduce actual carbon. There's a lot more low-income emitters than high income ones.
> Shifting the cost to the rich doesn't change behavior and it doesn't reduce actual carbon.
Shifting cost to the emitters is a better way to put it. If a factory can make 10m in upgrades over time to reduce their carbon tax burden by 15m over time, they are definitely going to do it. So I disagree: I say it does change behavior and it does reduce actual carbon.
> There's a lot more low-income emitters than high income ones
Whether that's true or not it does not mean a carbon tax would not 'reduce actual carbon'.
The fuel/carbon tax would still be behavior-shifting for low-income emitters because it would still apply to low-income emitters per marginal unit, and that part is likely overall regressive because fuel is a larger expenditures for low-incomes.
However, the part where the resulting revenue is pooled and payed out in an equal amount back per capita is progressive, since that payment is a greater fraction of a low income. Desirably, it also means that low-income people emitting less than the average would make money overall: consider a household consisting of a single mom and two kids that take public transit to work/school.
If you set the carbon tax at about $1/gallon of gasoline, the corresponding carbon rebate would be about $1000 per family per year.
That wouldn't affect rich people much; neither the $1/gallon nor the $1000 extra income is significant. But many rich people get rich by being penny-wise, so many would change behaviour, by buying an EV or similar.
But for poor people both $1/gallon and $1000 per year is significant. If gas was $1/gallon more expensive, poor people definitely would drive less.
The same thing happened with electric car purchase incentives in New Zealand. The poor cannot afford to buy a new car - so only the well off received the efficient car discount incentives.
The trickle down as those cars depreciated in value was years away.
That doesn't make sense because the second hand car is not cheaper by the amount of the subsidy. Say subsidy is $20k, second-hand car might eventually be $6k cheaper (and the discount time value of money means that the $6k is actually less than $4k). Giving the wealthy person $20k, and the poor person less than $4k is strange.
New Zealand used car market is likely very different from the market where you are. The cheapest Model 3 I could find was a USD18000 for a 2020.
Subsidies make sense if the environmental gains outweigh the costs of the subsidies.
Subsidies: there was a purchase subsidy, charging stations were subsidised, and I think electric cars are not paying their fair share of road maintenance (much of our road costs are paid for by an excise tax on usage via petrol-tax or heavy-vehicle-milage).
That math doesn’t add up. If I buy a $100,000 car for $80,000, and I sell it to someone for $60,000, the recipient still gets a $40,000 discount.
And if you pretend that there is no subsidy, and the original owner paid $80,000 just because it cost that much unsubsidized, the second buyer still gets the same discount off the original purchase price.
So the fact that the car was originally subsidized isn’t relevant.
The context is about when cars reach the poor - your example of someone spending $60k is irrelevant.
A poorer person in NZ spends at most a few thousand on their car. The original retail price is nearly irrelevant by the time it gets to someone poorish (however maintenance/parts costs do matter for old cars).
The financial benefit of a discount mostly goes to the people that own the car while it depreciates as it trickles down.
Context: In New Zealand, the vast majority of people drive second hand cars (mostly imported second hand from Japan). A 20 year old car is regarded as newish in New Zealand. I am well off, so I have two second hand cars, my daily driver is 2006 I think, and I have a 1996 4WD for other stuff. New cars are only bought by the well off.
I thought about it some more but it is hard to explain.
I wonder if your mental model is that a $20k discount applies at all future prices - so that when the car is sold for $5k that it's "actual" worth is $25k.
My mental model is that when the car is sold at $5k it is worth $5k and the $20k discount has disappeared (the value captured by the early owners).
Background: I'm a top 5% earner but I have friends who are struggling financially.
My opinion is that the discounts is money paid for by our taxpayers into overseas pockets, that benefits a few well off people. Strangely enough the discounts were introduced by our more socialist party, and removed by the incoming less socialist party. I don't believe the discounts are an equitable use of government funds.
I am also extremely sceptical that there is enough environmental benefits: the policy appears green but perhaps it is not (greenwashed).
Having a carbon tax seems to be the most fair way to combat climate change; unfortunately in practice it is political suicide. Australia had a carbon tax in 2011 and was quickly repealed in 2014. Likewise Canada also implemented such a tax in 2019 and was repealed this year prior to their election. People like to say that they want to help the environment, but when it comes time to vote they vote against such policies.
Canada ultimately repealed the carbon tax because it was used as a political cudgel against the Liberal party that enacted it by the Conservative opposition in a sustained fashion for several years.
Which is dismaying because carbon taxes are a conservative solution to this problem and IIRC the first political entities to suggest the implementation of them in Canada were Conservative.
At the end of the day you have a nontrivial amount of the population, and many in positions of power who just outright deny environmental concerns and climate change as an existential threat.
They aren't going to approach this problem in good faith and it isn't obvious what the solution to their nefarious influence on policy should be.
1. The textbook implementation involves 3 parts: tax, rebate and tariff. Canada only did the first 2. They were in talks with Germany/EU to create a carbon tariff zone, but that never happens. Without the tariff the carbon tax is massively unfair to local producers.
2. The rebates were almost invisible. If they would have been cheques in the mail it would have had much more impact psychologically.
But I agree, the main problem was denialism and its use as a political cudgel. It should be hard to argue that carbon tax is stealing money when all of it is given back, but they successfully did that.
Broadly agreed. IMO the Canadian carbon tax had a marketing problem. It should have been called a Carbon Dividend. First, it would have replaced the negative connotation of the word "tax" with the positive connotation of the word "dividend -- and it would have been more accurate to how the program actually worked.
Second, and probably more important: the rebates showed up in your bank account with a description that didn't make the source obvious enough for laypeople. Had people seen monthly "CARBON DIVIDEND" credits in their bank accounts, they would have noticed.
It was never called carbon tax, but carbon pricing. It being knows as carbon tax was the result of of opposition efforts. The same efforts and results would have happened had it been called dividend or anything else.
What makes "rebate" terrible but "dividend" good? They accomplish the same thing in my mind. In fact I think calling it a "dividend" would be a pretty unconventional and contrived usage of that word.
The Australian implementation had a lot of problems. Instead of being (something reasonably loophole free like) a tax levied on fossil fuel consumption it was a scheme that applied to the 500 largest emitters. These emitters then (crucially) estimated their own emissions minus offsets and paid tax on that.
The issue with this is that it creates a whole parallel (and largely fake) carbon accounting world. Fake estimates, fake offsets, a complex web of compensating subsidies - but real public money.
The field of carbon taxes is tricky because we can imagine simple schemes which handle a few scenarios in a fair way (ok, fuel! we know how to tax that) but once you start thinking about agriculture or construction you quickly get into complex estimation. You then end up with armies of carbon accountants who spend all day looking for loopholes and rorts.
You can give the rebate based on prior year or estimated usage at the start of the year, and then repay at the end of the year if it was too much, like with healthcare subsidies.
Are you sure? Gas consumption is notoriously inelastic. West coast gasoline is already a dollar or more than it costs on the east coast. Do poor people drive less in California than in Florida?
I don't know man, gas prices have been consistently pretty high for the last couple of years, meanwhile almost every small car has been discontinued- VW Beetle and Golf, Fiat 500, Honda Fit, Ford Fiesta and Focus, etc... this class of cars basically just doesn't exist anymore.
I think everyone drives less in California than in Florida. (Google says ~14,500 miles annually per licensed driver in Florida, versus ~12,500 miles in California.) Gas prices are a factor in this.
California law requires a special blend of gasoline, which is a lower volume market, which increases the cost. The remainder of the cost difference is transportation costs or taxes.
> By making them not regressive we don't change behavior!
I'm poor. I could get just the $X back as my carbon tax dividend and continue with my current lifestyle. Or I could make choices that emit less carbon, which will cost less since they don't have a carbon tax cost to them, and save an additional $Y on top of the $X I'm already getting.
I mean, I assume that most people who are in a position of financial stress continue with their near-term need to commute to earn a living, and bear the cost of a tax that hurts them.
The government's job is to say that in aggregate, they people better off from the overall reduction in carbon emitted.
My opinion is that trying to make consumption taxes non-regressive is a fool's errand. If it needs to be progressive, figure out what the total dollar contribution needed and pick a rate that when scaled with incomes yields the outcome needed.
A revenue-neutral tax (like GP proposed) could, in theory, change behavior. I don't know enough about human behavior to say how it would work in practice.
Let's say that instead of taxing carbon, we pay people a bonus for emitting a below-average amount of carbon (proportional to the amount that they are below average by). If the amount is in a certain range, it will be too small an amount for wealthy people to care about, but large enough for poorer people to do things within their means (e.g. carpooling) to try to get it.
The results would hit certain geographic areas much worse than others, and (if priced enough to change behavior) would also probably depress car sales, which are two reasons why the federal fuel tax has been flat for over 30 years.
Think about how much easier that is to game though.
The original suggestion could be collected at point-of-sale for carbon emitting products. Gasoline, airplane tickets (based on average for the flights), even electricity are easy to measure and charge at the point of sale.
In your example, the person has to prove how much they didn’t emit, which is way harder in practice, to get the credit.
Why tax the gasoline but then the airplane ticket and not the kerosene?
And similarly i would extrapolate to do we tax the buyer of electricity (which could be green sourced) or the manufacturer - the gas burner. Or maybe even at the first point of contact with the carbon source, the oil company.
I was making an analogy to a revenue-neutral carbon tax. That is tax all of those things, but cut every taxpayer a refund for an equal share of the revenue. This is ultimately identical to paying people for having below-average use.
> Let's say that instead of taxing carbon, we pay people a bonus for emitting a below-average amount of carbon (proportional to the amount that they are below average by). If the amount is in a certain range, it will be too small an amount for wealthy people to care about, but large enough for poorer people to do things within their means (e.g. carpooling) to try to get it.
So you're saying that the government should incentivize poorer people to sell one of the last bits of their functional autonomy for what would be trivial amounts? "We'll just hang onto to this for a bit until you decide to stop going anywhere or make friends at work".
You are correct that most consumption taxes are intrinsically regressive, but you can turn pretty much any consumption tax into a progressive one by simply taking the money and redistributing it at a flat amount per person.
I believe this would be more fair to children who are the ones who will be most impacted by climate change in the end.
I believe there are even some governments that use this approach, but many of them don't make it feel as significant as it should. You should get a big fat cheque in the mail every month as if you won the lottery.
It's hard to see any of this as "trivially fixable." Taxes are inherently political, politics are complicated, changing incentives on this scale are pretty much impossible in our political system.
"Taxes are simple... and they don't have loopholes" is not at all how taxes work in the US. Perhaps your imagined perfect carbon tax is simple, but a simple tax with no loopholes is not likely to happen. Everyone wants a break or exception, and many of the interested parties are powerful.
This is mixing two questions: whether a system can be elegantly designed and do the job without major market distortion, versus the question of whether various actors will stand in the way to prevent it.
You could say the same thing about zoning. Higher density is better for affordability, but faces opposition from landowning existing residents. Does that make it wrong, or not worth pursuing? No, and that particular movement seems to be getting traction despite the political opposition.
I read "trivially fixable" as "there is an elegant solution to this," not that "it is easy to get it politically passed."
As we learned in the 90s with email, an elegant solution that doesn't take human nature into account isn't worth pursuing. There used to be a joke checklist we'd send to each other about this.
> I read "trivially fixable" as "there is an elegant solution to this," not that "it is easy to get it politically passed."
The huge problem with this line of thinking is that it's easy to identify a half-dozen key players standing in the way of your elegant solution and it would be easier to remove them from the situation than change their minds. It's an attractive idea that can become a fixed idea.
> Make it revenue neutral and give every citizen a flat portion of the total collected revenue. Bam, it is now progressive,
Unfortunately, poor people don't have the cash on hand to hold them over until they get their Carbon Stipend on April 15th.
It's going to hurt poor people to charge them more at the counter, even if you give them more later. The stipend is just going to end up paying for less than the interest the tax created on a credit card.
I see the carbon tax as a 'stick' (to penalize undesired behaviour, in this case emitting carbon), but it needs to be coupled with a 'carrot' to encourage the desired behaviours.
I'd like to see a carbon tax coupled with massive investments to make public transit legitimately good. There are too many places where there is no viable alternative to driving, a carbon tax will unnecessarily punish those people without giving them a reasonable alternative.
The carrot is doing the things you want to do like getting from A to B or building a home.
Government ‘carrots’ are almost universally a terrible idea because they codify specific solutions. Instead you can get the same effect more efficiently with a carbon tax large enough for people to notice.
Rich people use more energy. That’s been shown by loads of studies.
Maybe they drive a more efficient car, but they own much larger houses which are heated or cooled consistently, they travel a lot more, and they buy things with embodied carbon emissions.
Right, but now you're talking about adding the tax to the whole economy, not just car fuel?
That's close to impossible to implement. You'd need to track production and usage of everything in an extreme detail. Plus tracking all purchases (items + services) to a given person. So complete state surveillance of citizens. Globally.
We're talking about a carbon tax. By definition it is not on car fuel, but on carbon.
You don't need state surveillance or tracking purchases. You just need to get to the source of the problem. Hydrocarbons leaving the ground.
At the hydrocarbon level, it's much easier to track. Oil and gas is mostly extracted by very large corporations and transported by large infrastructure. You don't care what happens to it once you've produced it - but you do need to put a levy on the hydrocarbons before they're sold on. The people who use those hydrocarbons all have higher costs which pass on to customers.
The biggest problem is international borders. If another country isn't applying carbon tax, then you need to make an estimate of the embodied energy of a product at the point of import. Or encourage them to tax carbon. But neither of those require surveillance. Once the product has been imported, you don't care who buys or sells it because the tax is already paid.
Ok, let's assume you do. Let's tax all fuels 300% in the US.
Now all manufacturing stops as your production costs are all over the roof. Everything is imported from countries that do not have these taxes.
Aviation fuel is dispensed at a limited number of places; it would be easier (or just as easy) to implement a higher aviation fuel tax than a higher auto fuel tax.
There's an auto fuel tax in the US. Increasing that from $0.184/gallon for gasoline and $0.244/gallon for diesel to say $1.50/gallon and $2.00/gallon would ensure massive losses for that party in the next two or three election cycles.
Increasing the tax on aviation fuel to $2/gallon wouldn't produce massive shifts in the next several elections, therefore it's easier to implement.
We already have a carbon tax, you pay it when you buy the carbon. 3 cents per liter federally and an additional 18 cents per liter in California specifically.
Some European countries have total taxes to the tune of 90+ cents per liter (50-60% tax) with current gas prices, for reference. (~65ct/l for the energy/carbon tax, specifically)
I don’t think that level is sufficient to cover the externalities.
> 1. Poorer people tend to drive older vehicles, so if you solely encourage higher fuel economies by taxing carbon emissions, then the tax is (at least short-term) regressive.
You give it back to poor as a income-phased out refundable tax credit. Crucially, base it not on how much they drive or consume, but on their income.
Name it something like the "Worker's Energy Credit". In the worst case, it cancels out the carbon tax spent by them commensurate with their lower income.
In the best case poor people who don't drive much actually come out ahead, and it's just a very progressive sales tax.
The rich might hate it, and call it "redistribution", which is fine because that's exactly what it is, and what taxes have always been, but this one would redistribute downwards instead of upwards, and incentivize lower carbon emissions by those who can afford it.
This is way too complicated. You just give it to everyone unconditionally and tax it as income. We already have progressive graduated income taxes with a huge exempt class, we don't need to layer anything on top of that.
Why don't the poor just buy smaller cars? Less weight - less pollution. Nobody needs a to drive a pickup, unless they run a farm or construction firm. A car weighing less than a ton would be perfectly enough for 99.9 % of drivers.
They do buy smaller cars. But they still spend a much greater percent of their income on gas. Worse, most of the auto industry has upsized their entire vehicle fleet. It's not as easy to find small used cars as it once was. They also are less likely to have jobs they can remote work, and can't afford to live close enough to the workplace to use transit.
Also many poor people need a larger car for their work. I'm not talking about a vanity pickup, but something more like a small pickup
or a work van. Others may have many children to drive (maybe their own and others if they live in joint family situations).
Their solution is to buy a 3rd or 4th hand large vehicle.
Giving it back based on being alive on Dec 31 seems the best solution to me. (It’s very difficult to game and if you give 900 billionaires under a million bucks in total, it’s just not that big a deal…)
We manage to phase out ACA subsidies at 400% of the federal poverty level, so I don't see why we couldn't use a similar mechanism for an energy tax credit.
You can. It will cost political capital and erode the clarity of the messaging about the purpose of the tax. It also gives politicians one more thing to dick around with later.
Personally, I think it’s letting the perfect be the enemy of the 99+% perfect.
> The rich might hate it, and call it "redistribution", which is fine because that's exactly what it is, and what taxes have always been, but this one would redistribute downwards instead of upwards, and incentivize lower carbon emissions by those who can afford it.
Larry Page would be pumped. His annual salary is $1.
I feel pretty strongly that adding exceptions and loopholes to taxes only benefit wealthy people, which is the opposite of the intent.
I would be interested in reading a study where all the tax laws in the country were burned down and rebuilt, with no loopholes or exceptions. Also, eliminate borrowing against a stock portfolio. That is downright evil.
> I feel pretty strongly that adding exceptions and loopholes to taxes only benefit wealthy people, which is the opposite of the intent.
It depends what the exception is.
If the exceptions are "we treat a form of income received disproportionately by the rich a 'not income' and tax it at a lower rate, and on top of that we add an extra tax on top of income tax on labor income, and cap the larger part of that extra tax, too, to avoid burdening high earners", that helps the rich, sure. But there are plenty of exceptions possible that don't do that.
> Larry Page would be pumped. His annual salary is $1.
The tax would be on consumption, the credit would be based on income, so Larry still pays when he buys gas (if not for his cars, then for his planes).
> I would be interested in reading a study where all the tax laws in the country were burned down and rebuilt
That would burn down the country. Tax policy and the economy are a ship that has to be gradually turned in the optimal direction, just like how for the last 40 years tax policy has been gradually redistributing growth/wealth upwards. Sudden changes (like we are seeing now with indiscriminate tariff policy) are what results in the most harm to the poor.
> Also, eliminate borrowing against a stock portfolio. That is downright evil.
Agreed, or just heavily tax borrowing against a portfolio above, say, $2M/year. That way you don't penalize working people borrowing against 401ks or taking home equity loans for home improvements.
> Larry Page would be pumped. His annual salary is $1.
Salary might be $1 but what is his effective income when he files his taxes? That is what he is taxed on, which includes things like dividends and selling of stocks.
There’s nothing wrong with borrowing against stock, the evil part is the step-up in cost basis when the billionaire dies that prevents them from paying any tax at all.
It would be a good deal for the country to let the billionaire use their skills to grow wealth without interrupting it and tax them all at death.
Carbon taxes become progressive with the simple step of returning the revenue to taxpayers as a dividend payment using the existing social security payment infrastructure. Richer people have such outsized carbon footprints that most people would get back more in dividends than they lost in higher costs.
If you want to reduce carbon emissions, if the tax is regressive or not does not matter as long as you tax emissions. If you want to mix too many things, you will not get a good solution for any.
> 1. Poorer people tend to drive older vehicles, so if you solely encourage higher fuel economies by taxing carbon emissions, then the tax is (at least short-term) regressive.
The idea that policy makers care about this in any meaningful sense is absurd given the EV mandates, as EV's radically change the lifecycle costs of cars in a way that is absolutely destructive to people who aren't wealthy.
EV's lower the 'fueling' cost but shift part of it into large cashflow crushing battery replacement costs.
Automobiles have been a significant engine in elevating less wealthy americans because you can buy a old junky car for very little and keep it limping along with use-proportional fuel costs and minor maintenance. Even if it's an inefficient car, you use it to go to work, so you're making money to pay for the fuel. Less work, less work fuel required.
EV's significantly break the model and will push many more less wealthy people onto predatory financing which they'll never escape. Yet policy makers refuse to even discuss the life-cycle cashflow difference of EVs, and continue to more forward with policies to eventually mandate their use.
> it was almost certain to be wrong in one direction or the other, but it hasn't been updated.
It's been broken all along. We've had decades to fix it.
> Meanwhile jet fuel for private jets is (and remains) not taxed at all, even in the EU.
Not correct. Fuel for private aviation is taxed, including jet fuel and avgas. However, there are very few "private" jets, most are operated by some company, and therefore not private. Jet-A1 for a truely privately operated C172 with a diesel engine is taxed.
Which is bonkers. If ever there was a thing that should be taxed it's jet fuel for private jets. 300% tax on private jet fuel would be reasonable.
The emissions just to shuttle rich people from one side of the country to the next (For some, multiple times per day) is insane. You should need to be a billionaire just to afford flying private jets and it should still eat a significant portion of your income if that's what you choose to do.
And for what? Like, we live in the modern era, why does anyone need to travel from NY to Florida to Texas to California in a day?
I have a suspicion the reason why super wealthy people like say Musk but he isn't the only one hate subways and high speed rail is because they fly everywhere. You might like if you could get on the subway in Glen Park and be at lands end in half an hour. You might like getting on a high speed rail and being in LA in 4 hours.
These guy will never ride a subway or take a train anywhere.
LOL on an e-bike I can beat BART to SFO from Glen Park unless you time both to start at just the moment BART arrives instead of at a random moment. If you want a Glen Park to Lands End to take under 30 minutes, the cost would rival the Iraq War.
Many politicians campaigning for green energy (aka AOC) also fly on private jets everywhere so that they can fight the oligarchy - this behavior isn't restricted to wealthy businessmen alone.
Maybe you shouldn't base your assumptions of the world on politically charged clickbait headlines... Did her and Bernie use a private jet? Quite possibly. Does that mean they fly "everywhere" on private jets? Certifiably false.
I'm no Musk fanboy, but it is funny you mention him not liking subways or high speed rail because didn't he try to build a subterranean high speed rail?
The hyperloop was a shit idea from day one and thus far no one has been able to make it work. It's also entirely possible that Elon Musk floated this as a distraction to stop the development of "regular" high speed rain in California[1].
The Las Vegas "loop"[2], on the other hand, is basically a parody of a subway - with a fraction of the capacity.
> In July 2021, the peak passenger flow was recorded at 1,355 passengers per hour.
As a comparison Toronto's subway can handle 28,000 passengers per hour[3] per direction or more.
Did I say it was a good idea? I was merely pointing out that there's evidence that he is not the best example for people that hate high-speed rails and subways.
>Stop the development of high speed rail in California
The same thing that differentiate a private car from public transportation or freight, I would think. This distinction isn't a particularly novel problem.
Well actually, lots of places have special fuel for farm vehicles that are exempt from certain taxes. It's dyed a certain colour so if you get caught with that colour of fuel in your vehicle you can get in trouble. So its not a crazy thing to suggest that we tax different fuel at different rates.
TIL poor people can't pollute, so their market segment shouldn't be incentivized to cut pollution.
TIL that US car companies won't make smaller cars in the face of different regulations, even though they made larger cars in response to current regulations.
The only way to avoid perversions is to tax the problem directly. The market will adjust to all proxies in unintended and harmful ways.
Yeah that’s the truth. The mass of poor people are the predominant polluters. They produce little of value and pollute a lot. So the question then is whether you care about the environment or about the poor and most people would rather the latter.
Thereby penalising existing vehicle owners who can’t switch to a more efficient vehicle overnight.
We have to come up with a rigorous alternative that doesn’t disproportionately affect lower income folk, because people tend not to be overly concerned about nebulous concepts like the climate impacts on unborn future generations, especially when my carbon impact at the margin is negligible when taken in context of global population.
You don't create carbon out of thin air, it's from the fuel, so burning the same quantity of fuel will result in the same quantity of carbon, no matter how the engine works. Therefore a tax on fuel is a tax on carbon.
Yes but since incomplete combustion is inverse correlated with fuel efficiency (unburned fuel is wasted fuel), it's not really a trade off. What is a trade off is NO emissions vs fuel efficiency. Burning your fuel oxygen rich will burn of more fuel, but also makes more NO (due to higher temperatures if I remember correctly).
By definition, more carbon is less efficiency. Efficiency is about how much of the hydrocarbon you turn into heat. Diesels often burn a little dirty. That's partly because diesel engines don't burn all the fuel
Apparently not enough, as USA has quite cheap fuel. Add 100% carbon tax and people will start to pay attention to MPG ratings. With x2 price increase gasoline in USA is still cheaper than in Germany.
It wasn't the intended purpose. It turned out that way because the Detroit lobbyists were smarter and more motivated than the government policy people, and they bamboozled them.
This has been a known problem and could be changed if the political will to make common sense policy changes and corrections when needed was anywhere near existing. Unfortunately, we live in a [political] dystopia
> a simple carbon tax would be miles better than the complex morass of regulations we currently have
Doesn't this just punt the morass into the magic variable of one's carbon footprint?
How about this: fleet efficiency standards are stupid, anachronistic and counterproductive. Scrap them. Then, separarately, create a consumer-side rebate based on a vehicle's mileage. (Because a gas tax breaks American brains.)
> How about this: fleet efficiency standards are stupid, anachronistic and counterproductive. Scrap them. Then, separarately, create a consumer-side rebate based on a vehicle's mileage. (Because a gas tax breaks American brains.)
It's a good concept that is also ripe for abuse with anyone who has some amount of "fuck your rules" money. Same reason why fines that don't scale with income/earnings in some form often do nothing to deter "the rich".
I certainly like carrots more than sticks, but we need a couple of sticks as well.
>No, it makes it so that the outcome is more equally felt across all income levels.
Because you want to... hard stop behavior. Parking violations cause harm, so the fine should be a function of damage to society, not some weird fetish to make people feel pain.
If behavior is so unacceptable that you want to prevent it altogether, criminalize it.
If you subsidize polluting life-styles, you'll get pollution.
You think the rich suffer from pollution and car dependency? It's not at all clear that taxing gas will lead to worse outcomes for the poor. It's entirely clear that subsidizing pollution from the poor will lead to worse outcomes for the planet.
Because you're only considering first-order effects. Behaviors, markets, and systems will evolve around the new rules. Public transit could improve. People could trade in SUVs for hybrid sedans. People could carpool. People could bike. People could walk. Corner stores could re-open. People could demand zoning changes, instead of fighting every nearby development.
that's a different problem. US cities used to have good publhc transport, but the urvanization policies since 50s is car-centric. plus, because of the American cars having huge engines they have bad MPG. The current situation US is in is nothing to do with the tax regime.
Not clear what is meant here. Does ethanol from corn count? Methane from waste dumps?
Gray hydrogen?
Wood pellets?
Ammonia?
Electricity from unclear source?
Human ingenuity is infinite. It is not enough to enact simple rules, people will just produce electricity with hydrogen and claim it green if it will make them profit. If it will help them evade carbon tax. Nevermind that hydrogen came from some extremely polluting process involving damaging our planet atmosphere and everyone's health.
Well, you don't need to tax the ethanol from corn or methane from waste dumps or wood pellets, or ammonia itself. You would tax the oil/gas/coal that came out of the ground that was used to fertilize the corn, process the corn, transport the corn, and distill the ethanol (otherwise it's double taxation). You don't need to tax the wood pellets or the stove they're burned in, or the electricity, just the carbon that is burned to make and transport them. So this is largely irrelevant.
A better question would be for imported items and services. How do you prevent tax shifting from carbon emission havens, which is no different from financial tax havens now. You tax them at entry using the most beautiful word, "tariffs". If an importing country doesn't tax carbon or carbon tariff their imports then you tariff them. Interestingly, it would then be a higher tariff for air transport than shipping. Where it actually get complicated is services, which people really don't like taxing. But if I run a LLM datacenter on coal in china or make bitcoin burning middle east oil, or consult on green projects on Indonesian gas those should be tariffed as well, and that's more difficult.
Give everybody $1000 (or whatever) to offset that. Ends up being neutral for some folks, a net benefit to the poor, and a net cost to the rich. This is already how lots of jurisdictions handle regressive taxes.
That’s the excuse that is used for agriculture. They sell a vision of a Fisher Price toy farm, but make policy for giant Midwest farms.
The proverbial blue collar truck owner is already screwed. Random surburban dude should be paying through the nose for his F-250. Create demand for fuel efficiency, and you’ll have cars like my dad’s 1993 Escort Wagon, that got 45mpg.
Life-style should never be subsidized. God forbid that someone feels the repercussions of their life-style, which is the only feedback mechanism that will ever cause change.
My moral system will stop global warming and save the planet. Your moral system will destroy the planet and kill billions. Everyone needs to be responsible, including the poor. Tough.
You don’t know anything about my moral system. I know that you declared all regressive use taxes in all cases as morally right.
But a system that makes it so you must drive an ICE vehicle to participate in the economy, makes the price of food directly indexed to gasoline costs and then provides tax breaks to the rich who can afford to buy new electric vehicles while increasing the taxes on the poor who can’t is not 100% morally right.
There are lots of ways to introduce a gas tax that are ethically sound but they aren’t simple and the idea that _any_ use tax is morally just is idiotic.
And what you’re describing is exactly the reason Kei trucks aren’t a thing despite most farmers actually liking them for their utility.
You can’t import them unless they are old because we want to protect the automotive industry. But we can’t build them new either because they don’t meet the safety standards (FMVSS) and are penalized more for being fuel efficient because the standards are stricter for smaller vehicles.
Motorbikes are much worse in crashes than kei trucks, we are more than happy to make, sell and operate them. I don’t actually buy the “unsafe” reasoning. It’s also perfectly street legal to buy and drive cars and trucks from the 60s with abysmal safety ratings.
They’re horrible in crashes in the North American region. That’s because the average vehicle size in North America is much, much bigger than the vehicles in the Kei trucks’ region of origin. And streets in North America are, on average, much, much wider and permit higher speed traffic than those in Japan. The cars themselves aren’t inherently unsafe; if you keep them mostly on private property and only take them out on low-speed public roads with light duty vehicles, they’re still operating in an appropriate context. Also pretty appropriate in historic city centers where the roads aren’t too fast and the trucks and full size SUVs aren’t too numerous. But yeah, take one out on the interstate boxed between two semi trucks, an F-350, and a Suburban and you’re going to be in real danger.
Fine print: The truck in the link is only $20K after government subsidies/rebates. So if the government gives my tax dollars to buyers of this truck, then it will cost $20K.
Is the standard deduction giving people your tax dollars? Anyone who itemizes?
What if someone declines a promotion and thus doesn't increase their income and pay more taxes? Is that also taking your tax dollars?
Sure, yes, if the government doesn't follow PAYGO[1] (which they almost never do) and offset tax expenditures (tax incentives) with reduced direct spending and government debt increases then maybe, some day, some portion of your tax dollars may get indirectly spent on this.
But how do we really know? Do we know what other secondary effects will come from these tax incentives?
If electric cars catch on maybe the government will get more revenue somewhere else (there are North American manufacturing requirements to qualify after all) or have to spend less revenue on something else (surely burning oil must have some effect).
Or maybe the person getting the electric vehicle then uses it to make more money and pay more taxes than they would have before (unlikely but possible).
But, directly, they're getting back their own money. The real issue with the credit is that it disproportionately favors people who already make a lot of money (but taxes also disproportionately tax people who make more money so maybe that's fair).
> But, directly, they're getting back their own money.
It doesn't matter. Everyone else is now paying for all the federal government services they consume. Other people are paying for that. It's literally that simple.
Congress doesn't retroactively raise tax rates to make up the difference. If the government budget ends up in a deficit, which obviously it does, not just because of this but for many reasons, that is financed via debt. This isn't passed to the population as higher taxes, but as inflation, which affects everyone equally, including whoever got the tax credits in the first place.
First of all, you're wrong about how debt is financed. It's not via inflation, it's by taxes. Interest payments accounted for 13% of the federal budget last year. That's enormous. (Yes inflation reduces the value of debt over time, but debt carries interest which generally outweighs expected inflation.)
Second, Congress absolutely adjusts tax rates as well. Not precisely one-to-one to match spending each year, but over the long term it's all got to add up. Every dollar the government spends today is paid with people's taxes either today or their taxes tomorrow.
Third, the person who received the tax credits isn't being affected "equally". If 1% of people get the credit, but 100% of people pay for it, then the people who receive the credit end up hugely ahead in the end, while the other 99% lose out. So yes, for the 1% of people getting an electric vehicle tax credit, it is almost entirely paid for by the other 99% of people.
Goverment debt is reduced by increased taxes and/or reduction in services just as much as it is by "inflation". Further, inflation doesn't affect the person who got a $7,500 individual tax reduction as much as someone who didn't.
However instead of taking the credit yourself you can transfer it to the dealer at time of purchase to use toward the purchase. You can transfer the full $7500 credit regardless of how much tax you eventually end up owing for the year.
So, should I wish to purchase a vehicle this tax year, I tell my HR to adjust my income withholding such that I owe 7,500$ come tax time and then reap the rewards?
Withholding isn't relevant here. Non refundable means it can't cause the government to net pay you money: that is to say, it can't make your refund larger than your withholding.
You can still get a refund with this tax credit, but it has to be a refund of taxes you paid through things like your payroll tax.
Non-refundable means that if the rebate drives your owed taxes below zero you don't get the negative tax debt back.
If you don't earn much money most of your paid taxes go to SS and medicare rather than income tax, so the rebate may not do anything for you. But if you make at least median income you should be able to fully use this rebate.
If you're retired and buy one of these trucks you'd be wise to realize $100k in investment gains in that year in order to fully exploit the tax credit.
Let's make up an example. Let's say you earn $75,000/year and the tax rate is 10%. So you owe $7,500 in taxes. That is your tax liability. It doesn't matter if you have your employer deducting $144 from your weekly paycheck or $0 from your weekly paycheck.
Even finer print: the $7,500 federal incentive is a tax rebate. If you don't have a $7,500 tax liability, you won't get the full amount. (this also applies if you transfer the credit to the dealer at point of sale). I mean, money is fungible and all, but your particular tax dollars aren't going to people who buy EVs, they are just paying less in taxes.
It's ~28k without them, particularly when considering recent inflation it's an attractive price... inflation corrected it's in the vague ballpark of other small IC trucks when they were still available.
E.g. a early 2000's Nissan frontier base model was $23k in today's money. It was a somewhat better speced (e.g. more hauling capacity) and much better range, but this new car likely has significantly lower operating costs that would easily justify a 5k uplift.
So I think it ought to be perfectly viable without the subsidy, especially so long as the absurd CAFE standards continue to exist giving EV's a monopoly on this truck size.
My favorite thing to come out of CAFE regulations was the Aston Martin Cygnet. It was just a re-badged Toyota iQ whose sole purpose was to raise the average fuel economy within their fleet.
Later they made a one off version for Goodwood that has a V8 stuffed under the hood.
> My favorite thing to come out of CAFE regulations was the Aston Martin Cygnet. It was just a re-badged Toyota iQ whose sole purpose was to raise the average fuel economy within their fleet.
Maybe that's a good thing. It compelled Aston Martin to provide their customers with a fuel-efficient option.
Nobody looking for a fuel efficient car would look at Aston, and nobody looking at Aston would go for a fuel efficient car.
Which was borne by its sales: sold for nearly 3 times the price you'd have paid Toyota for an iQ, it sold all of 600 units in two years before being cancelled, Aston's second shortest production run. The shortest was the Virage which sold more than 1000 units in a year.
I have a small(*) twenty year old i4 pickup and I regularly get cash offers for it while out and about. There is a lot of demand for the small inexpensive and relatively fuel efficient utility vehicles that the government currently prohibits manufacturing.
(*Ironically, though small it has a considerably longer bed than many currently produced larger and less fuel efficient trucks... I'm mystified by trucks that can't even contain a bike without removing a wheel or hanging one over a gate. Looks like the bed on this EV is a bit short too, but a short bed on a small truck is more excusable than a short bed on a huge truck)
It's also who sedans and compact cars have largely ceased to exist. The vast majority of new vehicles are crossovers or _light trucks_, which aren't held to the same emission/efficiency standards.
Anybody know how it got to this point? It can't be because of regulatory capture, right? I don't think small cars are getting made for the US because of SUV mania and something like a 67 MPG requirement for the Honda Fit based on it's build.
> I don't think small cars are getting made for the US because of SUV mania and something like a 67 MPG requirement for the Honda Fit based on it's build.
The famous 67MPG requirement was for a hypothetical 2026 model year car
But Honda discontinued the Fit in the United States in 2020, long before the hypothetical 2026 target.
The reason is consumer demand. People weren't buying them. There are thousands of lightly used Honda Fits on the used market for reasonable prices, but they're not moving.
Yes, the regulations are flawed, but that doesn't change the lack of consumer demand.
> The reason is consumer demand. People weren't buying them.
I think this over-simplifies things. Strict milage standards force a set of compromises on ICE car design that make them both shittier and more expensive[1]. Why would anyone buy such a product when they can get an SUV instead?
[1] Some examples: turbochargers, CVTs, start/stop systems. All of these increase both the cost and complexity of building as well as repairing the car. And with higher complexity comes higher chances for something to fail as well so reliability suffers.
> Why would anyone buy such a product when they can get an SUV instead?
Isn't this just a circular way of admitting that people actually wanted SUVs?
This doesn't explain why the used car market is full of very cheap cars like the Honda Fit for much less than a new SUV.
> [1] Some examples: turbochargers,
Have to disagree. These are a great way to downsize the engine and maintain the same torque output. Yes it's more parts, but modern OEM turbochargers are very reliable. If you can reduce the number of cylinders from 6 to 4 or 3, that's a net win in moving parts, consumables, and repair costs.
I disagree that turbochargers are shittier. For most people, hell even for a large subset of people that only want to race their cars on a track, turbochargers provide huge benefits. Yes, they add complexity and cost; they also vastly improve fuel efficiency, create the best torque curve possible on an ICE vehicle, and substantially improve power output. Sometimes you actually need more complexity to build a better system. I think turbochargers are a marvel of modern engineering.
And while it's subjective and admittedly more enthusiasts prefer naturally aspirated to turbocharged, I personally prefer the character of a turbocharged engine. I'd rather hear turbo whistles than a whining V10.
If what you want is a reliable commuter, because knowing you can get yourself to work is more important than even fuel efficiency, then turbochargers are a clear net negative. I think most people view their car as a tool first and foremost, and don't have the luxury to view it as a toy.
Turbocharged cars have been reliable for a while now. There was a time when people said the same thing about fuel injection - because it is objectively more complicated than carbureted engines. But as time went on and they became more reliable and cheaper the only people that care about carburetors now are enthusiasts because they have so many drawbacks. It's the same thing with turbo engines today, except they're already reliable and better to drive (assuming you ever want to merge onto a highway). If you consider the higher RPM typical for NA vehicles they're arguably less reliable over time. If you include rising fuel costs turbocharged is arguably cheaper over the lifespan of the vehicle.
Buy whatever you want. But most people's perceptions of 'reliable' for cars is based entirely on rumors and hearsay and has nothing to do with data. Most awards for reliability are marketing gimmicks and aren't based on useful data.
What I know for sure is anybody talking about V10 engines is obviously utterly divorced from normal person reality, and I can't take any of their suggestions seriously.
Performance does not matter to the majority of car buyers. Reliability and capability are what matters. Whether you can count on the car doing what you need it to do. Even fuel economy is second to those. Anybody talking about the sound of turbochargers, performance and V10 engined (seriously, WTF) is totally out of touch.
“Reasonable prices” open to some debate. There’s such a premium to the Honda nameplate that the prices that “lightly used” ones go for make them a tough proposition over buying new. (Which of course, is no longer an option for the Fit.) From a look at prices in Canada, used 5-year-old 2020 model Fits are going for more than they did new.
The US is falling way behind in electric vehicles. If BYD could sell in the US, the US auto industry would be crushed.[1]
What went wrong is that 1) Tesla never made a low-end vehicle, despite announcements, and 2) all the other US manufacturers treated electric as a premium product, resulting in the overpowered electric Hummer 2 and F-150 pickups with high price tags. The only US electric vehicle with comparable prices in electric and gasoline versions is the Ford Transit.
BYD says that their strategy for now is to dominate in every country that does not have its own auto industry. Worry about the left-behind countries later.
BYD did it by 1) getting lithium-iron batteries to be cheaper, safer, and faster-charging, although heavier than lithium-ion, 2) integrating rear wheels, differential, axle, and motor into an "e-axle" unit that's the entire mechanical part of the power train, and 3) building really big auto plants in China.
Next step is to get solid state batteries into volume production, and build a new factory bigger than San Francisco.
I think one of the biggest problems in the United States is the misallocation of ambitious people. The highly educated and ambitious people see finance, government, tech, and corporate executive tracks, as the way to convert their energies into social status.
Even startups these days seem to be a case of too many chiefs, not enough Indians.
> (...) why would any highly educated ambitious person want to work for Tesla?
To that dimension I would add ethics as well. It's very hard to justify working for the likes of Tesla when being mindful of the attitude the company and company representatives have with regards to basic issues ranging from workers rights to totalitarianism.
Well the problem is US wants to be the world's managers. And all we cared about is writing messenger apps. Totally missed the boat on building things, like houses, boats, and most of all new weird things we don't even have a concept for.
Watching nearly the entire software-financial complex burn to the ground when the vaunted "moats" dry up is going to be a hell of a sight. All this AI hype is just going to end up commodifying the very thing that the entire industry is built on: management of processes.
Places that understand that physical production cannot be abstracted forever will prevail.
Agreed, and this is a somewhat recent phenomenon (see wtf happened in 1971)
For example, we have 100+ drone startups in the United States. But our overall drone production capacity (hammers in Civ) hasn't actually increased. We just have 100 companies buying grey market from Vietnam and Indonesia, many of which came from China originally.
The way the system should work is if you want to do a drone startup, you need to build a drone factory. That's what the money is for.
If the startup fails, maybe the market leader buys the factory for cheap. This is how the automobile industry was in the United States - a bunch of those companies went bust, but the factories were often kept online by the winners.
> Well the problem is US wants to be the world's managers.
I think the problem is more nuanced than that. The US was effectively "the world's managers", in the sense that their economic might, entrepreneur culture, and push for globalization resulted in a corporate structure where the ownership and executive levels were US whereas non-critical business domains reflected the local workforce, whether it was the US or not.
This setup worked great while the US dominated the world's economy and influenced their allies and trading partners to actively engage in globalization.
Now that Trump is pushing for isolationism, of course things change.
I would push on how well GDP measures "economic might".
If I were to tell you a country over five years grew its GDP 5% in 1900, that would mean houses and roads and factories and mines and a whole range of things were built.
In 2020, 5% real GDP growth could be an increase in the value of various services. In fact, you might not need to change the physical world at all to achieve that growth.
GDP made sense in 1900, back when it took so much labor to keep us all alive and well that we could think of any economic activity as a proxy for progress towards that goal--a goal we could all agree was good. Our concept of value was mostly aligned with our values, so more = better.
Nowadays we're more in conflict, partly just because we can afford to be without risking immediate starvation. Billions get spent on swaying an election this way, more billions get spent on swaying it that way. Dollars spent in both directions count as GDP even though each one has another dollar on the other side pushing in the opposite direction. And it's not just elections, everywhere we're building moats instead of solving problems. It's a very busy way to not go anywhere.
We need to move from scalars to vectors--progress towards some goal--otherwise we're just patting ourselves on the back for working hard to no effect.
I'm not entirely sure what your question is - are you asking how Google/Facebook are proxies for physical thing?
Google, at its core, provides a service that helps you do physical things more quickly. If I need to replace the cruise control buttons on my car, I could go to the library and source a manual, or I could just search Google.
Facebook marketplace increases the efficiency of trading physical goods.
The Facebook feed is probably most akin to cigarettes.
The problem is that things like houses and boats became political tokens and/or don't have the same profit scaling as software. Housing is mostly restricted by political opposition that made it very hard or even illegal to build much. Building ships is labor intensive which is expensive here, but AFAIK at least construction of navy ships has become a bargaining ship that gets moved around to support senators rather than being allocated to the most efficient place. In general it also seems like unions in the US are somehow more of a problem than in Europe or at least Germany where I grew up. They seem less powerful here but somehow less reasonable.
I think the bigger problem is we filter for conmen. You can become a billionaire for vaporware and are less likely to if you actually ship something.
There are plenty of smart people who are highly passionate about things other than money. The problem is a large portion aren't at top name universities and doing don't have the connections. Problem is, they spent all their time learning their craft and not how to market their ideas.
I disagree that it's just because those jobs pay well. Look at what people are investing in and how it works. We throw tons of money at obviously bad ideas, obvious cons, and anyone that took a semester at Stanford. There are plenty of Bitcoin billionaires! There's tons who have made riches off the VR hype wave before that.
I agree that we put too much focus on finance and the like but I think more importantly we have a system where you can get ultra wealthy for producing vaporware. It's much easier to build hype than build a product. You still get people who become millionaires & billionaires by shipping things, but we created a system where we reward conmen. Ultimately, the con is easier than the actual job.
There's a lot of that tech can do but let's be honest, our industry has capitalized on the boom and bust cycle and accelerated it. We're not the only ones, but we're a big player and it's easier to hold our own community accountable than get others to change.
They go where it's feasible to go. As long as regulation hamstrings industries, it'd be idiotic to build there. Ambitious people just want everyone else to get out of their way so they (I) can build stuff - and they'll go where there's less resistance.
Oh, there's a "tax credit" to make it easier? Sounds like more paperwork & friction. No thanks!
That's one reason Tech is such an attactor. Low barrier to entry.
The US automakers lost the plot a long time ago, and have just been sucking out money without innovation or improvement since.
When California and the EPA tried to legislate lower emissions 9 years into the future, the US automakers sued to block saying it was impossible. Japanese automakers were already selling vehicles that met those standards.
When they badly, badly screw up, they just get bailed out with public funds and then go on to pay execs tens of millions of dollars a year and fat bonuses. Guaranteed profits no matter what made them lazy and uncompetitive.
> When they badly, badly screw up, they just get bailed out with public funds
When this happens, I think it's only fair that the bailed-out company becomes publicly owned. If I'm forced to invest in a company with my tax dollars, then I damn well better be treated as an investor. Where are my shares? Where are my dividends?
When the USG bailed out banks via TARP during the 2008 financial crisis, it did so by buying shares in those companies. It later sold those shares for a $30.5 billion profit.
If GMC had been “publically owned” it would have been gutted for profits (kickbacks) by its bureaucracy and politicians and been long dead by at least a decade. Bureaucrats are not good at running companies and private companies should not be providing public services (prisons, toll roads). I don't know why Americans have become so unpragmatic and either all in on “government doing everything” or “private corps doing everything” when life is never ever that simple.
GM and Chrysler went bankrupt and were partially bailed out, the CEOs were replaced and the Government took a stake in the companies, which eventually paid off.
There also is the chicken tax which has been protecting US automakers in the pickup truck space which has lead to then leaning much more into that. Together with absurd CAFE rules that benefit huge cars and more beneficial tax write-off rules for vehicles over 3.5t regulation has lead to US automakers focusing on cars that are absurd by international standards.
I agree with the gist of that piece; focusing on specific engineering choices (important as they are) is missing the forest for a particularly interesting tree. Any American EV maker is heavily disadvantaged right now, no matter how clever they are.
BYD's allowed to sell in Europe. They're not crushing the market here. They're not substantially cheaper, or better for what they offer for the price compared to other manufacturers.
No way I'd trust them. When you crash them or they have a battery fault, the doors lock you inside before the battery catches fire. Many videos of this happening inside China with one recent event in the West.
Only cybertrucks I've heard about catching on fire where the ones purposely set on fire. While I'm sure it happens I doubt it's any higher than any other vehicle on the road
Fail-safe designs are more expensive because they require redundancies, fully manual linkages, or just non-centralized control.
The Cybertruck went with daisy chained PoE automotive Ethernet variant. The same cables delivering power to subcomponents handle data. Damage/problems in a single component can not only bring down the network but kill power to all the car's subsystems. It means less wiring in the Cybertruck (and lower production expense) at the cost of durability and fail-safety. Someone looked at TokenRing Ethernet and said "yes that is best".
I think it's a well intentioned safety feature that was never fully thought through. Locking the doors in a crash can prevent a passenger from being ejected from a vehicle. However, if there is no reliable way to unlock the door once the acceleration forces have subsided, you've created a death trap.
There's a mechanical latch release handle integrated into the doors, but they are very much not meant to be used during normal operation and are designed to be inconspicuous. This seems to cause at least some people to fail to operate them during a fast-paced emergency situation.
China has one of the least free trade regimes in the world, their currency controls alone amount to potentially more than Euro tariffs on cars and that’s just one part of their governmental stacking of the deck for their manufacturers.
I think it’s easy to look at the outputs of their industries and compare them extremely favorably to the outputs elsewhere, especially in EV.
But once you start comparing tariff adjusted pricing it gets much trickier much faster.
BYD could slash european prices by quite a bit. They price them competitively to take advantage of the margin. The increase in price compared to their domestic MSRP is pretty wild, 2x in some cases. In a race to the bottom, they will win.
You're right, but comparing Switzerland to America... You need a car to live in 90% of the USA. That said, talking only about specs or prices is pretty reductionist. If anyone on this forum could forecast car sales based on pre-delivery marketing, you know, become a billionaire investor.
What went wrong is that the federal government didn't build or legislate a national charging infrastructure to match the scale of the interstate highway system.
They could have strong-armed the states into it with a combination of funding the construction and the way they mandated the 21 drinking age: by threatening to withhold highway funds.
Isn't this lack of forward thinking somewhat the general problem now?
From an EU perspective the world as it has existed in the living memory is a world shaped by decisive US-actions. The way EVs have been approached were anything but that. Arguably neither did Germany, because of the way their politicians are entangled with the car manufacturers.
> They could have strong-armed the states into it with a combination of funding the construction and the way they mandated the 21 drinking age: by threatening to withhold highway funds.
Yea let's give the federal government more power. That's going so well right now.
> Yea let's give the federal government more power. That's going so well right now.
Investing on a nation-wide infrastructure grid that fundamentally changes the nation's energy independence is hardly a reason to mindlessly parrot state rights cliches.
In a way, the current administration perfectly demonstrates the value of a strong federal government: a kakistocratic, kleptocratic regime wouldn't dismantle the "administrative state" if it weren't an impediment to their criminality, incompetence, and rapacity.
NATIONAL-scale projects are exactly what the federal government should do. I specifically referred to the Eisenhower interstate-highway system. Those are the kind of grand undertakings that transformed our country, and which the current administration can't even conceive... let alone articulate or propose.
I adored my Spark EV til it sadly died (fairly scarily, on a highway access road) one day. Chevy was never able to repair it and ultimately gave me a nice payout after paying for a rental for me for nearly a year.
But if you sold the Spark EV for 20k today with like 120mi of range, it would be perfect and would satisfy all my needs 99% of the time. Even mine (13k all in) was great here in LA with ~60mi of range. I loved how small and easy to park it was without feeling cramped to me at all. If it had CarPlay I'd've said it was the perfect car haha.
It's a shame they haven't rebooted it yet as a pure EV. It's right there in the name!
>2) all the other US manufacturers treated electric as a premium product, resulting in the overpowered electric Hummer 2 and F-150 pickups with high price tags
They had to in order to build the manufacturing capacity without literally bankrupting themselves. As GM has shown, once they had the expertise and manufacturing capabilities, they could quickly move downmarket. By all accounts GM's entry into the space has been a raging success, moving downmarket with the Equinox being available for as low as $27,500.
They obviously aren't to Tesla level sales numbers yet, but they're growing rapidly and I would not count them out of the fight.
That is not that much in terms of subsidy for a critical industry. I tried finding the awards for Tesla but the articles lump in government contracts and report the figure to be in tens of billions. I am sure they have received a comparable amount of funding. BYD has just been able to make better use of it I suppose.
> 2) all the other US manufacturers treated electric as a premium product
This is because the LITERALLY CAN'T make money of a non premium product.
And for Tesla is just because Musk is stupid and went ALL-IN on self driving. They literally believe that the market will drop by 80% because of self driving. That's why the only build robotaxi and no model 2. Against the advice of basically everybody in Tesla leadership.
You're probably right about BYD, most people only see price and whether it's reputation is at least "ok". I personally will never buy that big of a purchase from a Chinese company until CCP is no longer in charge.
> 3) integrating rear wheels, differential, axle, and motor into an "e-axle" unit that's the entire mechanical part of the power train
Obviously an electric vehicle is so much simpler than one with a gasoline engine. We have seen it already with lawn mowers who shrank from huge tractors to nimble robots.
An in particular when you don't start from the Autobahn-eater type of cars.
Do you own a BYD? It’s not that great. Build quality is subpar. Problem with investing in China is that once tech transfer ends, there’s no promise that these companies are capable of continued innovations. It’s basically an ecosystem dependent on outside innovations that they can “transfer” and tweak. That’s the whole “communist” economy in nutshell.
You missed a big elephant in the room 4) China did a significant subsidies for BYD factories. If USA did similar % wise thing to Tesla then we would’ve have $20k teslas driving.
China subsidized EVs in the same way that America did (tax credits), and less aggressively so. Unless you mean incentives from Shenzhen and getting taxi companies to early adopt? They also added incentives in getting a car at all in cities like Beijing (EVs started out in a different lottery allocation for plates)?
It's more like BYD winning the race in China's auto industry. China has over a hundred automakers, most making low-end cars.[1] Some are state-owned, some are province-owned, some are privately owned. BYD is privately owned and doing well.
No. Five years ago BYD introduced their "blade battery", which is a lithium iron phosphate battery built up of plate-like "blades" in rectangular casings.[1] Wh/L is about the same as lithium ion, Wh/Kg is not as good, and Wh/$ is better. It will survive the "nail test" and does not not go into thermal runaway.
Today, most of BYD's products use this technology. It's been improved to handle higher charging rates. Seems to work fine. Lithium-ion has better Wh/Kg, and it's still used in some high-end cars, mostly Teslas. BYD's approach has captured the low and medium priced markets.
BYD has announced that they plan first shipments of cars with solid state batteries (higher Wh/Kg) in 2027. Price will be high at first, and they will first appear in BYD's high-end cars. Like these.[3] BYD has the Yangwang U8, a big off-road SUV comparable to the Rivian, and the Yangwang U9, a "hypercar". Just to show that they can make them, probably.
I don't really see how any car company can "fall behind" in EV.
Fundamentally, IMO, EVs are such a simple concept mechanically that any company capable of building a conventional ICE vehicle can build an EV.
It's glib to say that - obviously there's a lot of unsaid complexity (battery back cooling, fitting into the frame, and so on), but the actual drivetrain component is just so simple. That EVs are still expensive is to me a sign that production hasn't ramped up yet. So long as production is limited EVs will remain a luxury product - but I can't imagine that's going to continue for all that much longer with an increasing backlog of used EVs on the market and decreasing battery prices.
Even if there were no improvements to be had in the vehicle itself, improvements in manufacturing processes determine how expensive the product is and thus how competitively priced the vehicle can be. Falling behind on price means falling behind on market share which means falling behind on efficiencies of scale which often means going out of business or at best becoming a niche producer.
Honda and Toyota weren't able to outcompete US manufacturers in the 1980s by offering higher performance vehicles but by delivering similar quality products at lower prices by making use of superior production techniques like Lean and JIT inventory management.
Are you serious? EVs have been the biggest disruption in the auto industry. It has created major corporations who made the attempts of traditional manufacturers seem obsolete.
VW Group and Stellantis totally failed to compete with Chinese manufacturers and were driven out of the Chinese EV market almost entirely. Competition is extremely fierce.
>That EVs are still expensive
Look up what they cost in China.
>So long as production is limited EVs will remain a luxury product
Around 50% of new sales in China. Not "luxury" in any meaningful way.
The issue is that EVs do not differentiate themselves by power train. They differentiate themselves by battery and software.
I LOVE it! THIS is the kind of truck I'd be looking at to replace my 1998 Ford Ranger.
Here is what could be potential deal-breakers:
- Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.
- Lack of good charge management and battery conditioning. Either that, or a cheap and easy to replace battery pack. I'd really like both!
- Comparable hauling and towing capacity to the 1998 Ford Ranger. Those numbers aren't exactly impressive, but I do use the truck as a truck, and I occasionally need the hauling capacity (weight).
- Bucket seats. I need a bench seat so I can take my wife and dog. Think weekend glamping trips. Picture 8 shows a bucket seat. It doesn't look like that would work.
If anyone from Slate is reading this, this is how I'm looking at this truck. FYI, I'll be comparing this to the Ford Maverick.
> - Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.
Noooooooooo! No apps, please! Finally a car not tethered to and dependent on your phone, and we already have our first request to app-ify it!
EDIT: Ughhh, according to the video that another user posted, it looks like there's an app, and yes, "updates" go through it :(
> - Lack of good charge management and battery conditioning. Either that, or a cheap and easy to replace battery pack. I'd really like both!
Yes to a simple battery system!
> - Comparable hauling and towing capacity to the 1998 Ford Ranger. Those numbers aren't exactly impressive, but I do use the truck as a truck, and I occasionally need the hauling capacity (weight).
Yes!
> - Bucket seats. I need a bench seat so I can take my wife and dog. Think weekend glamping trips. Picture 8 shows a bucket seat. It doesn't look like that would work.
Yes, definitely. It being a 2 seater is kind of a deal breaker for families. You really want a bench seat to at least stick a small child between the driver and passenger. Back in the day, we'd stuff 3 kids between two adults, but these days the Safety People would have a heart attack just thinking about that.
The article mentions an SUV upgrade kit that will bolt onto the back of the truck. Ugh, OK I guess. Sad that that's the way it will probably have to go.
> Yes, definitely. It being a 2 seater is kind of a deal breaker for families.
What you need is not a pickup truck. Catering to families means expensive bells and whistles, like entertainment systems, etc.
> Back in the day, we'd stuff 3 kids between two adults, but these days the Safety People would have a heart attack just thinking about that.
Rightfully so. Back in the day we did so many things we shouldn't have, and survivorship bias makes us default to thinking it was ok. As kids, we used to go barrelling down dirt roads in the back of pickups or played in the backs of station wagons. There's a reason automobile deaths have gone down.
> Catering to families means expensive bells and whistles, like entertainment systems, etc.
It absolutely does NOT mean those things.
Cars didn't have entertainment systems for nearly a century and families did just fine.
<Get off my lawn>
My entertainment system was the window. Observe the world, not just whatever AI-generated garbage some algorithm pushes to a small screen 8-10 inches away from your eyes.
And aside from a window, you know what's better than a car infotainment system?
A physical holder for a personal pad device.
The amount of not-invented-here, duplicate functionality that car companies execute poorly, when buyers already have devices that do that well, is ridiculous.
The biggest benefit of aligning manufacturing costs for profit should be jettisoning the "post-sale" revenue streams that drive complicated built-in tech for current cars.
And also, you-know, 100% A+ on getting back to "customize your own car, because it's cheap and supported"!
Owners being afraid of doing what they want with their devices/vehicles has to stop.
> The amount of not-invented-here, duplicate functionality that car companies execute poorly, when buyers already have devices that do that well, is ridiculous.
Like when GM invented their own computer to put into their cars instead of just buying one off the shelf decades ago
Yes! By far the biggest feature here is "no infotainment" which leads directly to "hard controls for HVAC," that alone is a killer feature! They should double down on that concept and make the truck work perfectly with no apps at all and no OtA updates too.
OTA updates on my truck have vastly improved suspension response and cruise-control/ lane-assist features. My wife's car has had OTA updates that improve her cars charging curve, and have implemented recalls for stuff like brake light response when regen braking.
Sure one could say these things should have worked perfectly from the factory, but that's not realistic: not with my cars, not with your cars, and not with this new brand either.
The only alternative I see here is the old fashioned way of having to bring it to a dealership. I would rather have an entire foot of ingrown toenails over dealing with dealership service centers of any brand.
Patches and OTA updates just scream "We know ahead of time our product is defective." Arguably OK for software (but I'd argue not), but not even remotely OK for cars.
>"We know ahead of time our product is defective."
All products are defective. Full stop.
Cars are necessarily complex and have a lot of software to get the safety, comfortable, and reliability we expect today.
Most vehicles get some sort of recall; usually minor. I just checked the NHTSA recall website and every car I could think of owned by people I know (~30 vehicles) had some had some recall.
Cars should have an easy way to update. I’m generally against always connected cars (which are the norm today), but there must be some way to patch them.
I don’t like the idea of cars having cellular modems in them (my mind goes to nefarious implications), but having a way to securely update it without having to bring to a mechanic would be nice.
Nothing can be made to work over an infinite temperature range, or for an infinite period of time, but a product that can meet its specifications, for its design life, is in no way defective. That happens all the time, for example with electronics:
Every component in your computer or phone, down to the smallest resistor and capacitor, has multiple pages of documentation characterizing it's performance, and is individually tested to ensure it meets the stated capabilities. Each trace on the circuit board is tested to make sure it is complete and not shorted to any other trace, and once assembled every component is verified to be correctly installed. This means designs can be proven to always operate within the specifications of every component.
This isn't some fancy military-spec process; it's standard operating procedure for petty much every electronics component or assemblies manufacturer. At the volume manufacturing equipment handles, it's much cheaper and easier to automate qualifying and testing everything, at every step, than dealing with the ramifications of manufacturing a bad batch.
There are occasional bad parts that do get into the mix, but it's usually a pretty big scandal. From botched industrial espionage leading to a plague of defective electrolytic capacitors in the early 2000's to management pressure at Samsung leading to the release of a defective battery design on Note7 phones, there are occasionally products that should be recalled for defective hardware, but with a design consisting of hundreds to thousands of parts, on almost every phone or laptop ever produced, every component has lasted past the useful life of the product and, except for ware items like batteries and displays, would continue working past the useful life of the human using it.
If kept simple, as is doable with an electric drive train, and especially if devoid of non-embedded software (a field which seems to have no interest in error-free designs: https://xkcd.com/2030/) a recall-free and provably capable vehicle is completely doable.
I’m not exactly sure what point you are trying to make. The specs to which you refer are also specs which the component are _rated_ at. But that’s still only a (very high) % of components. Issues do arise with individual components. Unless it is wide spread, it is not a scandal. I have worked in the industry as well as do it as a hobby. You have a very rose colored view of it.
Lemon phones make it into the hands of consumers. I had one myself a few years ago where it overheated and shut down. One offs don’t make the news because you bring it in and it’s swapped out.
What is the need for OTA updates for an EV, once you remove the autopilot and touch screen? Genuinely interested, I would guess there is none, right?
Yes, and no.
I've only started following this recently, but a lot of OTA updates aren't just bug fixes, they're additional features.
My wife's car recently got a free OTA update which upgraded her radio to get HD stations. A previous update allowed her car to start recognizing more types of School Zone and Night Speed signs.
I've read that every year (February, I think) Tesla pushes out a big update that adds features. However, the last two Tesla pushes included a bunch of features that came standard with my wife's (much cheaper) car years ago.
You could certainly argue that her car should have come with HD Radio enabled from the start, and ditto for the Tesla features. But to suppose that all OTA car updates are nothing more than more invasive tracking and bug fixes is not strictly correct.
HD Radio tuning is built into the FM tuner, but was disabled in software. It's patents are still in effect, until 2030, so your wife's car manufacturer likely recently obtained a patent license to tune into HD Radio stations. Why they didn't negotiate a license from the get go may be a mystery, but there's no development reason it wasn't capable on day one.
Tesla, on the other hand, has promised capabilities that haven't been developed yet, something they wouldn't be able to do without OTA updates, which is a sensible reason to feel animosity toward their reliance on them.
I don't personally disagree with you, but today it pretty much does.
Anyways, my point is that this is designed as a utilitarian, cheap truck that covers the use case that most pickup trucks are actually utilitarian for, like local farm or light duty construction work. It's got a short range, no entertainment for long drives, etc. The article doesn't even say if it has AC (Slate's site seems to have images that allude to it having it).
The OP wants something for families, which exists and costs more because most families want more. They want good, cheap, and available when you can only have two. Even with gas/diesel powered trucks, there's a huge difference between the utilitarian ones construction workers and farmers buy and beat up and the expensive "luxury" quad-cabs that families now buy because minivans are too uncool.
I want something much more utilitarian than what is being pitched to today's families. If you want a Quad Cab, Infotainment systems, and yadda, yadda, yadda - the market already has options. Lots of them.
If you want a cheap, light duty truck similar to what a Chevy S10 or a Ford Ranger used to be, then you're pretty much SOL.
> My entertainment system was the window. Observe the world...
The world is pretty freaking boring when it's just pavement and the 5,000th time you've passed the same strip mall, gas station, and McDonald's. The same dirty snowbanks on either side of the same gray asphalt under the interminably gray winter sky.
Maybe you lived in a place of wonderful natural beauty, or a vibrant urban street culture. A lot of people don't.
I concede that the way much of the US looks from car windows might be bad for people's mental health, but I doubt any of the badness is prevented by
playing music or listening to podcasts in the car.
The world is pretty freaking boring when it's just pavement and the 5,000th time you've passed the same strip mall, gas station, and McDonald's. The same dirty snowbanks on either side of the same gray asphalt under the interminably gray winter sky.
And yet, somehow the children survived and thrived.
They learned to make up games, to entertain themselves, and to -- perish the thought -- talk to other human beings in their own family! /shudder/
I hate to tell you, but a lot of them didn't thrive. Some of them didn't even survive. Some of them didn't have families that particularly want to talk to them. Or when they were spoken to, it wasn't exactly healthy.
Just because maybe you had a great childhood, doesn't mean everybody did.
I hate to tell you, but a lot of them didn't thrive. Some of them didn't even survive.
Citation needed.
Maybe we shouldn't pretend that a small number of exceptions are the norm. Nobody is saying that every child had a completely happy childhood. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with not being entertained 100% of the time. Being bored is a good thing.
Just because maybe you had a great childhood, doesn't mean everybody did. Let's not look at the past through rose-tinted glasses.
Boredom is so essential to human mental health, that after we automated it away with the industrial revolution, we had to reinvent it (we call it "meditation" now) to stay sane.
Being alone with your thoughts for a few minutes is not in the same class as being unable to afford food or medicine. Get out, troll, this isn't Reddit.
I respect the “old person yelling at clouds” disclaimer lmao.
Honestly, I got bummed when I found out this was an electric vehicle, I wish there wasn’t a chance for my vehicle to get bricked through an over-the-air update, and I personally would like to have a basic stereo with an aux input just so I can listen to FM stations or Spotify while I haul a bunch of DIY materials around without having to install my own speakers.
My friend keeps telling me to get a truck for my next vehicle, and while this truck doesn’t make the cut for me, hopefully future trucks made either by Slate Auto or other manufacturers inspired by them will add juuuust the right amount of creature comforts to win me over.
> Yes, definitely. It being a 2 seater is kind of a deal breaker for families
I believe I saw there are plans for some sort of SUV conversion.
> Catering to families means expensive bells and whistles, like entertainment systems, etc.
IF it could just get a bluetooth signal from an iDevice or some Android thing, that would probably suffice for a basic option. If the owner needs more than than, let them install (or have installed) some sort of third-party infotainment head of some sort.
Back in the old days, cars sometimes had a single speaker and that was plenty sufficient for listening to music.
I'd be worried that once an app got a foothold into the product, the company would be unable to resist the urge to spread the app's tentacles across the entire vehicle, adding connectivity and telemetry and DRM, integrating it into the other car's systems, adding remote-this and wireless-that, and then inevitably the product would end up just like the turd cars we have today.
I have a iron filter that works via app. All configs can be done with button presses on the valve but in a much more tedious process/workflow.
It connects via bluetooth and not WiFi. If the company goes belly up, I'd just need the APK and an android phone to continue using the app to configure the valve and see/download water usage data.
Fast forward 20 years when I can't install the APK on android v79, I'd need an older phone to run the APK.. but that seems to be pulling hairs.
Apps would be great, it's how you handle the backend to it that's the gotcha.
I also have a water softener with an app that no longer works that had it's backend shut down. It can still be configured via the valve head button presses, but none of the "smart" usage data is available. As an example of good design, this is a perfect dichotomy of one company doing it well and one company doing it un-well[sic].
Not only the backend, but what happens 40 years in the future, when our phones don't run the app anymore, or we're all on phones that are totally unlike the phones of today, or if we don't even have phones or apps? I would expect the car to still work after that long, and making it dependent on a technology that is specific to a particular decade risks premature obsolescence.
I'll be ecstatic if my iron filter lasts 40 years.
I saw in another post that a person said there's a difference between "device dependent" and "device augmented" that really resonated with me.
There's diminishing returns on everything, and just throwing your hands up on any subject as bad/good might be a disservice.
If I live through an era where phones are no longer a thing and APKs are a thing of the past.. then I either...
A. Don't use the iron filter like that anymore. (manual programing now)
B. Get a new iron filter. (ewwwww)
C. Keep a legacy-device for the purposes of programming the iron filter. (doesn't need any internet connection or subscriptions)
> ...what happens 40 years in the future, when our phones don't run the app anymore...
40 years? How about, like, 3 to 5 years? Remember when Apple decided to kill all 32-bit iOS apps for new hardware? I have an old iPod and iPhone 4S with "landlocked" software I enjoy using but can't anymore because Apple.
Phone manufacturers have shown they don't give a damn about allowing old software to function. Physical devices tied to software is a terrible idea.
Relying on a mobile app is relying mobile operating system compatibility over the years and is just asking for combinatorial methods of obsolescence via OS/app/library breaking changes, plus if your old phone breaks, etc. Open sourced mobile app with open sourced back end might be somewhat acceptable but otherwise it's just asking to be bricked as soon as one of the companies involved goes under as we have seen time and again just in past couple of years.
Not an app, but an API. And an app on top of that, if desired.
Also there are evergreen interfaces, so to say. An RS232 / RS485 connector that serves 115kbps 8N1 serial interface and runs a VT220-based TUI should still be serviceable 40 years from now (VT220 was released 42 years ago). A now-modern web-based GUI also has a great chance to be serviceable 40 years from now.
100% agree. I would be fine if they had an estimated time-to-fully-charged displayed on the screen. I don’t need to know the status of my vehicle, personally. I would imagine a third party system could be implemented to achieve most of what one would need.
Nice idea in theory. In practice, apps imply ongoing OTA connectivity, which means the truck will be updated to show ads or at the very least collect and sell all my driving information to any dirtbag that can rub two nickels together. Connected devices can alter the deal so they will, after all I've lost any leverage against them after I purchased the vehicle.
I think legally they would need to require using an app for their back view camera. All new cars in the United States after 2018 need one and I don't see how it would work without using the phone/tablet as a display.
The regulation did exactly what it was designed to do: take the base-model Nissan Versa off the market and prevent any low-cost vehicles from competing in the US market. (Remember when brand-new cars were available for under $10,000?
Inflation adjusted, that was still less than $15,000)
Sure, ultrasonic sensors have a better outcome than backup cameras in a cost-benefit analysis (https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/nhtsa-2006-25579...) and allow you to simultaneously look out the windows and get feedback from the sensor, but allowing them would have allowed for the sale of cars too cheap to have infotainment systems, and that was not the goal of the regulators.
I don’t have a problem with the regulation. Slate is trying to build a safe, affordable, electric vehicle. Having one display for all information seems like a good way to save cost.
You need an app. You could make steering to the left only available in a 50 USD per month subscription but steering right is free or something like it.
I wish devices could have web servers and web-based UI rather than thick "apps" that end up rotting when device manufacturers arbitrarily decide that old software won't work anymore (cough, cough-- Apple-- cough, cough).
I know we can't because "security", no end-to-end over the Internet anymore, etc. >sigh<
It seems like we've engineered the networking and software ecosystem to promote disposable "smart" devices. It's almost like somebody profits from it. Hmm...
Why, we of course could if we cared. Let the car offer a wifi access point. WPA3 is secure enough, but you can of course have an extra layer of TLS inside it.
For the extra paranoid, a car could have a USB socket that pretends to be a wired network interface, offering DHCP.
Run a web server for car diagnostics and maintenance when connected to this interface. Do it from the comfort of your laptop, or anywhere anytime using your phone. Zero chance of remote exploits, if you set the things correctly on the car side. An ESP32-based system with $5 BOM would suffice to provide this.
Not with off the shelf protocols. Yes WPA3 is plenty secure, but any AP advertising the same SSID with the same key would allow the device to connect. So how do you know that you're connected to your car, and not to the black hat AP next to it?
From there, you can have as much TLS as you want, but that still won't give you server identity unless the server certificate is signed by someone you already trust. So a generic web browser would be screwed, because you either add SlateTruckCertificateAuthority to the globally trusted list, and then you still have to deal with revocations and certificate expiry, or you use some other CA that is willing to delegate. There's no good support for self-signed certificates or pinned certificates, and even if there were, the initial connection would be tough.
Unfortunately this really isn't a well-solved problem. Bluetooth can get you part of the way there, but it only offers really good security in theory (in practice it is constantly having issues) and it is intrinsically limited.
First of all, the SSID and password should be unique. Then, you can have a QR code printed in the owner's manual, and inside the glove compartment, or something. There's a standard for QR codes for connecting to wifi, so you don't have to type in the long and cryptic password.
But I don't see much incentive to produce a fake wifi AP for me to connect to with my car diagnostics. I'm not going to punch my bank account and password into it anyway. If I'm misled to alter the battery charging settings for someone else's car, or for a pretend mockup of the car controller, I don't see what the perpetrator could gain from it.
Then there must be a button on the car dashboard, or near, which I should press to activate the AC (it does not need to be up all the time), and press again to switch it off. This can serve as an easy way to check if there's doubt. The interface may have a function like headlights on / off as a simple way to check that the connection works.
A locally-hosted web interface would likely be easier to reach a given level of security than a centrally hosted interface, but obtaining and renewing SSL/TLS certificates is a requirement for HTTPS interfaces, and are designed around centralized and frequently updated centrally hosted systems, so it's only really doable with a different protocol.
It would still be easy to have a locally-hosted interface, over any other protocol, with an open-source client that could easily be ported to any future hardware and operating system.
Battery balancing and conditioning does not need to be fancy, and does not need a fancy screen; a couple of LEDs should suffice.
But I'd like my batteries charged competently, recharged efficiently while braking, worn uniformly, and kept at reasonable temperature. It's not hard to do completely automatically and invisibly; a quality electric bike would have it.
EV battery engineer here. It's not hard. Battery management systems are often over engineered but the state of the art is fairly straightforward and will allow battery packs of sufficient size last 200k miles or more easily.
I dunno the PhD electrochemist that I know who spent a long time teasing out the conditions and requirements for megapack operation didn't think it was trivial. That's also the reason Tesla pays Jeff Dahn so much money. A million miles/20k cycles is the goal.
The electrochemical interface where lithium intercolates into the anode and cathode of the battery experiences microscopic electric field variations that, depending on the local surface geometry, lead to side reactions and battery degradation. The hardware that converts DC to DC and DC to AC must be designed to mitigate the voltage ripple and harmonics that exacerbate the localized electric field extremes that prematurely degrade electrode interfaces and battery electrolytes. State of the art BMS and rectifier components are much more difficult to build than you might think.
Correct me if I'm wrong but your comments do not suggest that the end result of this engineering cannot be very simple, elegant, and hopefully even inexpensive if built at scale. Instead, they suggest that the team who builds it needs to know what the heck they're doing.
But you realize this will make cold-weather range suck and on-the-road charging suck, right?
Preheating the battery and cabin on "shore power" is something EV buyers just expect at this point because that can consume 2-3kWh of energy (equivalent to 6-10 miles or 10-16 km). That's almost 10% of Slate's range (see below).
Preheating the battery about 10-15 minutes before you arrive at a supercharger is another expected feature. It can increase charge acceptance rate by over 50% (reduce charge time by 1/3).
The 150 mile range is extremely optimistic given the size of the battery and shape of the truck. With just 5% top and bottom buffers, you'd need to achieve over 3.1 miles/kWh... which is the consumption expected of a small aerodynamic sedan. I would bet real money that highway range (at 75 mph) for the small battery is less than 120 miles from 100% to 0.
Highway speeds are worst case scenario so maybe you're right but I doubt it.
Your charge rate acceptance number is surprising to me, I've never seen anything like this in my years of experience designing EV batteries. Preconditioning helps extreme fast charging but isn't necessary for 1-2 C charges at all unless it's very cold out.
There's some caveats to this depending on the exact chemistry but if anything the newer semi solid state NMC cells are even less dependent on this and can charge down to -20C.
> - Bucket seats. I need a bench seat so I can take my wife and dog. Think weekend glamping trips. Picture 8 shows a bucket seat. It doesn't look like that would work.
Take her car on those trips then. You wouldn't complain you can't take a Miata camping, why would you complain you can't take a 2-seat pickup? camping? The product isn't trying to do everything. It's trying to be the minimum viable truck and be good at it. And just like the purpose built roadster you give up unrelated stuff, like family hauling.
> You wouldn't complain you can't take a Miata camping, why would you complain you can't take a 2-seat pickup? camping?
Because 2-seat pickups used to function this way. It's okay to pine for functionality that has been lost, particularly when a new product like this comes along and gets your hopes up.
>Noooooooooo! No apps, please! Finally a car not tethered to and dependent on your phone, and we already have our first request to app-ify it!
What car is tied to your phone? A mustang mach-e, for instance, does not require your phone at all. It has a FOB for opening the doors and starting it, you can program the charging times from the in-car screen.
The app is optional, exactly as it should be. This car DESPERATELY is going to need an app when it comes to charging whether you know it or not. With no in-car screen you'll have absolutely no way to control charging which WILL come back to bite you.
>Yes to a simple battery system!
"simple" in this case will add cost. Nearly every EV has the battery as a part of the structural frame of the vehicle for a reason (there are some niche exceptions in China). Nothing is impossible, but I don't see them making the battery easily swappable, while also being structurally sound, and keeping the low price point.
In addition to the sibling comment, you want to be able to check if the vehicle is charging and everything is fine remotely. EVs randomly stopping charging for various reasons is not rare at all. You want to get a notification.
You want to know when the vehicle finishes charging so you can vacate the public charger.
You want to be able to reduce the current when the charging is tripping breakers wherever you are.
Again, why do you consider those things as better done via a smartphone and an app, versus using the already built-in screen (the one behind the wheel)?
I absolutely agree with you on the NO APP thing. I too just want air conditioning knobs and that's it. A truck from 1980 that is an EV that can haul lumber to build a house.
I think you're assuming a mobile app would mean that the car is dependent on your phone. Just because an app can be connected to your car doesn't mean the app controls your car.
Bench seats are almost certainly not coming back in modern low cost vehicles due to side impact safety regulations. They aren't _illegal_ but its extremely difficult to meet those standards with a bench configuration and ironically probably why a budget pickup is less likely to have them. Cutting those corners by not having a bench at all is an easy way to save money in the design.
The hauling and towing is another one. Unfortunately batteries are much heavier than a combustion engine and take away from the total capacity of the vehicle. It's curb weight is 500lbs more than the 1998 Ford Ranger. Same thing, budget vehicle means budget suspension, so its weight lowers the capacity instead of increasing the cost of the suspension.
The problem with bench seating is not side impact but accidental steering wheel input during hard cornering. In the typical 10 and 2 hand position having your butt move makes your shoulders move, the shoulders make the hands move, and now you’re understeering. Understeering on a mountain road likely means death, and on other roads a ditch or hitting a phone pole.
Steering position has been taught as 9 and 3 for a long time now… but still fair point. You can add a bit of alcantara to the seat to help you stay in place though. My RDX has it for the sporty-ish trim and it helps.
I had no idea bench seats had such an impact to side impact safety regulations. Thanks for that insight!
It also makes sense that the total capacity of the vehicle would diminish, but at the same time, and engine isn't weightless (though neither is an electric motor). If I had 1,500 pounds capacity, then I should be good to go.
1. Cars that offered manual options needed a center console. Japanese imports would always have a manual version, even if that version wasn't in the US. Same with European.
The only one alternative is a column manual shifter which is horrible to use.
You couldn't use a forward floor shifter unless you want to shift between the legs of the person in the middle.
There are dash mounted shifters but would probably hit the middle person's knees. Not sure since these are rare and usually European (fiat multipla) /Japanese
2. At a point a US safety requirement was all front passengers needed either an airbag or a automatic shoulder seatbelt, basically it ran along the door with a motor when the door closed.
Automatic shoulder belts were cheaper than airbags so manf usually picked that option but don't work with middle seats since they need a door/column for the rails.
3. Minor, but, additional side safety rules increased door thickness. Both sides pushed in more making it uncomfortable. Fine in rear but front, as you mentioned, is a danger to steering.
4. Smaller import cars due to gas crisis in 70s that US companies (eventually) copied that combined with reason (3) made the middle seat basically useless
> 1. Cars that offered manual options needed a center console. Japanese imports would always have a manual version, even if that version wasn't in the US. Same with European.
Maybe in cars, but even when trucks still had a manual option, the S10/Sonoma as well as the full size GMT400 had a bench seat in the 90s/00s and a floor manual shifter, and it all worked pretty well. None of them shift like a Porsche, but especially in the full size trucks the center of the bench wasn't too bad if you weren't a large person, and they're generally pretty pleasant to drive.
> You couldn't use a forward floor shifter unless you want to shift between the legs of the person in the middle.
I’ve been in one of those. And I may or may not have been the child stuck sitting there. Mercifully only a couple times, because I was horrified. It felt like a child had the power to get us into an accident. 0/10 would not recommend.
I had an experience travelling across Kyrgyzstan recently in the middle front seat. The gearstick was just to the side of my leg, but changing gears invariably meant hitting my leg with it. It was a long 10 hours.
You're 100% right, they are used in semi trucks where it's not usually an issue.
It's also a horrible shifter experience even for regular commuter cars where performance isn't a priority. Considering how it's one of the three constantly used controls in a car it would likely hurt sales in a sedan.
> Same thing, budget vehicle means budget suspension, so its weight lowers the capacity instead of increasing the cost of the suspension.
Leaf sprung solid axle is great for doing things on a budget.
But it's probably impossible to put one in a new vehicle because the hiring pool of the automotive industry is too indoctrinated against that sort of stuff at this point.
> - Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.
I get that cars have these, but my PHEV (which I don't often charge) lost its app when Ford pulled the plug as 3G was sunsetting and I don't think I'm missing anything. If there's anything wrong with the car, it can show the check engine light (or whatever it's called when there's no engine).
> - Lack of good charge management and battery conditioning.
Seems like a little early to declare this on a vaporware product? I don't think you need a screen or an app to have reasonable battery conditioning?
Anyway, I would love small trucks to return. I had a 2007 Ranger and I have a 2003 S-10, and there's nothing in the US new vehicle market that fits the small truck niche anymore. CAFE standards can't be met with a small footprint truck, so we only get large footprint trucks. But EV trucks don't have efficiency standards, so maybe we'll see the niche again. (I think you could maybe hit the CAFE standards with a single cab ranger and a hybrid drive train, but I also think automakers prefer to sell luxury trucks rather than base model trucks)
This is why it's so hard for companies to introduce stripped-down or small models of anything: People will tell you how much they want it, but as soon as they see it they realize they actually miss something from the models that are already out there.
It happens with small phones (iPhone mini) to laptops and cars. There are comments throughout this thread claiming that everyone would be buying small sedans if not for CAFE regulations, but we have plenty of small sedans on the market that aren't selling well.
It always comes down to market demand. The big companies have market demand figured out better than many give them credit for, even if it's not exactly the product you want.
I'm grateful they don't make truly stripped down models of cars anymore, because those were always what would end up in the rental car inventory. Every time I'd rent a car, it felt like I was taking a step back in time.
Now all rental cars actually have some reasonable set of features, without you having to pay for any up-sells.
You should try renting in New Zealand. It literally is a step back in time, lots of companies mostly rent very old (20 years plus) Japanese models. So cheap though.
I'd recommend folks watch the video – it's fascinating.
The truck gets OTA updates through your phone and not some LTE modem. It doesn't have one. They moved all car management including OBD-like functionality to the phone, too, which I think is awesome.
This is how I want the interior design philosophy of manual controls to be digitized – with digital control. I'd pay $10k more for physical buttons, though.
Only if the phone app is open source, or at least the api, alllll of it, is public so no one needs the default app nor is limited by it.
Alternatively, maybe the overall simplicity will mean that a 3rd party full computer replacement would be feasible even without any official help from the manufacturer.
I mean yes, but also this is a complex new prototype vehicle. I can assume that there may be mistakes/ non ideal things that they only catch post production.
As long as the fixes are a long the lines as bios updates (not required per say, but may fix bugs or edge cases) then that seems reasonable.
Oh sweet. Delicious. Very reassuring. Was really hoping this thing was going to be device agnostic.
My 2015 car had 3g "smart" features that no longer work since 3g has been sunset in the US. Awesome to see forward thinking of a smart feature-set that can be updated with a module you'll likley already have an upgrade path for.
There's a difference between phone-dependent and phone-augmented. I don't know the details of the truck, but I think a happy medium would be for an app to exist to augment the truck's abilities and allow at-home updates, but to not require the app or phone to just use the truck (even for long periods; i.e. you could go forever without using the app and the truck will just keep working in its current state).
Bucket seats. I need a bench seat so I can take my wife and dog.
Ah, there's the problem. You have violated Pauli's "spouse/dog size exclusion principle". You need to either have a dog that can sleep curled up on the spouse's lap during the trip, or a dog big enough that the spouse can sleep curled up on the dog.
Bench seats also aren't a panacea, I still feel the burn of my dog's stink eye when then girlfriend was prompted to center of bench seat and dog on the side.
This sounds like the feature creep tesla always struggled with.
also, no mobile app? that is a feature.
The appeal of this vehicle is that it IS like your 1998 ranger, not: mobile app = data collection = monetized vehicle = mobile upgrades = basically all the things that are bad with technology.
Honestly, all these "monetized experience" companies forget that (like matt ridley's rational optimist says) with trust, trade is unlimited.
1. Even though they aren't required to have OBDII, every electric vehicle has some kind of management interface, although manufacturers do often lock out users and third-party mechanics. Slate seems to show an interest in allowing third-part modifications and repairs, so I doubt that will be an issue. No matter what they do, I sure hope it doesn't require me to install their software on my phone or computer to access it, although I have no problem with them providing it.
2. Only very early first-gen electric cars, like the Nissan Leaf and Smart Fortwoo, were shipped without effective battery management. There's no reason any manufacturer would do that now, and I doubt any battery supplier would want to work with them, if they tried.
3. The Slate truck will be more capable. It has 201 hp and 195 lb-ft of torque, significantly outperforming the 117 hp and 149 lb-ft of torque in the standard-model 1998 Ranger. How they quantify hauling and towing capacity may have changed since the 90's, but you can rest assured that it is more powerful.
4. Designing an optional bench seat would be easy, but getting approval to sell them would be expensive, due to current safety regulations. This could likely only happen once sales volume is large enough to justify the long approval process for that variation.
Number four is likely the only holdup. If the SUV accessories are easy to install, it may still be worth considering, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's a long process for their first generation. Most auto manufacturers can't design an easy-to-install hard-top, on their first try.
Battery expansion is a user installable option. It might not be as easy to replace the main battery, but the expansion battery will be, and will make it easier to install newer tech down the road, etc.
> I occasionally need the hauling capacity [of a] 1998 Ford Ranger
Then rent a suitable vehicle for the occasion.
- Your example Ford Ranger[1] seems to have towing capacity of 6,000lbs (~2700kg), and a payload capacity of 1,260lbs (~570kg).
- Compare that to the worst model Toyota Hilux[2], which has a payload of up to 1240kg, and can tow 2500kg. These can be rented for like $65 AUD per day (~$40 USD).
This truck has 150 miles of range at 100% charge with no weight. I like the idea of the truck, but you won’t be doing “glamping” with it and you probably won’t be using the battery for anything but driving
I think you are way off on the target demographics. The idea is to have a car that is minimalist in nature, which does mean:
- no app
- no bells
- no whistles
Slate.. I will add one more thing. If you will make it spy on me like all the other new cars now, its a nogo either. I might as well just get an old car from 90s... which amusingly will still work for what I need it to do ( move some stuff around ).
I grew up with an (already old, and by the time we got rid of it years later, hilariously rusted-out and with tires containing more fix-a-flat than air) Scout and their announcement ad for the electric one hit a bullseye with me.
I don't really do new cars (too expensive) but damn... if I had enough cash to not give a fuck, they'd have been well on their way to selling me one just with that ad. Really well done.
It really depends. The model for a smartphone app is that the app is eventually abandoned, leaves behind old platforms, or just drops previously-owned functionality when the business needs to make a few more dollars. If you can do EVERYTHING outside of the app I suppose it's not so bad, but if you rely on the app for basic functionality you're absolutely setting yourself up for failure in the future.
I also Love the direction of this truck. It would be nice if they installed speakers…two door and a small sub and just left a space in the dash for a standard radio of your choice. Or at the very least cut out the spaces and run wire so installing a proper stereo isn’t a nightmare. I don’t need “infotainment” but I do consider a radio with decent sound to enjoy the ride standard equipment.
> - Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.
God, please, no. Why on Gods green earth would I want that? Stop doing this to stuff. It is an abomination. I am sure many others echoed this point but holy crap. No. I am all for technology. But I do not want some tracker in my car. Apps are anathema to my freedom.
The Maverick apparently has poor build quality but I'm hoping Toyota comes up with a pickup using the same small footprint + bare bones + hybrid drivetrain formula.
I just mean poor vs trucks from Honda or Toyota. I don't know if there's anything from a US brand that has comparable build quality and engineering these days.
Your passion is something that market researches for this company should salivate over, especiall from a curated forum like HN.
Unforuntatley, this company and this project are VC expenditure "throw away projects", made to fail.
No motor vehicle satisfying NHTSA can be made in america for below 20k cost of materiels, nevermind msrp.
This article and the company are pitching that this is "realistic" due to cutting costs of paint, radios. Which...are pennies on the dollar compared to what satifys US road requiremnents for EV; safety, suspension, manufacturer support, parts availability, reparability. Are they skimping there too? will this 2025 electric vehicle have LEAF springs?
20k is the pre-production estimates. When in history has that not balloned especially for car platforms made in USA? What will a made in USA replacement lead acid accessory battery cost? 3k?
Once this goes over 40k (which, is guaranteed. A mazda miata which is as bare bones as it gets, old technology, is still 32k base, and thats made in a cheaper labor market.), the funding will back off, and all the R and D money wasted.
This is extremely refreshing. I think that it would be possible to make something like this in the US for under $15K even. Cars and trucks are so over-engineered and come with tons of low value options intended to drive up the price.
For a case in point, consider that headlights that turn on and off automatically in response to darkness (or rain) are not a standard feature on many cars, yet they include a manual switch that costs more than a photosensor only because of the trim-level upgrades.
Cars could include a slot for a tablet but instead come with overpriced car stereos and infotainment systems that are always light years worse than the most amateurish apps on any mobile app store.
As should be very clear by now after the 2008 US auto industry bailouts and the 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, the US auto industry is heavily protected and faces virtually no competition, which is why a common sense vehicle like the one in the article sounds revolutionary, though I imagine BYD could deliver something a lot more impressive for $10K if allowed to compete in the US without tariffs.
To be honest most of those accessories are actually incredibly cheap at manufacturing time and several have a direct impact on safety (e.g. ensuring people don't drive around with lights off). The cost usually comes as companies use them for pricing tiers where they market them as suggested extras to ratchet up profits.
Driving with your lights off at dusk or dark gets you (rightfully) pulled over by law enforcement in CA. It's well-correllated with driving under the influence.
I'm a huge fan of many car safety regulations, but this isn't one.
(Sign me up for car-hiding-in-blind-spot notification lights on side mirrors, though, those are great)
Let's say net X lives are saved each year because of automatic lights turning on.
Let's say net Y lives would be saved each year without automatic lights, via more effective detection of drunk drivers and stopping them before they kill someone.
Is X > Y? We don't know.
> Eliminatung DUI is not a matter of detection
There are a lot of avenues to decrease DUI, among which one is effective detection combined with enforcement.
Okay, let's compare it to: Let's not make auto-pilot mandatory in planes, because sometimes a copilot has found that a pilot was drunk when taking off manually.
Even if there was a drunken pilot epidemic that causes 10 plane crashes per year, and autopilot only prevents 1 plane crash per year, it would be ridiculous not to make the autopilot mandatory and rely on its absence to catch some of those drunken pilot crashes.
In the example you give, if the copilot catches the pilot more than 10% of the time, then the swap to mandatory autopilot kills more people than not doing it.
I hardly think it would be ridiculous to want to save more lives.
The EU has done lots of reach on road and car safety, there's lots of data out there - just perhaps not in the US as many American made cars have significantly lagged behind in terms of safety features.
I don't know if it's an EU rule, but in my (European) country cars are required to have their lights on at all times, even during the day. The lights switch on automatically when you start the car
I'm baffled that daytime running lights are not mandatory on all models of all cars in 2025. My 13 year old Grand Caravan has them, though I suspect it's because it comes from the Daimler Chrysler era.
I love to baselessly praise europe as much as the next idiot in the comments but most North American models that got DRLs before it was legally required got them because they've been required in Canada since the 90s
After I visited Iceland where it's mandatory, I liked the improved visibility so much I turn my lights on for every single trip. It was not a takeaway I was expecting to have from the trip.
There may be something like that that does make it counterintuitive. Usually those kind of Malcom Gladwell paradoxes end up overstated.
There would be other factors, like drunk people are probably safer with their lights on too. Lane keeping probably makes it harder to detect drunk drivers too but also may make them safer.
This is simply because police don’t do their jobs. It would be trivial to simply wait outside bars at 2AM and give out tons of DUIs but a significant percentage of the population are alcoholics and this would result in massive blowback against the police.
Go to any small town watering hole at 2AM to see this in effect. The police have no legal obligation to prevent crime or enforce laws. None.
Parents who sit in their idling cars for (fucking) ages while their cars are facing the tennis courts thus blinding the player on the other side of the court for however long it takes them to either turn their car off, drive off, or someone to tell them turn their fucking headlights off.
Personally I feel like cars with headlights in the daytime on days with good visibility can be too noticeable. I find myself giving them too much attention because they stand out more in my visual field.
When the oncoming cars do not have headlights on I find it easier to give them just enough attention to see that they are behaving normally leaving more attention to devote to things other than oncoming cars.
>Personally I feel like cars with headlights in the daytime on days with good visibility can be too noticeable. I find myself giving them too much attention because they stand out more in my visual field.
Especially the cars with the projectors that bounce around.
BYD is also heavily subsidized by the Chinese government.
If the us were not to fight back, the non subsidized industries would die, Chinese would stop subsidizing, rack up the price and competition would be too difficult to start again because of the monopoly on lithium and advance on technology.
It's been done thousands of times with other industries and countries.
Most recently Google, who had been giving Android for free when windows phone were licensed and Samsung tyzen cost money to develop, then forced manufacturer to accept outrageous terms to ship Google play service in their phone when all competition was already dead, is now under scrutiny for antitrust.
China’s approach to funding BYD is meant to replace much of the capital it might raise in freer markets, providing subsidies, tax breaks, and preferential policies to offset limited access to liquid equity and debt markets.
This support, totaling $10-12 billion from 2018-2022 plus in-kind benefits, mirrors the role of U.S. automakers’ $160-220 billion in public market raises and $50-100 billion in private capital, but with less financial risk for BYD due to state backing.
I think what people are missing is that EVs can be dramatically simpler to manufacture than internal combustion vehicles. This leverages manufacturing advantages and so with or without subsidies, China has big advantages due to its advancements in manufacturing tech.
Recall when China started making hoverboards for a fraction of the price of a Segway? Making EVs at scale required largely the same manufacturing pipeline.
It is the foresight of China’s industrial policy, not the amount of subsidy that has created the manufacturing powerhouse China has become.
US attempts are crude (sledgehammer) methods that leave the market far less free with mostly downside for everyone and no industrial policy goals, only domestic incumbents being protected from reality.
RMB is undervalued by ~10-30%, with latter being extreme estimates, pegged to usd with small floating band. It's minor advantage vs executing competent industrial policy that durably drives production costs down fraction vs competitors. Add 10-30% to PRC EV production costs and western (especially US) producers still nowhere near.
That’s _just_ the peg. The other currency controls include the prevention of currency outflows by Chinese capital and the restriction on foreign holders of Chinese debt. All of that drives the costs down.
My personal opinion is that the Chinese EV would dominate in a completely free market, but we will never know.
My broader point is that it’s weird to say that the cash subsidies make up for the lack of freer markets capital, that’s double dipping.
Currency controls drive costs down (really loss/inefficiency) in the sense that it contains misallocation like illicit capital flight, i.e. stashing grafted funds meant for industrial programs abroad. That's less advantage than mitigating the disadvantage of legacy of PRC corruption - not double dipping, but ensuring sauce stays in the domestic bowl to be dipped at all. And ultimately "freely" competing with reserve USD privilege is a stacked game - the currency controls themselves aren't subsidies, they protect employment of subsidies, i.e. ensuring higher % of X gets directed properly to industry, rather than mansions in vancouver, it's not a multiplier like X*2.
If the argument is that currency controls gives PRC a more stable basis for financing industrial policy (deal with fluctuations and keep domestic captive bond buyers), then sure, but that layer is levelling the playing field. Ultimately it comes to productively using actual allocated $$$ for indy programs to develop durable competitive advantages that can be sustained in lieu of subsidies. VS printing more billions to bail out legacy auto as domestic job programs - which op was replying to, everyone protects domestic auto, even PRC also has to prop up some SEOs, but they also focus on indy programs that's just about hammering pure industrial competitiveness to eventually build comparable item for fraction of the cost.
IMO why this proposal is exciting. If US producer can figure out how to produce somethign that's only 50% more expensive then PRC versus 200%, then it's a huge win.
BYD could totally avoid the tariffs by making in the USA (well, they were planning a factory in Mexico, and tariffs on car parts will kill that if something doesn’t change). They already set up a bus factory in SoCal. My guess is that Chinese automakers are still hesitant about introducing their brands to Americans given politics (Volvo and Polestar are Chinese owned but I think the design is still mainly done in Sweden?).
Japanese, Korean, and European brands already make a lot of vehicles to get around tariffs, although it makes sense for some sedans to be made abroad given American lack of interest in them (so economy of scales doesn’t work out), and sedans typically not being tariffed as harshly as trucks.
BYD could totally avoid the tariffs by making in the USA (well, they were planning a factory in Mexico, and tariffs on car parts will kill that if something doesn’t change). They already set up a bus factory in SoCal. My guess is that Chinese automakers are still hesitant about introducing their brands to Americans given politics (Volvo and Polestar are Chinese owned but I think the design is still mainly done in Sweden?).
Yea you nailed it in the end. No way BYD would invest in a factory when the entire government and media are anti-China and could expel you out of the country any moment. The US is not predictable for businesses and investments right now.
Chinese investment in the US is inherently risky. For example TikTok. BYD would be stomping GM and Ford. The next thing you know, they would need to sell their factory.
Wouldn’t they still need to pay tariffs on all the parts they manufacture in china? Maybe I’m misunderstanding the tariffs but it sounds like Chinese companies would have to build completely separate supply chains to keep the US market
Before no, or at least not very high tariffs. Now I have no idea, Trump’s story changes daily. However lots of US made autos are using Chinese parts so they are all affected to some degree.
>I think that it would be possible to make something like this in the US for under $15K even.
The closest this comes to is a Dacia spring. Which is not a great car. The dacia could not be made at US labor costs. 15k is an absurd price, Chinese companies can do it because they pay Chinese labor costs and have serious economies of scale. Unless you sell hundreds of thousands of these a year AND pay US workers like Chinese ones, 15k will not happen.
>heavily protected and faces virtually no competition
Huh? Out of the top 25 vehicles sold in the US in 2024, 16 of them are non-US automakers. Just because the US is actively blocking China from dumping heavily subsidized vehicles into the north american market, doesn't mean they "face no competition". Kia and Hyundai alone show that it's VERY possible to break into the US market if you have even a little bit of interest playing fair.
The only real way to break into the US market is to have factories in the US. Trucks in particular are protected by the notorious 25% "chicken tax", which has been in place since the 1960s.
> they're trying to retain some semblance of manufacturing in the US, which I'm fully in support of.
>
> Both because those are well-paying jobs and because it's a matter of national security.
Why should manufacturing jobs be well-paying? Human productivity has not kept up with business improvements at all. A contemporary robot can assemble car modules much faster than a robot from, say, the 60s. A human now works at the same speed as a human from the 60s.
I don't think this is true. Yes robot capabilities have increased but those business processes also make people more productive. I recently toured the F-150 assembly line and it is clear a lot has been done to improve worker productivity.
"Manufacturing jobs" doesn't mean doing the same job as in the 60s. Human productivity improves by offloading more to machines/tools/processes while having the humans manage other things. A human making cars now is not moving their limbs twice as fast as humans in the 60s, they're using tools that get the job done 3x faster than the person in the 60s. The jobs are actually quite different across time, but we colloquially call both "manufacturing jobs".
> They aren't protecting US automakers, they're trying to retain some semblance of manufacturing in the US, which I'm fully in support of.
"The US can't make anything" is an absurd delusion. We are the second most productive economy in the world.
> Both because those are well-paying jobs and because it's a matter of national security.
We are fully capable of meeting our defense needs already. If you really care about reinforcing our military-industrial capability the best way to do it is to arm Ukraine.
People say stuff like this. When you buy a $1 USB cable from AliExpress that probably took 25 seconds to manufacture, okay, that makes some sense, from that narrow point of view. But then the courier is going to spend like 3 minutes futzing with delivering it to you. Someone is paying something, no? You have an incomplete picture of costs, and hopefully your answer to the example conundrum isn't, "Delivery drivers are underpaid."
It's more complicated than features leading to a bill of materials and time in a factory.
It costs at least $15,000 to replace a roof in San Francisco, and maybe closer to $60,000. It costs basically nothing to manufacture roof tiles, and the whole thing can be done in a day. If you could answer the question why, and persuasively, you know, run for mayor.
It's a $20k, street-legal, EV modding platform. Sounds like you can mount your own infotainment system. Just an electric motor, battery, and chassis, and the rest is up to you. Isn't this what we've been asking for?
Yea, it's pretty exciting. I'd like to see how much more they could strip out to reduce the price and still have a viable commercial product. I guess I'm living firmly in the past, but $20K still seems to be a high price for a car. Then again, I haven't bought a car new since the 90s, so I'm probably just an old fart who hasn't grokked what things cost today. I still remember the day when the base-model Corolla started costing more than $9999 and I thought the world was coming to an end.
EDIT: Yep, I'm just old. Another commenter linked to a "10 cheapest new cars" list and there seems to be a price floor of around $20K. No major manufacturer seems capable of making one cheaper!
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics[1], $9999 in 1995 is equivalent to $21,275.25 today, so it's a pretty spot on price for a barebones car.
Except, with advances in computational design and engineering, manufacturing automation, and moving to plastic for the body I would expect a reduction in price, in real terms. Not impressed.
>Except, with advances in computational design and engineering, manufacturing automation, and moving to plastic for the body I would expect a reduction in price, in real terms.
Except with all the safety equipment, crumple zones, airbags, sensors, etc. I would expect an increase in price.
And this back-and-forth here is why the folks at the BLS
have a hard job. Both options—
a car in 1990 is a car in 2025 and real value/utility is unchanged and price should be compared 1-1 ignores that cars are actually better now. But at the same time you literally can't buy a new car at 1990's quality so the additional value/utility might not actually be wanted by some and so this in effect makes real price go up.
Some of those $10k cars in the 90s had more plastic in the bodies than cars today, e.g. Saturn S-series, where all body panels below the belt-line were plastic.
It isn't necessarily the cost savings one might expect though, because steel panels can also be load bearing and part of the crash structure, which is not really practical with plastic panels.
Cost savings wasn't the reason for the Saturn plastic panels, IIRC -- they were intended to make the car more durable; they were hard to dent. Some Saturn salespeople would kick the side of the car, hard, to demonstrate their resilience.
With plastic panels, that means they're replaceable. Possibly even swappable (custom 3D printing?). This just adds to the "modding platform" they could be marketing to.
In fact, on modern cars many times these panels are replaced.
If you get a big enough dent in a door, a good body shop will offer to replace the outer skin instead of filling with bondo. They cut the weld on the inside of the door all the way around, take off the shell, and epoxy a new one on. The body shop owner told me that the epoxy is actually stronger than the factory weld.
Yes, bodywork is quite a mature discipline. I was presuming the parent commenter meant user-replaceable, i.e. bolted on.
> The body shop owner told me that the epoxy is actually stronger than the factory weld.
Often this is because the special high strength steels used in vehicles today depend on proper heat treating to attain their strength, and welding can compromise this. Many OEMs even specify panel bonding for repairing particular crash-critical parts of vehicles now because of this.
It's mostly because the factory welds are the result of someone running numbers until they find the bare minimum whereas the autobody guy would rather not risk it.
The OEMs have proper repair procedures that are the correct way to fix the vehicle, and if the autobody shop is reputable, they follow them. And the stated reason OEMs specify panel bonding instead of welding is:
1. because UHSS is sensitive to heat, and robots are much more accurate in how they heat than Jimmy with a tig torch, and they were programmed by a process engineer, where as Jimmy welds until 'it looks good'.
2. welding may compromise anti-corrosive treatments on the inside of inaccessible cavities, which can lead to corrosion issues
In nearly all cases they're faster. 10+ second 0-60 times used to be pretty normal for "regular" cars. Now days, people will complain that a car is slow if they can't put down 7 second 0-60 times. And "quick" boring cars of today are as fast as sports cars of the past.
The 1996 Ferrari F355 Spider and the 2025 Hyundai Elantra N both have a 0-60 time of 4.8 seconds.
The average price of new cars sold in the US last year was nearly $50k. The manufacturers make more money from expensive cars than cheap cars, and people keep buying them, so that's what they sell. Before they canceled the Fit, Honda was selling almost 10 times as many of the larger CR-V each year.
You can find numerous new cars for sale in Mexico for under $15k USD.[0] Even Europe has several new cars under €20k.[1] These are the same manufacturers we have here, but lower cost models that are only sold in lower-income countries.
Most of those models are not real. They exist, but they don't make many of the base model and if you attempt to purchase one, it is a 4-18 month lead time.
I was in the market in Mexico last year, just looking for a cheap city car with a warranty for when I am there. I test drove half the cars on that list, the other half I immediately eliminated after sitting in the driver's seat for under a minute.
You can think of those base models like MSRP GPUs right now. They exist on paper, but good luck actually getting one for MSRP.
In the end, I didn't purchase any of those and got a two year old certified preowned vehicle with the top trim and comfortable seats from a dealer with a warranty for about $3000USD more than the cheapest actually available model of those linked in your post.
I guess I'm living firmly in the past, but $20K still seems to be a high price for a car.
You're not even living in the past. Our 20 year old Scion xB cost us $20K out the door new (granted, that's with most of the paltry list of options added, $15K base). And that was a cheap car at the time, Toyota marketing to "the kids".
The last time $20K was "a high price" for a new car was probably before most HN folk were born.
For those price-comparing, it is $20K after the federal incentives. So, its real cost is around $27K which makes it way more expensive than what the article claims.
One would be wiser to based on annual depreciation in real $ plus time value of purchase price. I suspect out of new trucks a tacoma would be the cheapest since the depreciation is low to negative (IIRC recently a Tacoma was worth more 1 year old than new).
All new car brands/models will not have comps for several years. Even folks buying Rivians, etc have no idea how the resale value will play out so you’re always going to have to take a gamble
That's with federal incentive and likely before they factored in the tariffs. Those 500 parts aren't all coming from US. I wouldn't expect any usable version of it to be below 30k once it's actually available.
This is an $27k car, with $7.5k rebate, so much for the unfairly competing Chinese.
The MG4 is £22500 in the UK before tax, which is about $30k in USD, and that's a full-featured 5 door car, with double the range.
I do applaud the philosphy of cheap and barebones, and easily moddable, but my two cents is that trim is not the thing that's making cars expensive to make.
Is it? They show speakers mounted in the front as a "soundbar". Will people figure out there is a reason cars with good sound systems have them mounted all around the vehicle?
I just want some power ports and good mounting points, then I can put whatever I want there, and upgrade it. I'd imagine that people will come up with a mountable radio kit, like the DIN format radios of old, but with less restrictions.
DIN format radios are still around. My recent-ish corolla's infotainment display is just a well integrated double-DIN. I'm surprised this car doesn't as far as I can tell, have a DIN slot for one.
Yes, they have a nice storage bin right behind where you put the optional tablet mount, but the only option I've seen for that bin is a speaker kit. I don't want a tablet mount or speakers in the bin. I want the left side of the bin (above the controls) to be a double DIN mount.
> Will people figure out there is a reason cars with good sound systems have them mounted all around the vehicle?
No, because they knew what they were getting into when they bought this truck. And I'm sure there will be a dozen DIY ways to add a more traditional sound system.
The interesting modern tools for passengers wanting to DJ are shared Spotify playlists and Apple SharePlay.
A lot of Bluetooth speakers today can fill a car with a sound wall better rear speakers used to. Apple says you just need two of their Bluetooth speakers to fill a room in a house with great stereo and reasonably good surround sound. The square footage of a car is generally smaller than the supported room size.
Samsung Galaxy A Series (A15 / A15 5G, A14 / A14 5G, A25) all have headphone jacks. These are their "lower-end" models, though. The higher-end ones don't. And of course, iPhones haven't for a long time, too. Alternatively, for other phones with just a USB-C port, you could get a USB-C to headphone jack adapter.
edit to add: if Slate is successful, I wouldn't be surprised if a decently sized ecosystem pops up around easily installed custom sound systems and the tablets (possibly with headphone jacks!) to control them.
Thank you! I'm not a huge Samsung fan, their Android flavor doesn't appeal to me much, but I'm glad that someone is still making phones with headphone jacks. USB-C adapters are mostly fine, but I like being able to charge and listen to music at the same time without a clunky adapter, it's yet another thing I'll lose.
Good find, I currently have an aging Pixel 6a (with, regrettably, no headphone jack) but I like Motorola's hardware and their fairly vanilla Android. I may consider a Motorola device, if they provide updates for at least 5 years.
> a comprehensive active safety system that includes everything from automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection to automatic high beams
No stereo, but luckily they still found space for a few DNN accelerators that will slam on the brakes randomly when getting false detections. Likely still has a 4G uplink and all the modern car cancer to make sure they can datamine their clients as much as possible and offset the subsidized purchase cost.
I like it. My wife runs a riding academy and we use a Honda Fit the way some people would use a pickup truck: we can fit 10 bales of wood shavings in the back. [1] We’re dreading when it fails because they don’t make the fit anymore and compact hatchbacks seem to be on the way out. Recent experiences have made me a bit of a Buick enthusiast and I can see driving a 2005-ish sedan except that I won’t get those sawdust bales into the trunk. We are also thinking of fitting in EV into the fleet, so far the used Nissan Leaf has been the main contender but this is a pickup truck I could get into.
[1] We were profitable from day one because we didn’t buy a $80,000 pickup on day one the way everybody else does.
The Honda Fit is great. You can probably squeeze an extra decade out if you're willing to swap out the motor or transmission (used, 100k miles or so, if you shop around $2k-$3k should be doable), and if you're using it heavily then you have the advantage that most cara on the market take less abuse, so you can maybe grab a decade beyond that by picking up somebody else's used Fit when you're done repairing yours.
If you stay on top of fluid filming or wool waxing you can largely avoid this. I've got 7 winters of WI slush and salt on my truck and just a few nickel sized spots of surface rust on the frame so far.
> used, 100k miles or so, if you shop around $2k-$3k should be doable
Where are you finding a 100k mile Honda Fit for $3k? Before I bought my current daily driver, Honda Fits were on my list to look out for and in the central NJ area I never saw one in decent condition around that mileage for less than $5k. Even looking now I see people trying to part out theirs for $2k or looking for $4k for a 200k mile one. I messaged someone on FB Marketplace that had a 2013 with 65k miles on it to try and bring down their $11k asking to $8k and just got ignored.
NJ is probably on the higher end of the market but the deviation can't be that big.
Sorry I wasn't clear. You can get a motor with 100k miles from a totaled car for $3k, including the labor to replace it.
To your actual question, I bought mine (2008, manual) in 2018 for $5k with 100k miles in The Bay, and it took about a month of waiting for a good deal to crop up. I've put another 100k on it without issue and plan to drive it a long time. Inflation and the chip shortage have roughly kept up with depreciation, so I'm currently seeing some good options in the $6k range and similarly expect that $5k is around the bottom of what you can pay for a nice vehicle with 100k miles on it.
Also, deviations can absolutely be that big. It's more prevalent at the top of the market, but there are big differences in Subarus and Civics, for example, in different parts of the country, even in the sub-$5k range. It's often worth a flight and driving back to purchase a car (if you value your time at $0 or have other things to do while you're there).
Damn, that's a great deal. And yea, $5k seems to be about the bottom of the barrel in terms of getting a decent car.
For my "daily" driver (I drive a few times a week and it's rarely more than 20 miles), I ended up buying an imported WRX on an auction site. Cost more than a used Honda Fit but it's a ton of fun to drive.
Japanese cars, particularly cars that have been orphaned, keep their value at high mileage.
If I had to get a high mileage car in a hurry in upstate NY with some expectation that my acquisition + repair costs would be reason I'd go looking for a 2005 Buick. Maybe half of that is getting older, the other half is that my son drives a '96 Buick which has needed some creative maintenance but has been rock solid reliable after a flurry of work where we replaced aging parts.
Why a Buick? Which 2005 Buick? You can probably, find a simpler or less expensive doppelgänger if you look at the same car but with a Chevy or an Olds badge. I don’t mean this as a dig, simply curios.
Buick is gonna be less ragged out than an Impala or Olds of same age (you see the same with the Grand Marquis vs the Crown Vic). An 05ish one will come with a 3400 or 3800v6 which was pretty solid and cheap to own by then. The rest of the car is nothing special, just keep oil and coolant in it and drive it.
Basically he's picking a very well sorted platform of a vehicle and then choosing the brand that most correlates with buyers who'll keep it in good order.
When my son got his first job and needed a car in a hurry to commute I helped him get his first car and in the search we wound up looking at a lot of Buicks that we liked and were at a good price and in good condition, particularly circa 2005 though we wound up with a '96 Park Avenue. It was my first experience owning an American car (title in my name for the cheaper insurance) and my own experience plus what I read indicates I probably would have done well with one of the 2005s.
My take is that at that age you don't pay that much more for the upbadged car but you're likely to find it in good condition but you get to enjoy the bling (the '96 is ahead of its time with traction control) and Buicks of that vintage have one of the best engines GM ever made.
I also love this design and I'm happy that someone is doing it. I think it's unlike anything else on the market.
But, they won't necessarily be competing against other new things on the market. My wife also rides horses and we got a $5000 20 year old F250 which is very basic but has been bulletproof, and it can tow. I imagine old, basic trucks, either cheap domestic ones or kei trucks will be what this thing competes against.
I hope it does well. This is the kind of design thinking that the auto industry needs.
Also I'm increasingly convinced that the Honda fit is what peak performance looks like. But when it dies you do have options - maybe a Ford Transit Connect or a Metris.
All micro cargo van providers have stopped building them. The Transit Connect, Metris, Promaster City and NV200 are all now discontinued. The VW Caddy isn't sent to the states.
There are rumors that they will make a cargo van based on the Maverick but they make them in Mexico, and with the tariff situation I'm not sure if they will be going through with that anymore.
All of the perfect compacts and hatchbacks are slowly disappearing, and solid work trucks have been replaced with $60k+ fake trucks that will melt their gaskets with crappy turbos and can't even fit a piece of 2x4 in the back. There is an enormous category of consumers that just want an auto that's simple, affordable, safe, fuel efficient and reasonably sized. Almost nobody is serving them right now.
> All micro cargo van providers have stopped building them. The Transit Connect, Metris, Promaster City and NV200 are all now discontinued.
This is an entirely american problem, because the small van is largely dead in the US. They're doing fine elsewhere.
The Metris is still manufactured (as the Vito, or V260 in China), and is not the smallest model which is the Citan (based on the Kangoo, with its second gen based on kangoo III in 2021).
The Promaster City (Fiat Doblo) still exists, as a rebadged Berlingo since 2022.
The NV 200 was replaced by the NV 250 (a rebadged Kangoo II) in 2019, which was then replaced by the Townstar (a rebadged Kangoo III) in late 2021. There's also the Docker / Express below that (which descends from the Logan MCV / Van).
And the Transit Connect was replaced by the Caddy (rebadged), but Ford dropped its original plans of a US release.
> There is an enormous category of consumers that just want an auto that's simple, affordable, safe, fuel efficient and reasonably sized.
Apparently not sufficiently so (or with a consistent enough need) that they can be catered to. Or at least not so that you couldn't make more money selling them pavement princesses.
That's a supply:demand problem that will normalize in the long run though. Ford hedges their bets by not producing something risky at full-tilt; dealers maximize their profitability with an in demand model. (Especially since they're not making the absolute markup by selling full-loaded F150s at higher price points)
Ford’s pretty heavily discouraging that, and the supply/demand on the Maverick has pretty much equalized now. I put down a deposit for one recently under MSRP.
To be fair, a lot of farms need a big-ass pickup truck because they are always towing horses to go to shows or trailheads. We have 70 beautiful acres and a network of trails my wife built that were inspired by Het Vondelpark in Amsterdam. [1] If everything goes right we trailer in a horse once and never have to trailer it out although some horses don't fit in or have to go to the vet.
The Fit, however, is really genius. It's got the utility of an SUV in the body of a compact. I can't believe Honda's excuse that it wasn't selling -- in my area it is a running gag that if you have a blue Fit somebody will park another blue Fit next to you at the supermarket or that it makes a great getaway car, if somebody catches you doing donuts in their lawn you can say it musta been somebody elese.
If the grocery store parking lot is any indication, farming is the number one profession in America. All farmers can have their big trucks and still regulate out the other 99% of the 22-foot monsters used to commute to offices.
I've found this to be very regional. There are parts of the country where there are a lot fewer trucks and most appear to actually see a meaningful amount of real-truck use. There are other parts where like 40% of the goddamn cars on the road are pristine, bloated modern trucks that are just used as commuter vehicles.
Comments like these are rooted in selection bias (willful or otherwise).
You're never gonna see trucks being used at the grocery store because people who are in the process of using said truck for truck stuff aren't usually stopping at the grocery store as they do it, and this is before you adjust for what kind of grocery stores HN shops at vs the kind that people who use the crap out of their trucks shop at. If you live the median "suburb to office and back" life you'll never see trucks doing anything. You need to be on the road and not in a cube during hours when "things" get done to see that. And the people who do things with their trucks mostly don't live and cross paths with the people who don't.
I could use the exact same faulty logic you're using here with slightly different parameters and come up with the conclusion that cars don't need a second row of seating.
And before anyone projects anything stupid at me, I own a minivan.
> You're never gonna see trucks being used at the grocery store because people who are in the process of using said truck for truck stuff aren't usually stopping at the grocery store as they do it,
I think you missed the point of the GP post. They were noting the presence of (a lot of) trucks at the grocery store parking lot. Whether they are towing/hauling isn't really the point.
There are trucks and then there are trucks. The Ford Maverick gets 42mpg in the city, 35mpg on the highway and is reasonably priced. If you value economy, ecology, efficiency and such that's right up there with a compact car. The F150 is a L size electric truck, an S size truck will appeal to people.
If you're towing a horse trailer you really want the biggest truck you can get or a GMC Suburban or something like that.
On the other hand in the suburbs of some New England towns that I'm sure are full of white collar workers you see nothing but trucks in the driveway and I laugh when I see a Ford F350 with a lift kit and commercial plates idling and see, a few minutes later, a few pencilneck geeks come out of a frat house and climb into it.
Something I also only really appreciated after spending more time out plains-west in the US, it's dangerous to drive small vehicles because of the average distances and abundance of larger wildlife.
When you're regularly driving 2+ hours one way to a town and a random pronghorn appears in the middle of the road, at night, when you're doing 85 mph... you want to be in something that can take the impact.
If you’re not knowledgeable about cars, getting a 20 year-old truck is probably just not an option. Sometimes it’s totally fine, sometimes it craps out and needs a whole engine replaced!
My sister got a 2003 subaru last year for about $3,000. The oil leaked out while she was driving, and the whole engine sorta melted together and just totally died.
So I’d say for non car people, this Slate truck isn’t competing with old cars, if only on the basis of potential hidden catastrophes.
They're both good in different ways. The advantage of the Fit is largely in cargo height (with the magic seats flipped up), but for some other objects the 80s Civic is better.
I'm also a Honda Fit fan. Technically, it is still made, just not sold in the North American market. It's had a new generation come out since they stopped selling it here, matching the new Civics' style.
The closest Honda offerings are probably the Civic Hatchback (lower roof, but the seats still fold down) and the HR-V, which is basically a Fit on stilts with more weight and slightly less room.
I went with a hatchback Civic Sport Touring to replace my Fit (which has 210K miles on it and is still reliable, though I'm passing it on to someone else) and my girlfriend is about to try the HR-V to replace her (newer) Fit that was just lost in an accident, since she needs more roof height for dog crates.
Would a used Metris cargo work? We have the passenger version and it’s excellent. True 1000kg load rating, and the cargo version can be had extremely cheaply.
We also have our eye on this truck, but with less urgency since our van does everything we could want.
The rear seat legroom is absurdly good for a car that size. It's been our only car for the past 10 years for a family of 2 adults and 2 kids. Zero issues outside of regular maintenance. Bought for $18k new in 2014 (2015 model). Good times.
The Fit is a wonderful car. I'd buy one if I could find one for a decent price, but 40k miles 2020 (last year for them in the US) still runs around $20k at dealers and Carvana! For five grand more, I can get a brand new Corolla Hatchback, which is what I'll likely do, but I'd pick up a Fit without thinking if I could find a good price.
Most small SUVs should be fine though. You switched between wood shavings and hay bales, but I reliably fit 7 hay bales in a 2005 Saturn Vue (wife always managed to get 9 in there), which means that 10 bales of shavings should not be a problem since they're much smaller.
I run a Honda Pilot for this reason. With the seats folded I can haul 8’ lumber or 10’ PVC pipe inside the vehicle, no tie down needed. If I need to tow, I have a 5,000LB tow rating so most anything around the property is possible with a good trailer for a couple thousand extra.
I bought reasonably used, spent about 30k instead of 50k+ for a comparable pickup truck which lacks the ability to haul 7-8 passengers when needed.
Also has the benefit of being one of the most “Made in America” vehicles out there, #3 IIRC.
I use a 2018 Subaru Forester to move stuff like this, with the seats folded flat the cargo space is decent. You can add some cargo boxes on the back trailer hitch as well.
The dream is a Pacifica minivan - they make a hybrid version.
The Pacifica and Sienna (and probably Odyssey as well) are absolute garbage for hauling crap. If that is what you are looking for, get a used one from the prior generation.
The Chevy Bolt is very similar shape and size to the fit. Supposedly there is going to be a 2026 model. People have thrown after market tow hitches and towed (small) trailers pretty far even. Check out the BoltEV subreddit.
Love my Honda fit - had to replace the transmission at 160k km (in-warranty!) only thing I wish is it had AWD and just a little more clearance for the snow
A Mazda 5 might be a good option in the future. I used to run esports events and could get 20(!) 6’ tables in the back, with some rope to keep the back door down.
how do you haul hoss though? i would imagine you then outsource to professional hauling services? what do you do for vet visits, when it's not a farm call?
Just pay somebody. In a rural area there are a lot of farmers with a big truck and a trailer and it costs less than the monthly payment on a big truck.
i'll be honest, if the rest of your profile wasn't at least somewhat corraborative, i'd say you're larping, but what you're saying is at least irresponsible. most farmers in rural area have livestock trailers, not horse trailers, hauling for hire (including if you're hauling for students at your barn or whatever) requires CDL and a bunch of other documentation, which you're not typically going to have as a farmer, and more documentation if you're hauling interstate (my vet is across a border), but would i even trust random joe dirt to haul for me? i've hired professionals to transport horses, and i have a handful of people who could haul in a bind and unlicensed but i wouldn't rely on them to be available in an emergency. last year i had to haul an old mare, she was colic, she laid down in the field, covered in sweet, and had to be put down at the vet, but overall it was less than an hour from load to vet. if i had to rely on "farmers", that would prolong her agony. now i just train, so i don't usually have freak accidents, but at riding barns, with students, on trail, something happens from time to time. riding barns i work with tell me horror stories all the time. i'll give you a benefit of the doubt, maybe your wife knows the details, and ithaca being horse country, maybe she's got a friendly neighbor on speed dial, but then you're at best outsourcing your responsibilities to someone else. what other things you can save on to make your operation profitable, at the expense of safety and well being of hoss?
Often these "farmers" are horse traders or people I know with a CDL who have the right equipment and also do other work for me like cut my hay. One of them is "retired" but he waved to me driving a dump truck when I was photographing a sign for my Uni that had a field of daffodils in front of it this morning.
The farmers I associate with care a lot about their animals and I expect them to take the same care with mine. As a rural person I judge people based on relationships and reputation and not on how much insurance they have. I'd trust any of these people to haul a horse in a big-ass trailer than I would trust myself or my wife.
And for a horse that's not used to loading, a livestock trailer is often much easier because they're more comfortable getting into it than, e.g., a 2-horse slant.
Judging by the number of horses my wife hauls, most horse owners don't have their own truck/trailer. Which makes sense: for most people, the trailer won't be used very often, and hay is usually delivered by the farmer, so don't need a truck for that.
you're limited to one horse at a time with livestock trailer, and if load is a problem, you can use a straight load and i guess remove center divider in a straight load. because i train rather than haul, i'd opt for taking time with load of course.
personal farms don't need to haul, there's no disagreement about that, but op suggested that you can run a horse business this way. it took me a while to realize that he has a vanity farm that's funded by his tech money, so you know he can gradually grow, he doesn't need to board, or train, or any of those other things people in the business diversify their income sources with.
i don't think we're OT at all. in horse business and generally farming you have two types of vehicles relevant to this conversation, trucks and gators. you absolutely need both. your truck can act as a gator, but your gator can't act a truck. you can use pretty much anything as a gator, i've got an old cherokee, an atv with a hitch and an actual gator doing the gator business. op uses a ford focus. the electric pickup from original post is probably a solid gator. kei trucks can be used as gators. but none of this stuff replaces a truck, which you still have to pay shit ton of money for.
usually in conversations like this it's horse people who come in and say "nah we need a truck to haul", but this time op suggested that you can in fact run a horse business with a gator, which prompted some questions from me
you're not a rural person, c'mon, you're a wealthy cornell tech with a vanity farm. ithaca is dollar horse country, everyone knows that, so yeah i totally buy that in your fairly unique circumtances running a horse business off a back of a ford focus works. i read you as suggesting that the rest of the industry is silly for buying trucks, and you've got it figured out, but you simply punted on the hauling problem.
Most farmers have a semi and thus a full class A license. Though often haul my horse is done as a labor trade - I'll haul your horse in the off season for me if you help me in my busy season, no money changes hands.
this whole subthread started with some cornell guy saying that you can run a horse business off a back of a gator, because your neighbors can haul for you, which is pretty much as cloud people as it goes. i'll venture that there's not a single horse farm in u.s. no matter how poor that is not subsidized with tech money that outsources its hauling. we're talking about running a business here, not hauling daisy to county fairgrounds three times a season.
We don't even have a gator. My wife does the material handling herself. Our bill for horse moving is probably less than $400 a year in a bad year, a payment on a big-ass truck is upwards of $800 a month. For that matter, in bad years my wife's business subsidized my tech activities and not the other way around.
In my experience, most people who live in rural areas already have access to a suitable vehicle - because a 30-year-old pickup is the cheapest vehicle to own in those circumstances, long-term.
As a car audio enthusiast, the biggest obstacle to putting a system into a new high-tech car is bypassing the deeply-embedded infotainment system while retaining decent aesthetics and steering wheel controls. The idea of getting an electric drivetrain and new-car safety with a 90's-style blank canvas for audio is amazing.
I hope that the noise isolation and intended speaker mounting locations are good!
I read this as the parent complaining about other car manufacturers selling you crappy default stereos so that you'll upgrade, not that Slate is excluding a stereo on this truck to upsell you.
In fact, I would be rather surprised if you could buy $4,000 worth of stereo equipment for this car, given their promo materials seem to include a $100 bluetooth speaker below an iPhone.
Its a cool car, but forgive me for not getting Lucy-Footballed again by an electric car startup claiming to be able to "change the game" while never actually getting any cars sold.
Yeah, the completely unrealistic timeline, price point, and the fact that the company is only now looking to hire engineers sets off my "fun looking product that will never be available for sale" alarms. I don't think they even have a prototype built yet, everything you see is just a render. They have not even started planning how to start building the factory.
The price point is assuming the R&D is already paid off, the factory is built, the supply lines are optimized, and they're building a million of these things every year. History has shown that you can't start off with a cheap mass produced car as your only product because mass production requires way too much startup capital. The success stories started with hand built extremely expensive cars that were used to pay down R&D costs and keep the company afloat while they built the factory for the mass production model.
About the only way I see this happening is if Bezos goes all in and dumps an outrageous amount of money into getting the production line running knowing that he won't see a return for at least a decade or more, and I don't think he's quite that generous. Also this assumes that cheap lightweight powerful batteries become widely available in the next couple of years.
- "This doesn't seem to be a working vehicle. The Autopian's David Tracy climbed underneath and didn't see any powertrain or proper suspension components, indicating this is a non-functional show car."
> The Autopian's David Tracy climbed underneath and didn't see any powertrain or proper suspension components, indicating this is a non-functional show car.
My take: with financing this timeline (end of 2026 for first deliveries) is totally doable. The truck is extremely simple. Extremely. There is nothing exotic about the drivetrain or suspension; probably the hardest part was getting the plastic body panel stuff set up.
Second hardest part was designing for simplicity. At some point that part of the process will stop and they will ship.
Price: Probably too low. Manufacturing capacity: who knows? Deliverable: for sure. This is totally deliverable with today’s engineers and today’s parts.
If they could produce 100,000 of these instantaneously and sell at a 20K price point they'd sell all of them before the end of tomorrow and they'd immediately go out of business because they would be about a billion dollars in the hole, at a minimum.
Absolutely love this. Love brands taking the SLC (simple, lovable, complete: https://longform.asmartbear.com/slc/) approach - minimalism is an absolute delight in a world where everything is crammed with unnecessary/unused feature bloat.
(That said, I'd love a stereo - even if it was just a built in bluetooth speaker/aux-in, which feels like a perfect compromise!)
I like this comment because it both argues for "SLC" design and contains the reason why we don't get it: "Sure this thing looks great if only it had <FEATURE>" where <FEATURE> is different for every buyer.
> A Bluetooth speaker holder that fits under the climate knobs is available, but there is also a soundbar that can be installed in the dashboard storage compartment.
Technically you could zip tie or duct tape an Amazon Basics Bluetooth speaker to just anything even a lawnmower. This looks like just one step above that.
It’s a shame they didn’t add a DIN head unit slot and throw a plastic cover over it, preinstall install speaker wires. Anyone could then DIY a real stereo for less than they are probably selling the Bluetooth speaker/soundbar.
or just pre-installed dashboard speakers with an AUX input and single volume+power knob. very cheap off the shelf parts. would save customers from weird bluetooth speaker setups, and would support a wide variety of devices – from iPods to tablets to pocket radios.
no speakers and low range are the only two things I'd quibble about. and maybe the price, seems too high for what you're getting.
I loved the Saturn plastic doors. The salesdroids were conditioned to call them "polymer panels" and I got corrected when I bought my SL2 back in the day, but I was sold when in their own showroom he kicked the door in, it visibly dented, and then popped itself right back out with no damage to either the paint or the pla, uh, polymer.
That SL2 went from California to Maine, down to Georgia and back to California. It never had any dings and had only a few scratches in the paint. My Civics seem to get dinged if you look at them wrong.
I wish I could have said the same about the Saturn's stickshift, though. That actually fractured when I was in Gilroy. I mean, the shaft literally snapped.
My first car was a Saturn, they performed that same trick in the salesroom as well. They didn't keep that trend up forever though, in the late 2000s my father went to go purchase another Saturn, and he was reeling up to give it a kick before the salesman had to hurriedly tell him they didn't make them like that anymore.
That was probably by the time they had become a glorified Opel rebadge shop. I was probably going to buy another Saturn and I might have settled for an Ion, but the Astra was, to borrow from Dan Neil, "hewn from solid blocks of mediocrity." So now I drive Hondas again.
Yeah, the problem with Saturn was the general level of QA of GM cars of that era. I could make the "check engine" light come on by pressing the accelerator with a small amount of force in my SL2. And it didn't handle very well.
I put down $50 to reserve one. I grew up with an old car that I tinkered with endlessly. Mostly because it was simple enough for me to get my head around! This car reminds me of that time.
I'm hoping that they go with a lot of "off-the-shelf" electronics and mechanical parts. Standards are a blessing.
It feels like they're going with a different business model to traditional car manufacturers. AFAIK most manufacturers make a lot of their money via servicing. I'd love to take a look at what their long-term business strategy is.
Depending on where you live you can almost build certain older cars from new parts. For the UK I believe you can get every single part of an Morris Mini either brand new or at least refurbished. For France you can probably built a Citroen 2CV for parts, including an EV version.
A friend is doing exactly that with a defender 130 . New galvanized frame, every panel new, new axles, new brakes, new transmission, transfer case and engine. New seats, new interior, new doors. Cool project.
Thanks for the link. I see they sell portable bluetooth speakers we can mount under the dash. I like the idea of DIY wrapping both the interior and exterior; I can imagine anime fan boys like my son coming up with very wild art for these wraps. I had also forgotten cars used to have hand cranks to roll up the windows.
Very exciting! Electric vehicles have the ability to be very simple, much simpler than an ICE.
Although electric can't be 100% analog, I miss the old days when a car has no software updates, no telemetry, no privacy issues, no mandatory subscription for features.
I don't mind too much if there's still microcontrollers in the car, but I'd really rather they didn't have internet connectivity. The only antenna should be for AM/FM radio.
AM is on its way out with EVs though. there's no reason that a car that has all of that internet connectivity cannot have the same features just without sending the telemetry. upgrades do not need to be OTA, and be upgraded through a USB or even bluetooth from a device. the only reason for it is that there's money to be made from that telemetry.
And TPMS. And key-fob remote lock/unlock. And BTLE for BYO music / calls.
> but I'd really rather they didn't have internet connectivity.
This is the one big thing that has me leaning towards "used, 2015 or older" for my next car.
With an EV, you really do want a way to specify how much power / when should be used for charging though; some "discounted" electric utility plans require being able to shed / schedule big loads on demand, too.
If this vehicle doesn't have any screen, you need to use a phone or similar to configure all this. Yes, schedule data can be done over BTLE, but something big like an OTA update can not be (at least, practically).
There's also a lot of value (for some people) in being able to change/monitor charge capacity from distances further away than what BTLE would support.
If the modem could be toggled and there was a USB port for software updates, I'd be _thrilled_.
I've a petrol car so I don't really know, but what's stopping the power/timing controls from being buttons on the charger wall unit? Even a local network app I'd have no issue with, but I really don't want my car or charging unit on the internet.
Yep, this can absolutely be done. Home wall chargers are just a fancy switch[1], you just need a way to enable/disable it. Could be a feature of the charger, but in the worst case you could add your own secondary contactor that removes power from the entire charger when you don't want the car to be charging.
[1]: They also have control pins to tell the car the maximum amperage they're allowed to draw, but that's not relevant to the feature of "disable the charger when I don't want it charging"
> but what's stopping the power/timing controls from being buttons on the charger wall unit?
The car makes all the decisions about how much power to draw and when to do it.
Excluding the DC super/fast chargers, the hardware on the wall is pretty "dumb".
It's been pointed out elsewhere, but remote notifications are useful so you know it's time to get out of the public charger and let somebody else in (or to go back out and check on why it's suddenly stopped charging)
While the processing is practically necessarily digital it is possible to build an analog of an analog system - which is to say a digital device that acts in very much the same way that an analog device would. I think many people are underestimating the mini revolution still going on in the quality and price of electronic components.
What do you mean by "analog?" It's not possible to make an "analog" vehicle of any kind due to regulation:
* It would be impossible to pass modern car emissions standards without electronic engine control.
* Backup cameras are mandatory, so you need an electronic pixel display somewhere.
* Lane keeping is required in Europe as of 2022, so that's a suite of sensors and computer-steering as a requirement.
* AEB will be required as of 2029 in the US, so that's a full electronic braking system (some form of pressure accumulator/source, solenoids/valves) and forward looking sensors (radar, lidar, visual, etc.).
>Backup cameras are mandatory, so you need an electronic pixel display somewhere.
The vast vast majority of backup cameras ARE analog, including all the little one inch cubes you see poorly mounted on the back of sedans, and including the ones VW/Audi uses.
You could in fact plug their signal into a tube TV from the 50s. You might lose some overlay features.
If you want any one of:
Smooth running. Reliable start. Smooth Throttle application and resistance to all the problems we had with carbs. Airbags. Automatic management of cold weather performance.
Then you REQUIRE electronic actuators, sensors, and microcontrollers.
> The vast vast majority of backup cameras ARE analog
The camera<->head unit signal modulation is analog but unless the display is a CRT, both ends of the system are digital.
This is basically why I was asking “what do you mean, analog” - I suspect the OP really wanted either no touchscreen or no telematics, which are totally unrelated to whether the systems are analog or digital.
There was a whole generation of very cool analog computer fuel injection (K-jetronic for example) that avoided most carb problems for end users without going full computer - but, there wasn’t a chance these kinds of system could continue to pass modern emissions standards.
Nor practical but an analog system could probably meet the standard.
---
Rearview image means a visual image, detected by means of a single source, of the area directly behind a vehicle that is provided in a single location to the vehicle operator and by means of indirect vision.
Rear visibility system means the set of devices or components which together perform the function of producing the rearview image as required under this standard.
---
5.5 just says it needs to meet certain testing standards, start displaying within 2 seconds of backing up, and stop displaying when driving forward.
In many countries around the world you can buy a brand new 70 series Land Cruiser with a mechanical injection diesel fuel pump, crank windows, no screen, etc. No computer.
NGOs and UN buy them in the thousands for Africa and the Middle East.
The packet size is a major one. The lack of larger packets leads to nonsense like the "freshness manager" in things like AUTOSAR's SecOC, or the addressing scheme. Every subsequent CAN extension has tried to rectify both of these in different ways and inevitably failed, which leads to the next layer up the networking stack reinventing the wheel badly. Eventually you end up with UDS.
Yea, that 64-byte frame size. In practice, I've always seen it abstracted away into a layer on top, but if you're working low-level (e.g. implementing that layer), it's a pain. So, a given packet may be represented by multiple frames.
I doubt CAN bus will be around that much longer, I know several EV manufacturers are actively phasing it out. Yes, it was revolutionary in it's time but it's a 40 year old standard that doesn't have enough bandwidth for the requirements of modern cars, and it was designed before security was even a thought. It's also unnecessarily complex wiring that adds weight to the car. Even the updated FD standard is only 8 mbps, so it's barely enough for video from a backup camera.
As I understand it, newer systems like LVCS and Ethernet use less wire and smaller connectors. Apparently it can save up to 30% of the weight in a wiring harness which would be about 100 lbs. There was a thread on it on HN not long ago.
Video for a backup camera is mandatory on new cars in the US and Europe, so it makes sense to use the same bus.
However I wonder about the overlap between people that need a truck and this particular truck. I have only owned trucks when I needed to go out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere with a payload, in places with poor access to electricity. If I need to go in bumfuck nowhere without payload then there is no need for the truck, and if I need a payload in the city it's just way way cheaper to have it delivered when you factor in depreciation of even a cheap truck.
Would really love to see something like this with a simple 4 cylinder motor. Like the old s-10 / ranger. Until then the solution I have found is to just tag a trailer on small passenger vehicle, since it is now impossible to find a compact gas truck.
I think that you're looking at extremes exclusively when it comes to your assessment. I live in a "city" in WV and need my truck all the time to get to rural areas, but that doesn't mean that I don't have reasonable access to electricity. Furthermore delivery around my city really isn't affordable or available in a lot of cases.
That being said, I really wish we had a small ICE truck in the USA, or an equivalent to the s-10/ranger. Even the ford maverick is exceptionally tall and it doesn't come with a bed that is big enough to conveniently move building materials.
The maverick bed is only 54" or 4.5ft and older model rangers and S10s can be had with up to a 6ft bed.
I bought a Maverick and it wasn't noticeably larger than my extended bed ranger, I actually feel like it is smaller, especially considering modern A pillars and such are very thick and rigid compared to the death trap of the old ranger.
I have had no issues moving construction materials with the Maverick. I've moved around 12ft boards and stacks of drywall. The only real difference I noticed is I can't lazily hang things off the tailgate, which tailgate latches aren't specced to do anyways.
Not sure which ranger you're talking about - but if you mean the 6ft one, 18 inches of bed length is definitely noticeable.
It's also definitely possible to haul all those things with almost any truck. Hell, you could even buy a rack for a maverick that makes full 8ft by 4ft sheets of drywall/plywood super easy to carry around, but being able to really easily load up stuff and not have to do some complicated strapping/securing of the payload is a big win with a bigger bed. I personally haul motorcycles a lot, and being able to have two motorcycles in the bed with tailgate up is a huge plus for me.
edit: misunderstood your first comment. What year Ranger are you talking about? The difference between an 80's/90's small truck and an early 2000s can be very considerable.
There's a whole different conversation and argument about the general size of vehicles in the US that is essentially circular and leads to bigger and bigger vehicles in the name of "safety".
The Maverick is also kind of dumb because of the choice to do unibody instead of body on frame. I'm sure there's some weight savings or whatever, but at least on a body on frame truck, I can opt to change the bed out even on a short bed truck and add a flatbed when it makes sense. When someone using it like a truck inevitably beer cans the bed, they're going to be really sad that it's not a relatively quick and simple thing to fix (by just going and getting another bed).
Yes. I want this truck...but with a 4 cylinder ice engine. Nothing fancy. No needed stereo or seat warmers or complicated anything. I want a small, simple, and affordable truck with good reliability. Before anyone asks, I can't drive the tiny Japanese trucks in my state. They are cool, but look too small when people are driving what are essentially container ships with wheels these days.
No thanks. More expensive with garbage infotainment system that violates the user's privacy. Also I'd bet the engine won't hold up well in the long term
FWIW, the Maverick works pretty much as expected if you pull the wires for the telematics control unit. (i.e. the infotainment system works minus the connectivity.)
As far as the engine, I’d bet on the hybrid engine holding up better than the ecoboost long-term.
Rural areas tend to not have gas close. 10 miles or so. I know farmers who get gas delivery just because some cars never go to town, just field to field. Charge an ev at home and they avoid a lot of fuel headaches.
I remember in the '70s in central California many farmers did a similar thing, except with propane instead of electricity. They already had large propane tanks and regular propane delivery because they used propane for heating and cooking, so converting a truck to run on propane brought the same kind of convenience that an EV brings today.
In my experience "bumfuck nowhere" has better access to electricity than the city. Every farmer has a welder plugged into a handy accessible high amperage socket.
My experience of rural areas is that few are actual farmers. After all, farming has largely consolidated and become automated. Most country people just don't want a city lifestyle. They might have some of the accoutrements of a farmer and have added lifestyle (enjoyable/fulfilling) overhead and significant attitude (independence & sometimes xenophobia) for themselves, but it's a lifestyle choice. Therefore most don't have a welder (though they probably know someone who has one).
That's rural but not "bumfuck nowhere". Within ~100 miles of a city there are a lot of rural non-farmers, but only farmers will live 200 miles away from the closest city.
Very few people live over 200 miles from a city in the lower-48 states of the US.
To give you an idea: It's 413 miles between Colorado Springs and Wichita[1], leaving a very narrow area to be over 200 miles from either. Grand Island, Nebraska is 402 miles from Denver.
Pretty much all the land is over 200 miles away from a city of at least 50k population is in the great basin. To give you an idea, there are 3 cities in North Dakota (a 200x200 mile rectangle) that have a population of at least 50k, and with Bismarck relatively near the center, that rules out much of the state alone.
1: Dodge City is technically a city, but at much less than 50k population I'll omit it. If you allow anything called a city to count you could probably fit the list of people on a single piece of paper. Using the 50k cutoff you still have 3 cities in North Dakota, a 300x200 mile rectangle.
I don't think that's true, but can't quickly find evidence. Ultimately it can't be depended on and is something an EV buyer would want to verify for their region.
Definitely depends. Most my neighbors in the country have 100 amp service and they are sucking that dry already now that they have heated water and electric HVAC. Many more run solar only since it can cost $30K+ for a half mile extension.
It sounds like the truck is very modular so maybe they’ll offer a generator option for gasoline-powered charging. Otherwise you could throw a normal generator in the bed.
I'm living in a suburb but been thinking about a pick up
Some uses are, impulse Craigslist and local furniture purchases, outdoor sports equipment, home garden projects.
My sedan is trashed from ocean related stuff I'm always putting in it. I was in a rush the other day, accidently left something wet in the car all day and have a mildew smell now to deal with. Dumb stuff like that seems avoidable.
Keep a desiccant pack in the car, it'll go a long way towards avoiding damp-related issues. The reusable silica gel ones market for gun safes come in a metal can that's easy to handle & recharge in the oven at low temperature. We have muddy gear in/out of our cars constantly and this has worked for us.
Due to it being electric or due to the specific design? EVs are generally much easier to design for water crossings. I actually drove an electric motorcycle across a river fully submerged, which it wasn't even designed for (had to do a thorough check afterwards but it was completely fine). This is not even remotely possible with the bike I normally ride (Africa Twin).
Proper sealing, mostly. The bike I was riding is a custom-built enduro, the electric part is fully sealed up to the handlebars but the river turned out to be a bit deeper, as it often happens. Electric drivetrains are much simpler. They aren't running as hot as ICE, don't need outside air, have less vibration and fewer moving parts... you can make it a proper submarine if you desire. In fact, certain 2WD electric mopeds are rated for underwater riding.
It's possible to use a normal motorcycle fully submerged as well [1], but designing for that is way harder due to the exposed engine, you need a ton of things and not just a snorkel.
"Safe" is relative, but I've taken older Honda civics through water part-way up the doors. When you're in the middle of nowhere it's nice to have options. Do you run the risk of major electrical faults if you run this through water?
>The rather extreme omission of any kind of media system in the car is jarring, but it, too, has secondary benefits.
>“Seventy percent of repeat warranty claims are based on infotainment currently because there’s so much tech in the car that it’s created a very unstable environment in the vehicle,” Snyder says.
I'm totally cool with them not having an infotainment screen or even a stereo itself. But speaker management might be a pain.
I really hope they decide to either include speakers to which you connect to your own infotainment system or at the very least, have the space or brackets where you can bring your own speakers and install them without cutting.
Having a bluetooth speaker take care of all the sound is just too bulky and cumbersome for those of us who need to live with constant music in the car. Plus, I don't want to leave a $150 bluetooth speaker in my car all the time and encourage break-ins.
There is a video going around showing Slate’s answer is an optional, removable Bluetooth speaker. It looked similar to a JBL. There’s a bracket to mount it on the dash.
I'd rather have my Bluetooth speaker stolen than an installed stereo stolen where they just gut parts of the car and rip things up. But it will be a bigger target since it's easier to resell.
Looks like the dash and door cards are pretty much just flat plas- er, reinforced polymer. Aftermarket stereos and speakers come with mounting brackets and bezels to cover the holes you’ll need to cut.
> It only seats two yet has a bed big enough to hold a sheet of plywood.
Not really the point of the article, but, does it? This[0] says the bed is 60 inches long and 43 wide, and plywood is 96x48 inches. Is it like, any vehicle fits plywood if you cut it to the size of the truck or stack it on top?
That appears to be the bed width between the wheel wells. I assume it would fit width wise on top of the wheels, which is still in the bed. As to the length, not even most full size trucks are long enough to fit the whole sheet. I guess the main point is that you wouldn't have any trouble getting the sheet of plywood home.
In my old Ranger there were a couple of spots in the bed where you could put a couple of 2x8 beams across it and have a place to stack 4x8 sheets. You did have to lower the tailgate, but they didn't stick out past the end of the lowered tailgate so there was no special requirements (flags etc...) for hauling them. It was very convenient. I would hope this truck has a similar feature, since it's almost free to add and increases the utility greatly.
You generally have to find someone willing to sell you a fleet vehicle if you want a full 8 foot bed. Modern trucks are more like minivans with a vestigial bed sticking out of the back.
I have on old fleet truck: four full doors and an eight-foot bed. I love it, it’s getting quite old, and I have no idea how I’m ever going to replace it
Yeah, it's interesting that their FAQ [1] just says it can fit "full size sheets of plywood" and their specs page [2] also does not list the actual dimensions, only the volume. A 60"x43" bed would technically fit a 96"x48" sheet, but you would have to lean one edge against the side of the bed.
That said, the article you linked appears to list the bed width at the wheel wells. They say the Maverick's bed is 42.6" wide but above the wheel wells it 53" wide or so. You can find plenty of pictures of people hauling plywood with one. I suspect the Slate is similar.
I'm quite excited about this. Ticks all my boxes for "low" tech, simple, moddable, useful, and cheap. I'm hoping my aging Pontiac Vibe holds out long enough to upgrade to one of these, if they succeed. I put in a preregistration!
The problem is, the kind of person who cares about those things, as valid as they are, buys 0-1 cars per 20 years, and the market is driven (ha ha) by people who buy 2-3 cars every 2 years.
Very true. This truck appeals to me very much. My wife and I have a 2010 Accord and a 2014 CR-V. We could afford newer and/or fancier cars, but we just don't care about those things.
We're thinking of buying a newer car at some point, but between interest rates and, now, tariffs, we're not in any hurry.
My 30-year-old daughter is still driving the Toyota version, the Matrix, also 2008, that we bought in about 2013. She loves the thing. If she didn't have it, I'm sure I would still be driving it.
I find it hilarious that it's a limited-edition M Theory model. It has a badge glued to the dash that says "1926 of 5000." For a Toyota econobox.
> Looks like the biggest thing isn’t even mentioned: no telematics control unit to track your behavior.
Is that confirmed? I would buy one *today* if this was known to be true... but I am 80% sure that they don't have any in production; all I see are renders.
There will almost certainly be a WiFi radio (for at home OTA updates) but there will likely be a modem, too, for people that like to remotely manage charge. The modem may be an optional extra and the WiFi traffic is something I can block/inspect as needed.
> There will almost certainly be a WiFi radio (for at home OTA updates) but there will likely be a modem, too, for people that like to remotely manage charge.
The truck will come with a choice of two battery packs: a 57.2 kWh battery pack with rear-wheel drive and a target range of 150 miles and an 84.3 kWh battery pack with a target of 240 miles (386 km).
Perfect. Instant buy for me if they can deliver on their promises. No other car in recent memory has spoken to my minimalist frugal engineering mind like this one. Hope my 2000 4runner lasts until the Slate gets delivered to my door!
This should really be mainstream car manufacturing. I can't wait for the day when we have choice of cheap cars, with DiY upgrades and no fucking tracking mechanisms built in and something that works without a phone. I wish them all the success and for the first time in my adult life, I'm excited about technology in cars again!
> The simplification goes simpler still. Slate will make just one vehicle, in just one trim, in just one color, with everything from bigger battery packs to SUV upgrade kits added on later.
Makes me wonder if, once "normal" features are added, cost and reliability will be a problem?
In contrast, I could see this really helping the dealer model work because dealers could compete with different customizations.
That being said: At least when it comes to the battery, efficiencies come from a single large battery instead of a modular battery. I suspect they'll need to offer a larger battery at the factory.
I could imagine this being popular for company and fleet trucks, but I can't imagine it being popular for personal vehicles with the general public. The people I know who drive personal pickup trucks want the absolute biggest one they can find and have zero interest in actually doing any truck activities with it. They drive their Raptors and 2500s to work and to burger king and that's it. If they do any customization, they might take it to a shop and pay them to put a louder muffler on it.
So basically they are doing the simple "BEV can be cheap if you don't try to size the battery for long distance driving" but leave out lots of other things that don't meaningfully contribute to the lower price, as a distraction.
That might be just the thing that had been missing for bootstrapping the market of short haul electric (think of all those trips that are done in a car because they are almost but not quite walkable/bikeable!). Reminds me of how the Tesla roadster and then S bootstrapped the market of luxury electric.
If this can’t compete head to head (no tariffs or other import restrictions) with BYD and the like, then I don’t know why one would get excited. Feels like an expensive consolation prize with tons of compromises. I want competition.
You can't really compete in a any real sense when the labor price differential is so massive and the companies and supply chains are directly subsidized. The price does not reflect the product, but all its inputs.
I never said that I’d expect that a US automaker would “win”. I want the best car at the cheapest price to be made available. And for that to be done within a level playing field with regards to safety / workforce / environmental / labor regulations. My expectation is that US automakers do not win, even with subsidies. But I do think keeping an industrial base in the US would be worth that compromise.
Historically, tariffs guarantee the local market will not win.
Tariffs (the "chicken tax") are directly responsible for US trucks being so expensive. They have no foreign competition in the US.
Environmental regulation loopholes cause US trucks to be so big, which is a related problem.
It's probably possible for US manufacturing to compete directly with foreign manufacturers, but they have no incentive to do so now that Trump extended the chicken-tax to all imported cars.
It's not a loophole if you explicitly state: "This is what we are going to focus on." The CAFE regulations also regulate pickup trucks, just less stringently.
>CAFE has separate standards for "passenger cars" and "light trucks" even if the majority of "light trucks" are being used as passenger vehicles. The market share of "light trucks" grew steadily from 9.7% in 1979 to 47% in 2001, remained in 50% numbers up to 2011.[7] More than 500,000 vehicles in the 1999 model year exceeded the 8,500 lb (3,900 kg) GVWR cutoff and were thus omitted from CAFE calculations.[10] More recently, coverage of medium duty trucks has been added to the CAFE regulations starting in 2012, and heavy duty commercial trucks starting in 2014.
>"If this can’t compete head to head (no tariffs or other import restrictions) with BYD and the like, then I don’t know why one would get excited."
Would you prefer our roads flooded with cheap Chinese EVs that are the automotive equivalent of Shein hauls? Protectionism has its place in certain areas, and I would say building a thriving domestic EV industry that isn't beholden to a single weirdo is one of them.
I’m pretty sure there are more possible outcomes than “this one truck or cheap, dangerous Chinese EVs.” False choice fallacy.
A lack of import restrictions in no way prevents safety regulations. You could also subsidize the domestic automobile industry without having tariffs, so that we protect our domestic industrial base. These things take no imagination.
I can’t find any evidence that the NHTSA has ever evaluated Chinese EVs negatively. The ones not available in the US meet high standards in other places like Europe and Australia.
>"Do you think that the rest of the world needs to protect itself from Tesla then and slap tariffs on any Tesla cars exported?"
If it were a stated policy goal of said country to develop their own indigenous EV production at scale, then yes. The same the US did for 30 years after WWII to develop its own auto industry.
The era of dumping mass amounts of cheap "good enough" products on the global market, made entirely possible by the ignored and externalized costs of dumping trillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere via oceanic shipping, is coming to a close.
I drive a Polestar 2, which is a Chinese manufactured EV, and it's better quality than most North American vehicles.
The Munroe Live episode on it should disavow people of these biases. He ends it with a strong warning about people's weird biases about Chinese manufacturing.
Completely anecdotally from a friend who has BYD Atto3 - he had couple of issues with cameras. Plus some early rust (which is not unheard of in forums). So did his sister.
My impression of driving it - materials are nice, but overall experience (interior looks and software, aka what you use the most) was quite terrible in the context I own Tesla Model Y. I'm sure going from 15 year old Nissan you'd be ecstatic.
The issue with this is they claim the cost savings came from not having a screen and other silly features, but that’s not where money is spent.
The real cost savings came a tiny, 150 mile battery. It could easily be <100 miles loaded up after a few years of use, which means there are very few use cases for this truck, and it certainly doesn’t make sense without the tax credit. Cool idea, but there’s no getting around the price of batteries
Right, but it needs to be competitive with ICE cars that travel several hundred miles per tank and fill up in minutes. Literally 0 of my friends have been willing to transition to electric due primarily to range anxiety, and that's for vehicles that achieve over 200 miles per charge. I drive an EV and even I would simply never, ever consider this vehicle based on the range.
As the owner of a 2014 Nissan leaf with ~70 miles of range left, this statement makes no sense... ~100 miles (after years of use and loaded down) sounds amazing. I use my leaf CONSTANTLY and only resort to my 2000 Chevy S10 for things like dump runs, home projects, helping friends move, etc.
Maybe if it was the only EV in town I'd change my tune. I am willing to pay extra for a battery that will take me 200 miles because I make one-way 100m trips often enough. Keep in mind, where I live there is some decent charging availability, but the places I would visit don't have much. I've also had a couple of experiences where I get to the charging place and it doesn't work for some reason. I have some range anxiety for sure.
I drive 20 miles a day and fill my tank once a month.
Or I could plug in my car every night in my garage. Where I already park and exit my car every day.
There's no competition to be had here. It's a choice between going to the gas station occasionally or not at all.
The 100 mile EV doesn't go beyond 100 miles, but that's not what it's for and not why I need it. I need a puddle jumper to get beat up and rode hard in big city traffic for 20-40 minutes a day and that's it.
There are plenty of use cases in the narrow band that it can operate, but it is a pretty narrow band.
Around town commuter in climate that doesn't need AWD/4WD, like great for shopping, commuting, or for small contractors doing jobs. Two people in the vehicle plus luggage, it will be interesting to see what happens to range.
Love the concept.
> According to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation, 95.1 percent of trips taken in personal vehicles are less than 31 miles; almost 60 percent of all trips are less than 6 miles. In total, the average U.S. driver only covers about 37 miles per day.
> In a study published in 2016, researchers at MIT found that a car with a 73-mile range (like an early version of the Nissan Leaf), charged only at night, could satisfy 87 percent of all driving days in the United States.
This truck is compact/low-cost enough that you could commute to a city job, and its competitors for that are basically the Leaf, Bolt, Fiat 500e, Kia Niro and Hyundai Kona.
The bed is pointless for commuting, but so are the back seats in any of those other cars.
I commute in a Fiesta, and it’s been years since anybody has sat in the back seats.
2 years worth according to my math using ride.guru and that's in advance. That also means I don't have a truck and I have to coordinate trips twice a day. And that strictly commuting, not accounting for all the other uses I have for a car...
That jives pretty well with the total cost of ownership of a vehicle. There are plenty of reasons why one would want to buy, but unless one of those reasons is specifically “to be a frugal driver with a Civic/Prius/Corolla”, Uber at least seems cost-competitive for in-city use.
I’m a two-car household with my partner, but I’ve assumed that if one car is out of commission, we’d be fine with Uber+one car for at least several months while we take the time to thoroughly research/negotiate/etc. options.
Of course, my remark was more on if the sole purpose was to drive to and from work. It seems absurd to be ok with spending $20k if that is the primary feature. I'd expect a few more use cases, especially to buy new vs. used. But I've gone years with a used $800 car and my current vehicle was acquired in 2011, was only 5 years old at the time, for around $8k and has been going fine since.
Yes, exactly. And a 150 mile battery is still not that tiny in terms of size and weight, and still probably costs more than 20k alone, (unless you source it from China.)
The fact that it’s so bare bones (no stereo, etc. unless you put one in) makes me really hope that it doesn’t phone home with a firehose of telemetry like pretty much every other new car. If so, they’ve got my interest
I've seen that it doesn't have the ability to phone home on it's own but that OTA updates and other connectivity relies on you using their optional phone app and your phones internet connection.
That's the killer feature for me, if this actually comes out the after market mods are going to be amazing, having a test bed for creating your own self driving rigs is going to be a complete game changer.
It's so hackable (in a good way) that this platform could foster a whole knew segment of the population getting into EV manufacturing and dramatically increase the talent pool the same way the VW beetle and the Lisa Computer did, hobbyist hackers are the greatest pool for technical founders.
Not to mention replacing the exterior panels with custom displays and other amazing "Art Car" opportunities.
I see this and I don't see it as an every day, driving-on-my-commute style vehicle. As someone who (previously) drove a 2014 honda civic, cheaper cars leave a lot of comfort for longer drives. I can't imagine this barebones vehicle being fun to drive for any extended period of time, or any extended distance, unless you'd spent considerable time customizing it to those needs (at which point, you've probably spent more than buying something off the shelf).
I do see this being great for short utility trips (think running errands, picking something up, etc), and as a utility vehicle (would be nice to be able to have an 8ft bed).
It would be really interesting to me to see a fleet of vehicles like this that are ultra-rentable; think a Bird/Lime scooter, but a utility truck.
> I do see this being great for short utility trips (think running errands, picking something up, etc), and as a utility vehicle (would be nice to be able to have an 8ft bed).
Japan and the rest of the world figured this out decades ago. They're called kei trucks. You can buy pre-2000 imported ones in the US from like $5-15k depending on the miles/condition/year/transmission. I have a 1990 Suzuki Carry that is solely used for trips to Home Depot and picking up random furniture from FB Marketplace that I got for $6k.
I'm in NJ so as long as it's 30 years or older there's no emissions required. If you're in a state that doesn't allow registration of kei trucks then there are companies that make it pretty straightforward to get them titled and registered in states that have very lax laws like Montana.
Not going to say it's right, but for a vehicle that is occassionally used to drive between your home and the hardware store, I'm sure that a ton of these types of vehicles are just not registered. Even if you get caught without registration, the inconvenience is relatively minor (when compared to a daily-driver not being registered)
If the timing weren't so off (I just bought a compact electric car), then this would have been a real possibility for me: 150 miles is about 1 weeks worth of driving for me, it's usually just me (or occasionally +1), and we have my wife's car for driving the whole family long distances. Of course I'm skeptical that it will come in under $27,500 (implied by the "Under $20k after federal incentives), and if it's much more than that it will start to get squeezed by other options.
Completely agree. It has to end up cheap enough to be a "tool", rather than a "vehicle". If there isn't a clear price-based market segmentation between the two, this will get crushed.
~$30k for a manual-window, slow-charging truck? Will anybody in the US actually want one?
It's a cool concept... looks good to my eye, small trucks are neat, etc. But, I'd want push-button windows, up-to-date charge controller/battery tech, and the normal EV integrated app. Maybe if it was really a $20k truck (they're advertising the price after incentives, many of which are either going away or vanish for higher income earners).
Makes you wonder if they picked that form factor to appeal to a certain market segment that's current underserved?
I love the concept, but at $20.000USD it's to much. My guess is that they'd need to hit 15.000USD for the extend range version. Two minor thing I would chance, as others pointed out: Bench seat, and the second: Just make the holes/mounting options for an after market stereo.
Hopefully this is successful and will push other manufacturers to create similar options. I saw an old Morris parked outside the gym the other day, it took up maybe 2/3 of a parking space, it was perfectly size for my grandparents, it perfectly sized for my needs. I get that the car grows a bit in size, once all the modern safety features are added, but I don't see why that would amount to much more than the size of say an Opel Kadett D or E, or a Volvo for the 1980s.
Thing is, it's not even really a $20k truck. It's a ~$30k truck, with some federal rebates available to some buyers.
If it was a legit $20k truck/SUV, it would make a fine replacement for my wife's current car (at least by usage requirements, but not even close by style/luxury demands).
> Tell me you haven't purchased a vehicle in the current millennium, without telling me?
I have, and I think they are way to expensive for the use I get. My issue is that $20.000 quickly becomes $30.000 once my government is done with adding taxes. I drive a 12 year old car, original price was ~25.000USD. It's going to be around 30.000USD to replace it, once it dies. The price difference between getting an extremely bare bones car vs. one from a known brand, in colour, with better range going to be negligible I fear.
Anyone? Sure. If this was available 2 months ago, I may have bought one instead of a used Polestar. The Polestar is wildly faster, more luxurious, better range, but I'd have liked a truck, and if I got the $7500 tax credit, I'd have paid about $9k less for this. (Used, 20k miles, $29k.)
Lots of people? Much harder to say. Has to be either "first car" kind of thing for someone young, or "second car" in a family where it's OK to have a 2-seater with limited range be used for commuting/errands. (Or "third car" for people with money to spare.)
There's a 5-seat SUV version, so that expands the market a bit. I'm still not convinced it'll sell without beefing up the specs a bit while maintaining the price.
"third car" for people with money to spare.
Yeah, but the same ~$20k - $30k buys you a heck of a lot more ICE. A new Maverick XLT starts in that range. Or a Lariat trim at $34k. And if this is just a toy, that same money gets you in a new base or very high-spec used Miata.
120kW charging system, so ~30 minute 20-80% (on a relatively small battery), was what I saw. It's not "wall plug" slow, but it's nowhere near state-of-the-art. The small battery and slow(-ish) charging means it's mostly a run-about and less (relatively) suitable for roadtrips. The American market loves to buy on the most intense use, not the average or minimal - giant pickup trucks because somebody might go to Home Depot once a season or tow a small boat at the beginning/end of lake season. Etc.
I'm looking for a vehicle which doesn't track my location, and doesn't have complex software controlling vehicle functions which could kill me. Maybe this is for me.
Not when they're constantly failing. I've a 2020 Honda Civic with a lane assist that has quite a few times tried to spontaneously squeeze me into the wrong lane. I was better off without it.
I have said this and will reiterate - building an 'afforable' EV is impossible with the current level of technology - by which I mean a vehicle that competes on price with affordable ICE vehicles, and doesn't make compromises that would make it impractical to own as the only car.
There are $20k cars with infotainment, bodypaint and probably a lot more creature comforts than this thing. Also this thing has a 150 mile range (less probably IRL), which is not practical.
Looking at the basic shape, the drag looks horrible, and probably the efficiencys bad too, considering they only manage 150k with an 52kWh battery.
Euros have already tried this, they put out abominable shitboxes where they tried to save money everywhere but the battery and charger, and the result were poverty cars which barely cost less than a Model 3.
Once you spend the money on a 400 mile battery and a fast enough charger to be practical, you're most of the way in terms of BOM to a 300HP electric upmarket road monster. Tesla understood this, and are dominating the market.
BYD also knows this, and there's a reason their C-segment EVs cost more than their D-segment plug-ins, despite the latter having tons of electric range.
Also doesn't cost $20k from the factory, it costs $20k with tax credit.
Why is this? We've been told that the cost of batteries is in freefall for years now. Why aren't they competitive yet with ICE, even if they are heavier?
Not a truck guy, but I like it. What I like the most is that it's not batshit fucking insane.
I recently visited America after a couple of years away, and spent a couple of weeks in California, driving from SF to LA. The thing which I found the most striking was the sheer insanity of the pickup trucks that were absolutely everywhere. These things were true Idiocracy-class monster trucks, which are clearly lethal to operate in any environment which includes pedestrians. In some cases, my five-year-old's head barely reached the bumper, and my wife's head didn't clear the hood. And these were highly-polished, un-dented behemoths that had clearly never seen a dirt road in their lives. The whole thing is clearly all about aesthetics and identity politics. Absolutely revolting.
(If you haven't visited the US recently, I think it's almost impossible to appreciate how obscene the phenomena is. 10 years ago, trucks were far more restrained, but could still do everything they needed to do. 30 years ago, trucks were fully half the size, but could still carry the same-size loads and do honest work. There's honestly no possible justification for their corpulent growth.)
Anyhow, this thing looks like it can do honest work without killing everyone who crosses its path. I really appreciate that. I hope it starts a trend.
This is really useful. It's an upgraded kei truck. All the modern safety features - airbags, ABS, rear view camera, anti-collision braking. None of the frills - infotainment, connectivity, etc.
I love this. We have a Fiat 500 EV that we got for $8k used that’s a fantastic city / small hauling car, and this beats it in many qualities in a way that’s still minimalist, reasonably affordable, and low maintenance (if as promised). We also have a 1986 4WD VW camper van which gets the big jobs done but is still manageable in the city. This truck is like the DIY marriage of the two.
This is amazing. I hope it succeeds. If I had any use for a truck I'd be lining up to buy one. They make one in a compact sedan or hatchback form factor and I am in. Heck, even better a subcompact.
I compared the dimensions of the Slate with my '06 Pontiac Vibe hatchback, and it's only a few inches longer. I suspect the Slate + Fastback kit will be pretty close to a hatchback in size and function.
I would love to have such a simple car, here in the uk.
Something tells me though, that if such a company got successful, it wouldn't be long before the features started creeping back in, to justify an increase in price.
This looks great. But isn't there a long history of new car companies over the last few decades that have an impressive car, take pre-orders and never deliver? Something about production hell?
Slate is financially backed by Bezos [1] and Eric Schmidt [2] so it's not like they're going to run out of money unless they choose to do so. And it's staffed by a bunch of Detroit automotive engineers, so it's not like they're going to be surprised to learn that building and selling automobiles is harder than launching a CRUD app or SAAS.
I do expect a steep price jump when they realize that all this customization (especially post-purchase) makes crash testing really difficult and expensive, $20k is not going to happen but hopefully it will be under $30k MSRP and under $40k with typical options, at least targeting a different market than Rivian.
Why would post-purchase customization be crash-tested at all? It’s not currently. If I buy an F-150 and jack it up, it’s not Ford’s responsibility to crash-test my work. Even if I use genuine Ford parts I buy from Ford.
This is too bad. I'm not buying anything from people who showed up January 20th. It hasn't been difficult. And luckily there is plenty of competition in the electric car space.
If they get somebody else at the helm (not Elon), I'll root for them like crazy.
Being backed by Bezos and the appearance of infinite funding isn't necessarily a good thing. You need someone at the helm that is driven and in control. Don't know who's running the company or if they have the proper mentality to get through production issues, but it's certainly not Bezos.
Either way, I'm rooting for their success. The low end car market is pretty much non-existent. I've heard people blame the cash for clunkers program that got rid of a ton of low end supply in 2009, but haven't looked into it too much.
By the way, THIS is how we stop inflation. We make new things that cost less and are innovative. People on here are so scared of "deflation" but the reality is, if you don't have deflation your not innovating enough!
I wish there were an all-wheel or four-wheel drive option. This would make it the perfect shorter-range adventuremobile for snowsports and remote backwoods climbing and hiking access.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely adore this truck. But I feel the same way about this truck that I do about the Framework Laptop (having owned one)—cool idea, cool product, but will Slate be around in 5 years to keep making parts and offering support for it?
This is a fair concern, I imagine. If it is highly user serviceable, maybe that isn't a concern.
That said, I think you raise a bigger issue - I'd like to see MORE things like Framework, Fairphone or Slate - user serviceable, customizable - maybe low initial cost.
To me, this feels futuristic, exciting, optimistic and positive.. we need more like this, so how can we make these kinds of businesses more likely to succeed, resilient, etc?
I'm very positive, however note that when they mention "injection molded polypropylene composite material" - this (i think) is the same material used for Seadoo Spark jetskis. I owned one and had a minor crash, and because this material cannot be repaired, the entire hull needed replacing, it was an insurance write-off. I hope they've thought about how to make this car repairable and not 'disposable' after the first inevitable minor crash. Of course this may not be a fair comparison because jetski hulls are exposed, whereas car chassis' have panels and bumpers.
Does this strategy even make sense? You can charge $20k for a car. Why wouldn’t you add options that cost you nearly nothing but some amount of buyers will opt in for a meaningful revenue increase.
Charge $1k for paint. Even if 95% of people don’t do that, 5% of orders just increased their revenue by 5%. Paint doesn’t take engineering time.. just spend $500 and let some other company do it. This is why trims exist, having a single low price point means people who want to spend more either produce lower revenue than possible, or are disappointed.
IMO this one trim, one price is almost certainly a prelaunch marketing gimmick as from a business perspective there is literally no benefit.
DIY wrap kit I guess is a form of options, but again seems like a missed revenue opportunity. Some of your market wants DIY customization, but realistically some anmount of (or almost every) consumer would rather pay +$1000 for a nice colored than $400 for a wrap kit.
I think it better if they just give options for easy modding. You take it to a garage for a mechanic to spray it, or to hollow out radio nook, or add a phone charger outlet.
This is amazing. More car manufacturers should get out of the infotainment business. tablet tethered to a cellphone for reception, and a connection to OBD2 for car data is all you need and allows for easy upgrades/replacements when things fail.
I do think they should keep in mind that people will want to do this and at least design the dash to easily accept a tablet mount (vesa standard), amp mount (plug and play Pyle 120v?), speaker wire, and speakers (6x9 or 6.5”). That’s an easy hour install if everything is standardized, accessible, and doesn’t require drilling.
Not sure if the article covers it (I read Ars Technica's, not Verge) but the Slate site shows that they do have support for tablets, bluetooth speaker mounts, 3-seat back row, etc.)
While speaker wiring might be nice... I sense that's less likely to be readily supported. Mounts + wireless + USB port for charging is probably the limit there.
Of course, used truck buyers tend to be happy to run some wiring for things like CB, radar, extra lighting, etc. Doesn't matter if the wiring is showing!
If Slate succeeds, it would be the total inversion of Tesla's original masterplan strategy of starting with a supercar and then slowly working their way down the value chain. And what's really astonishing is that, not only is this the cheapest electric car in the country, it's one of the cheapest new cars in the country, period.
It's a very different market today than when Tesla started. Tesla's strategy of starting at the high end was necessary to build electric cars from scratch. New competitors can start with existing supply chains and a base of engineering expertise.
I do think Tesla has lost sight of their original plan, though. They should have kept going through one more generation of significant cost reduction/increased volume after Model 3/Y. They are intentionally leaving this part of the market to competitors as they focus on self driving, and I think it's a mistake that will cost them in the near term.
I think Tesla looked at what is selling in the U.S. market and pivoted to the Cybertruck. Small, cheap sedans and wagons just don’t sell that well at retail anymore—in part because people don’t like them, in part because of safety concerns, and in part because there is a huge backlog of cheap used vehicles.
I think the Cybertruck is a prestige project, like the Roadster. It will never compete with the F-150 in the US in its current form, it won't work in the global market either, and probably won't ever be material to Tesla's financial results unless it gets a complete redesign to make it cheaper and less ostentatious.
Slate’s plan is only possible because they have the benefit of almost 2 decades of advancements (read incredible price drop) in batteries and EV related components.
Exact same car 2 decades ago would have cost a hell of a lot more. At which point the lack of bells and whistles would have been a huge problem.
At $20k it is actually comparable in cost to a GEM el Xd pickup [1] which can only go up to 35 mph, has 78 mile range, and costs $18k [2]. Totally different class of vehicle, of course.
I do wish we'd all just call this a $27.5K USD truck. If it ends up allowing some people to get a tax credit, awesome. But that's not the price they are targeting for selling this truck. And that tax credit is far from a guarantee come late 2026 / early 2027.
(That's before any "later adjustments" to the price, not to mention the effects of uncertain tariff policy.)
150 mile range makes it close to useless. As soon as you take it on a highway, the range will likely drop by half. Which means you can only do a round trip of 37 miles before you have to charge.
Even a very aerodynamic Model 3 loses half of range at highway speeds.
It really depends on how they define their mileage rating. If it is an inflated number like some EV manufacturers, then yeah. If it is a conservative rating, then it's a useful amount of range for an "in town" vehicle.
It's not about "inflating" it. It's more that the energy needed to move your car a certain distance is quadratically related to the speed, due to aerodynamic drag.
Efficient vehicles spend less energy on other stuff besides moving the car (e.g. by having heat pumps, induction motors that can be turned off without any drag, etc), so tests conducted at a lower speed will appear to have a better range than tests at a higher speed. Meanwhile, less efficient vehicles that waste energy at low speeds will appear to have more similar range at both low and high speeds.
The range figure is determined by a test regulated by the EPA and actually does account for a variety of driving conditions, specifically including highway driving. The graphic you linked to actually shows that the advertised range is very close to the range at all highway speeds.
The article does talk of it being a relatively simple proposition to embiggen the range with an bigger battery kit if that helps. But yeah, it's not a ton of range.
EVs dont lose 50% of their range at highway speeds. Even if they did, I'm not sure why you think you could only go 37 miles between charges (I think you meant 75 mi?).
Tesla does not quote a 550 mile range for the Model 3, any more than an ICE car’s range is stated as what a hypermiler could get.
As the chart shows, the reverse would be true: if they’re advertising a 150 mile range you would be able to beat that considerably if you drove at 30mph.
People who buy trucks because they need a tool to do a job? The guys who buy one instead of getting hair plugs are commuting to work at 85mph but people who actually haul things tend not to want their cargo getting damaged. This isn’t the vehicle for someone doing long distance towing but it’s a great choice for someone who wants to carry cargo around a farm, supplies and tools around their local job radius, carry bikes or surfboards, etc. and the modest size means they’re not only saving a ton of money up front but also paying less over time since it’s cheaper than gas and they can charge without a special trip.
The guy who mows my lawn drives under 100 miles a day, doesn’t need a huge cargo capacity, and certainly doesn’t want to overpay for a work truck. I’d bet there’s a sizable market of people like that.
No mention of crash testing or crash-worthiness/safety. Airbags? ABS braking? Collision avoidance (brakes engage based on distance and speed to cars or objects ahead), etc.
Before the hounds say "it is refreshing..." remember that lots of safety features are there because so many people died before they were instituted.
How safe is this plastic body from lateral impact by an F150 or SUV?
One of the reasons for which I do not like or buy old vehicles is the lack of safety features that are common today. All it takes is to land a loved one in the hospital (or worse) to quickly regret the choice to buy a cheap car or an old unsafe car. Years ago my father was t-boned by a full size SUV at a neighborhood intersection, launching his car diagonally across the intersection and onto the front yard of the corner house...through a couple of trees. He walked away from that one because the safety engineering of the vehicle he was driving save his life.
Another note: To me, while this is interesting, it is also a sad commentary on the state of manufacturing in the US. The ONLY WAY to make a $20K car in the US is to strip it down to bare metal...err...not even use metal...or paint...or electronics...or comfortable seats...and have HALF the range of other EV's...and even take out the speakers, etc. And then, you sell not having all those things as a FEATURE! Yup. Brilliant. What's the least we can do to build a car and get away with it?
My prediction is that this thing will die a pretty rapid death or they will have to pivot into making real cars for this market. There's a reason nearly three million conventional trucks were sold in the US last year. Plastic bodies, 150 mile range and barren interiors did not fit the description of a single one of them.
It has a base range of 150 miles [0], which won't resolve range anxiety worries as the average American travels 42 miles a day [1] and only has 2 seats. I think it will do well for hobbyists and EV enthusiasts, but it would be hard to compete with a slightly pricier Tacoma. When people buy a pickup truck, they often use it as a daily commuter as well.
> Got a road trip planned? These trips are all doable on a single charge of our standard battery. If you want to go even farther, our extended range battery increases the range to a projected 240 miles from a projected 150 miles. [0]
Edit: The average pickup truck purchaser's has a household income of around $110,000 and 75% live outside cities [0]. When they are purchasing a pickup, it is meant to be both a daily driver and an errand vehicle.
Spending $20,000 on a 2 seater bench pickup with 150mi range is ludicrous when you can buy a used 5 seater Honda Fit or Toyota Tacoma for $0-7k more.
This is most likely targeted at fleet usecases like a factory or local deliveries, but this won't make a dent in the primary demographic that purchases pickups, and being overly defensive is doing no favors in thinking about HOW to build a true killer app EV for the American market.
All true but totally irrelevant. I wouldn't get this to make a cross-country trip, but I would absolutely, 100% get this to have an errand vehicle that never leaves the metro area.
Not really. The average pickup truck purchaser's has a household income of around $110,000 and 75% live outside cities [0]. When they are purchasing a pickup, it is meant to be both a daily driver and an errand vehicle.
Not have 4 seats AND having a lower range makes it a niche vehicle from a consumer sales perspective.
This is most likely being targeted at fleets, which tend to have a local presence and don't have the consumer usecase attached.
> I would absolutely, 100% get this to have an errand vehicle that never leaves the metro area.
You're a software engineer in the Bay Area. You were never the target demographic for pickup truck sales, but you would in fact be a target demo for a product like a Slate Truck.
The person you're replying to shares their perspective about why they think your complaints are irrelevant to them. You can't "not really" someone's lived experience. Well you can, but it sounds smug and out of touch.
> Not have 4 seats AND having a lower range makes it a niche vehicle from a consumer sales perspective.
The base model only has two seats. The article explicitly states there will be an SUV conversion kit that you can purchase and install at home. There will also be an extended battery available. It's a very customizable vehicle.
> Not have 4 seats AND having a lower range makes it a niche vehicle from a consumer sales perspective.
In the Bay Area alone, that's huge. A cheap electric 2-seater that can get you into the HOV lanes? Yes please! Who cares if it happens to be truck-shaped. Squint and pretend it's an Electric Camino.
> You're a software engineer in the Bay Area.
...who grew up in the Midwest, learned to drive in a 1970 Chevy Custom with 3-on-the-tree, spent many adult years on the Great Plains, and who happens to live in the Bay Area now.
I am no stranger to trucks.
There are a million things I could use a pickup for today, especially for that price.
> It has a base range of 150 miles [0], which won't resolve range anxiety worries as the average American travels 42 miles a day [1]
What am I missing here? Charge at home and you’ll easily do those 42 miles every day surely?
Especially since your other point said these would be aimed at those outside of cities and those people will presumably have parking/charging at their home.
Disagree. I would buy this as a secondary vehicle for in-city needs, not for road trips. I've been thinking about getting a second car to complement our Kia EV6, but don't want to spend a ton.
Average need not beethe target. There are large niches that don't need as much. Many work trucks never go on road trips. Are those niches big enough is a question.
The thing about range: it’s always reducing (as the batteries age). And then it also reduces based on factors like temperature. The anxiety is solely from the not knowing.
Yep, and it's something that Slate's marketing doesn't directly address. Before Tesla's brand perception meltdown due to Elon, a major reason why Tesla was much more popular than other brands was because of the Supercharger network, which helped reduce range anxiety worries in the West Coast.
> a major reason why Tesla was much more popular than other brands was because of the Supercharger network, which helped reduce range anxiety worries in the West Coast.
Can't basically every other brand use those now? Between the compatible Tesla chargers and all the other ones through Charge America and charging overnight at home, there is no concern from a daily driving, or even moderately ranged trip, standpoint. The downside to long trips is the 30+ minute wait at each charging stop, not the lack of chargers.
While there are enough charges to make the trip they are not as common as gas stations and often not in visible locations. You can't just drive until the light goes on and then stop at the next exit like a gas car.
>While there are enough charges to make the trip they are not as common as gas stations and often not in visible locations.
Sure but everyone with an EV has an app that tells them where they are and helps with route planning.
>You can't just drive until the light goes on and then stop at the next exit like a gas car.
You nearly can. Most ICE cars turn the light on at 50 miles. Other than maybe the middle of the desert, there is going to be a charger within 50 miles.
Using an app while driving is dangerious. Most places illegal as well. The charger will be within 50 miles but you won't find it without the app which means annoying. And if you forgot your phone you are in trouble.
> "and the only way to listen to music while driving is if you bring along your phone and a Bluetooth speaker"
Why not make a physical connection (power/network) and define a form factor for entertainment system with or without screen and speakers and let other companies design something to fit the space available. I don't understand why no one does this instead of selling cars full of crappy software that can't be upgraded.
This is not plug and play. I want plug and play. You could even make an entertainment system which just runs using a phone connected using usb or bt.. which would make it just like android auto but without needing the car to support anything from google.
This makes a lot of sense for a run around town and short commute car. It specializes for that use case perfectly. I can see a world where families have one decent gas/hybrid car and one cheap EV. That set up could save a lot of gas money over time while meeting the needs of the household.
Also, when is the last time an economy car/truck looked this good? The slate is beautiful.
I think it has a real shot if it arrives as promised, but we know how these things go.
I like the idea, but I think a hybrid version would be the better first product. A 150 mile range is going to limit the people who will purchase this truck.
I'm wondering why the hood is so big, given that it doesn't need to contain an engine? Is that where the batteries are located? Or is it just mostly empty space in the form of a frunk serving as a crumple zone to meet crash testing standards? I hope it's not just a strictly aesthetic thing, because you could reduce that distance and end up with an even more practical truck.
One advantage they might have is that there isn't much on the market for low priced pickup trucks in general. I'd probably rather have a gas pickup than an electric but I don't want to pay the inflated prices that go along with them.
Agreed. The U.S. market had a very long run of both large expensive and small cheap pickup trucks, and people consistently have bought the big luxury pickups. It is why all the small trucks were axed to begin with. Even back in their prime, I saw many more F-150s than Rangers. Its an easy up-sell as I'm sure any car salesman will say: well for only a few more thousand you get into a full-size, and from there, add some options and its over.
>Even back in their prime, I saw many more F-150s than Rangers.
I think you're misremembering. The streets were flooded with Rangers and S10s back in the day. Full sized pickups have been the most popular class of vehicle for decades but that number is grossly inflated by the amount that are bought as fleet vehicles or work vehicles.
It doesn't matter why the number is inflated. If full sized trucks are most popular, then that's what you'll see more of. In any case, there are many people for whom a full-size pickup is their daily driver and not used for work. HN is constantly complaining about it, just not today apparently.
Depends. rear wheel drives can get stuck on pavement if it is raining and they are trying to go uphill. Snow and ice make it worse. But put some load on and you get enough weight over the axel to be fine. Of course betteries may be under the bed thus providing good weight distribution.
I had an old Nissan XE truck for a few years. I loved it, the thing was simplicity itself.
I assume there's still a lot of vaporware here, but if they can make it reliable and avoid the teething issues of new cars, I'd probably impulse-purchase one. I would also love to see options for AWD and a full-length bed.
Damn, this might finally get me to retire my 83 Mazda b2200. I've king thought this size trick is about perfect, and the old Perkins engine in my truck is getting really tired. Mostly commenting so I have this in my history to refer to later
I couldn't be more excited about this vehicle (I put $50 down to reserve one), but god damn, that customizer tool is bad. I'm someone who goes to a lot of auto manufacturer websites and makes imaginary builds, so I think I've spent time using the majority of builder apps that are out there, and this is one of the worst. On a laptop, with a shorter screen and a touchpad, it's really hard to use. Which is too bad, since customization is their whole deal.
I wonder if I could write my own software for this car? Like auto-sensing rain-wipers with an Arduino or something, and if the CAN BUS protocol isn't super hard to use. This would be a car hacking dream.
I love this concept and will probably buy one for that reason alone. 150 miles is too low though, I already struggle with the 180 I get out of my current electric car. Really cool to see more ideas in this space, congrats to the founders getting this far!
I'm really intrigued to see how this does. Kudos to Slate for trying something new and building it in Detroit at a great price point.
I see a ton of discussion on social media from people who want to buy simpler vehicles with less features at a better price point (e.g. the Japanese Kei trucks). I'm not convinced Americans will actually buy such a vehicle because we are used to our modern conveniences in new vehicles. You can even see that trend in this thread where people are asking for more features, or things that were phased out decades ago due to safety (e.g. bench seats). Perhaps Slate has figured that out with their options packaging? I'm rooting for them regardless.
> I'm not convinced Americans will actually buy such a vehicle because we are used to our modern conveniences
My town is FULL of workers doing hauling, painting, gardening, construction, etc., and they're all driving old worn rusting pickups that barely seem held together. There's definitely a market for minimal trucks designed to just get the job done without the "modern conveniences".
If I undersand the article right, it sounds like they make
it with no features but that you add yourself afterwards
"We moved all the complicated parts outside the factory"
What does that really mean?
You can paint it yourself, well ok, people may like that.
Making it easy to service is great.
If I want electric windows is that adaptable?
(It may come with electric windows)
When I want to put in a stereo
A navigation system?
AC? (Might come with it)
It would be cool if the car was a abit "framework" so it has
an open well thought out way to add and integrate features
a person may want.
THe compnay and 3rd parties could offer up all sorts of cool stuff.
I LOVE this idea. I’ve specifically been looking to buy a tiny truck or van, “can hold sheets of plywood” being a major criteria. I love the idea of that being a simple electric I can charge at home. Beautiful!
Man this is so awesome. I do really think they need to consider the fold down bed sides like the kei trucks have.
The bed being plastic doesn’t give me much confidence either. The payload may be similar to a mini truck, but a mini truck’s metal bed will take a significant beating over plastic.
This is very, very close to what I want, but I worry that those two things may prevent me from actually pulling the trigger. While all of the modular features are cool and neat, I don’t really consider them very useful for what I would actually use this truck for.
The purpose of this seems to be a fleet or Personal utility truck, but I still feel like I would be leaning towards a used old Ford Ranger or similar.
If Slate can actually pull this off then this might be the first automobile I buy new. It's almost exactly what I've been begging for.
Main question I have is whether the "blank slate" can be gradually upgraded. Article mentions a battery upgrade, but for example if I did eventually want to install a head unit or whatever, would I be able to do that after driving the truck off the lot? How open will this thing be to aftermarket upgrades?
Looks like a concept that will never actually reach the market.
And if it does and I'm completely wrong, this concept is probably doomed anyways, as it is swinging far too far to the other side away from fancy tech and right into uselessly bare. I'm sure a few people are excited by this, but realistically it will have a tiny real market. Nearly no one wants manual windows and leaving them out isn't saving huge amount of money.
Make it comparable to a decent conventional vehicle, but electric, and you may do well. This though is more useless and non-functional than my old Jeep, which has a trip computer and bluetooth as the biggest "tech features".
It seems performative. They remove a bunch of stuff nobody ever complained about, like paint or radio. Meanwhile it still has an app and it's still electric with pitiful range. The goal isn't to actually fix the car market, but provide a sort of self-flagellation experience so people can feel good about suffering with no radio, no ac, no auto windows... And I doubt they will reach that goal, sounds more like some kind of investor scam. With all these controversial design decisions they can brag to investors it's "making waves on popular platforms like hn".
I have dreamt of some entity trying to do this. A completely stripped down vehicle sold for a (hopefully) sustainable profit. I wish them as well as possible, and they will have my interest in purchasing one.
An EV that's designed to be user-serviceable, has modular upgrades, and isn't full of surveillance technology? This checks all the boxes for me. Can't wait to play with it.
Good trend. Other companies should follow suit. Simplify the car enough. And make it cheap. Sometimes I feel like Chevys are just like this. Real cheap machines. Or those white ford vans made for industrial use.
I think one of the most amazing things about this new company is that its run by women who held prominent roles in the Big 3. Its an intriguing vehicle but a Ford Maverick pickup offers far more value for the same price.
Sad to say but if the thing was made in Mexico and was priced at $15,000 it would be a huge hit. By the time you accounted for the $7500 federal tax credit it would be priced at around a quarter the price of a gas 4 cylinder powered pickup. An entire industry of add-ons and wraps would spring up around it.
Actually I meant it in a good way. To my knowledge there has never been a car company anywhere that was started by a female team.
Just checked with ChatGPT and it confirmed while there have been women involved with EV and battery startups there hasn't ever been an all female founder led car company. Now that Mary Barra became the CEO of GM it was wildly heralded that there was no longer a glass ceiling in the auto world. But I'd posit actually starting a company, raising money from investors like Jeff Bezos is taking it to another level.
The good news is that I don't think its the last new car company that will get started. I personally know of a guy in Ohio who wants to manufacture a car he built using a diesel engine that gets over 100 mpg and can beat both a Dodge Viper and a Tesla Model 3 to 60 mph.
As far as I can tell, it's "$20K" the same way Cybertruck was "$39K". It's not available for purchase yet, and when it is, it'll be twice as much, because Bezos also likes money.
Just about anyone who doesn't mind the slight inconvenience and has space for a trailer... would be better off with a trailer than a truck.
But this could easily handle a mild commute and nearby errand running. Most "truck" stuff is like buying 5 bags of mulch from the Home Depot that's 10 minutes away. This will handle that perfectly well.
But yes, 20-80% battery usage makes the base model daily range 90 miles, unladen.
You could get a used non-truck EV, add a tow hitch and you'd be able to move more weight in the trunk and in the trailer than this thing can.
Of course, it's a truck, so it can move light + bulky stuff, like appliances and furniture.
Personally, I'd want to pay another $5-10K and get one that can also handle heavy loads. This, but for $30K ($37.5K pre incentives) with no truck-related caveats would be amazing. I'm guessing it wouldn't cost $10K for them to upgrade the suspension + drivetrain.
I'm not sure I understand your point, obviously it's not a replacement for a larger ICE vehicle with 4-5x towing capacity, but it's not designed or meant to be.
But what is it designed for? I understand it's appealingly different, but it doesn't do anything that a trailer doesn't do. And not much that any SUV can't do.
I have a homemade trailer with greater bed capacity than this pick-up that I got for $800 and use it for a myriad of things – from hauling lumber to launching small boats. I've driven it hundreds of miles to the closest Ikea.
When I'm not using it, it's not attached to my low-end SUV. But with the seats down, there isn't a whole lot my low-end SUV can't do as well as this toy pick-up, without range anxiety.
You didn’t answer my question, but I think the answer is “designed for people who want to pretend they need a pickup, have the EV bug, but don’t want to pay for an F-150 Lightning”.
But once it starts selling like hotcakes they'll jack up the price to "Whatever the Market will Bear" relative to how many they're able to produce.
With most people struggling to get by nowadays (economically) we'll love the "less gadgetry" option because all that advanced technology stuff (and I do mean even power windows!) is, as my father always said, "Just something else that's going to eventually break, and was designed so it must be replaced not repaired."
This has much the same design philosophy as the original Land Rover: tough, reliable, simple and maintainable. It was originally developed as the UK answer to the Jeep, but rapidly became the standard utility vehicle for anyone with an outdoor off road job. Especially farmers. Something like two thirds of all Land Rovers ever made are still in use.
>This has much the same design philosophy as the original Land Rover: tough, reliable, simple and maintainable
Where do you get any of this from? Especially EVs are not something you can easily tinker with as the risk of killing yourself is pretty high. In general they are also more integrated and less maintainable and it seems unlikely that this won't be the case here. Maintainability costs money and to make a 20k car happen every cent needs to be saved.
As for reliability it is obviously one of the first things to sacrifice to make low costs happen. We have seen nothing of this car, I doubt the engineering is even far along.
Looks up my alley. I already went backwards and got a low mileage 2013 specifically to shed all the technology crap. I’d much rather have something newer and nicer
Kind of a big light phone [0]. China has had these for a bit, I’d guess there’s a decent market for them, though hesitant to buy the first production model of any car, given how dependent we seem to be on warranties and market forces to ensure manufacturing quality and the poor survival rates for new car companies. Interested in v2 for sure.
Remember when cybertruck was supposed to be cheap minimalistic truck? No paint, spartan interior, simple materials and straight shapes. $39k price tag. Yeah…
> Unlike most vehicles sold in the United States, the Slate Truck is not expected to have any Internet connectivity
Well that's certainly a sentence. It wasn't true just 20 years ago. It makes me wonder about the world we've grown into with deeply intertwined apps becoming not only the norm but expected.
The idea is there but I'm wondering about the execution. Here's hoping it takes off.
If this thing really comes out in a couple years by the time it's ready for mass production to hit consumer hands there will probably be 2 or 3 self driving kits designed for it. The mods for this thing would be amazing.
A buddy of mine who creates shaped interactive art panels with oleds for disney and other groups interactive events texted me about this, installing video panels on this is going to be a breeze.
I'm more excited about this as a platform than even as a car, this is going to be like browser JS, the Lisa and VW Bug for creating an EV tech skill pipeline.
I like the idea of this as a Framework-style vehicle. If they really leaned into the mod community and were making deliberate decisions to support this, it could offer a lot of traction.
Shame there's no AWD version of this. That, the larger battery option, in truck mode with a rack and tonneau cover would be great for contractors as an around-town job vehicle.
What a gross looking vehicle, and at that price? I just want the old ranger design. I've been using a 2006 ranger for quite a while and it's served me well, I'd like to upgrade it to a ranger XL for that little extra cab room for crap, along with 4WD and power windows and AC, but people rightfully guard them and when they do show up at dealerships they're typically pretty expensive too.
I've thought about importing a Kei, but I don't think it's for me. When I think "American kei truck" I at least think something in the ballpark range cost of a Kei, which is quite a bit less, at least half as expensive for the best options like 4WD, even less if you can compromise. It also has charm unlike this. The range is just ridiculous, too. My little ranger isn't exactly great, I don't push it much more than 300 miles on a tank, but having half that (new! let alone after a few years) is such a deal breaker. Last time I took my truck camping it was around 60 miles each way, and that was a nearby spot.
This'll seem a like an odd question given the obvious bare-bones approach, but still: Is or could be instrumented for self-driving? I can't imagine us humans driving forever. Otherwise this looks like a dream truck to me. Easy DIY repair, electric, fewer distractions, meant for work not showing off.
I was thinking; hey, these remind me of Bollingers, which is the only electric vehicle I'm interested in, not for its features, but for the absence of them.
It is an interesting idea, but there is obviously a lot which can go wrong here.
Can you actually build an EV like that, conforming to all regulations, with significant cost reduction? VW is currently trying to build a 20k EV, which seem extremely difficult in Europe and US labor costs are probably higher. The Dacia EVs (which seem closest in concept to a pickup) suffer from many downsides, to make low prices happen.
Do people actually want less screens or do they just say that?
Is customization a road to profitability? VWs ID.1 concept has a similar idea to lower entry price, by making several upgrades user installable, so they can be bought over time.
This is obviously a US only car and the US is very lacking in EV adoption. Will this sell in significant numbers?
Can you actually make it cheaply? Rivian is notoriously unprofitable and making cheap cars is, far, far harder than making expensive cars.
The discourse around this thing is hilarious. For years people have been saying “I just want a small, simple truck with no frills and a reasonable price.”
Now, one is finally available, and all the commentary is “Oh, I’m in the target market for this, but I just need them to add:”
- more room for passengers
- more payload
- an infotainment screen for nav
- more room in the bed
- more towing capacity
- screens in the seats for kids
- an app to “manage” it
Guess what! This is why the best-selling vehicles are large trucks, because they give the most people what they want.
Everyone wants a small and cheap and simple car with all the comforts of big and expensive cars. Reality doesn’t work that way!
It's the Microsoft Office paradigm in automotive form. Nobody uses more than 20% of the features in Word or Excel, but nobody uses the same 20%, so it's basically a useless observation. You can't just chop 80% of the features out and still end up with a widely-used product.
They can't sell a vehicle in the US market without a screen, in any case, due to the need for a backup camera.
It’s like if you could buy an old Nokia for $200, or a new Android smartphone for $160. The old Nokia certainly has nostalgic qualities and some concrete practical benefits like all-week battery life, but overall it’s not a great deal.
And this is why you have >100% tariffs on Chinese cars — American manufacturers know they can’t compete.
Those cars are priced for the budgets of domestic Chinese consumers. BYD exports to Europe are priced similarly to car models sold there. For the same reason, this Slate truck is very unlikely to cost just $20k when it reaches the mass production stage.
it is extremely important that you read this comment: a company called edison motors out of canada is making a conversion kit that can turn any pickup into a hybrid using a drop-in motor and a really powerful generator. imagine something that costs less than this truck, has a range of many hundreds of miles, and can be used to tow more than ten thousand pounds. and you never have to turn on the generator if you dont need to. groceries on all electric. they are posting videos on youtube about this, its real. i personally believe that these work trucks will be the best in history. the most reliable, the most utility, the best cost.
These are going to be backlogged for years. The US market is absolutely dying for this truck (and even moreso the SUV variant), exactly as specified. The big guys have refused to provide it, so there is a literal gold mine awaiting anyone that can.
I hope they separate the BMS from the battery, unlike Tesla and others, which force you to replace the entire battery if the BMS fails. What a concept, allowing people to personalize and repair their own vehicles.
Oh HELL yes!! This is almost exactly the kind of thing truck owners have been clamoring for for years now. The only way this could be more exciting is if Ford flipped out and rebooted the Econoline on this concept.
> Rather than relying on a built-in infotainment system, you'll use your phone plugged into a USB outlet or a dedicated tablet inside the cabin for your entertainment and navigation needs.
How is a "dedicated tablet" different than an infotainment system, other than not having vehicle telematics and controls? Also, a regular tablet UX would be dangerous while driving, and typically they don't have their own mobile data connections.
Highly technical people tend to come in two varieties when it comes to electronics in their personal life:
1. Absolutely nothing smart that's not under their direct (or highly configurable) control.
2. Sure just take all my data I don't care. I'll pay subscriptions fees too.
Modern cars mostly do #2... to the point we potentially faced a subscription being required to enable seat warmers [0]. There's basically no cars on the market that do #1 anymore.
And with #2, you're bound by what the vehicle manufacturer decides. They are ending up like forced cable boxes - minimum viable product quality. They can be slow to change pages/views and finicky in touch responses... which I think are actually more dangerous... but this is our only option if this is the car we pick... and almost no one decides on a car for it's infotainment, so it's not a feature that gets much love or attention.
Additionally, technology moves too fast. My first car had a tape deck. The next one had a CD Player.. then I had to get an mp3-player-to-radio dongle, then I replaced my infotainment system with a bluetooth supporting one... and so on.. Even Android Auto (early versions) integrated directly into the infotainment system and needed potentially proprietary cables (USB-to-proprietary connector), and the systems did not look designed to be upgraded/replaced.
This model here allows you to upgrade your infotainment system every time you upgrade your phone (or dedicated tablet)... or simply by changing apps.
Also, Android Auto has mostly solved that UX issue (It's the same UX on a tablet as on an equivalent built-in infotainment system).. Though iPads probably (?) don't have a similar feature.
So I think the 'bring your own infotainment' idea is awesome.
It's not clear what they mean by "dedicated tablet". If it's an integrated add-on provided by the company that just does Android-Auto/CarPlay, then that seems OK. If it's just a holster for a tablet, not so much.
> It's exactly what I think a lot of techies want.
> Highly technical people tend to come in two varieties when it comes to electronics in their personal life:
I get it, I'm one of them. But using a tablet while driving is fundamentally dangerous to other people on the road, drivers or pedestrians. Android Auto and CarPlay are barely constrained enough to allow for distraction free driving.
I've lost hope that we're going back to days of people actually paying attention to the task of driving (even I take phone calls and play media while driving), but normalizing distraction by encouraging use of a tablet or phone seems like a public safety mistake, even if it appeals to the techie crowd.
Not being built-in is significant. Infotainment systems tend to get outdated, and are also a common point of failure that can be expensive to fix, so not having the tablet hardwired in allows for people to choose their own setup and is also more future-proof.
> Infotainment systems tend to get outdated, and are also a common point of failure that can be expensive to fix
Android Auto and CarPlay solve that problem for navigation/communication/entertainment. The automakers aren't going to provide an open API to the vehicle control systems, for both competitive and safety reasons.
What would be nice is the old fashioned DIN interface, where you could install an aftermarket AA/CarPlay unit like this:
Also, these days AA can connect to the car's systems to do range estimations for its route suggestions and suggest charging on the routes. I'd hope whatever connectivity they do here includes sharing that data with the device in the cabin.
You can do that in any car today. Nor is there a lack of devices available for physically attaching a regular tablet to your dashboard.
The question is whether a car maker should be encouraging or enabling a generic touch screen tablet to be installed on the dashboard versus an infotainment device with constrained functionality like AA/CP designed to minimize driver distraction.
I would be happy with a built-in screen that did nothing but AA/CP while the car was driving, and then reverted to a normal tablet interface when the car is parked.
Climate control, etc should be physical knobs and buttons. Anything critical to driving should be on or near the steering wheel.
This sounds great. There are not any pictures of the interior but I hope it is also very simple and not full of difficult to reach nooks and crannies that are impossible to clean.
Love this! Would like to see a (manual) split rear window- super helpful for hauling longer things in a smaller truck. I put 10' conduit in my Ridgeline all the time.
Will this be street legal?
Will it have airbags?
If most of the car in injected molded plastics, what
happens when it gets int a crash with a regular car?
It's embarrassing when people buy a truck and don't use it for work, towing or payload. So you bought a fuel-inefficient non-aerodynamic vehicle whose storage area is open to the air and unusable for passengers, and it's not big enough to carry or tow large items? What a smart choice.
However, with the SUV package and lift kit, this is actually useful. It's basically the same size (and payload and towing capacity) of the 2nd gen Scion xB. A boxy, roomy, small, cheap car. Absolutely useful and great. (Unlike a tiny truck.)
This is cool, but you can buy a 3 year old used model 3 right now for close to $25k that has 300+ mile range. The model 3 also has, wait for it, a/c and speakers…
go the next step, and offer box and wheel/tire deleet, lots of people will have or can get wheels/tires that will fit, if they use one of the
popular size combos, and many would opt for a flat deck, or custom purpose box
see if it can be squeezed down to 20k, taxes in delivered
with no box, they can be stacked, piggy back, just the way commercial heavy trucks are stacked for delivery.....more per load, less trips
People say they, and many other Americans, want a cheap and simple truck. They're lying.
I know you don't believe me but it's true.
Automotive sales numbers are public information. Every single time a VIN is stamped into some metal, that record is public. The gradual decline in the sale of small, simple, cheap trucks is well documented.
People want full-sized trucks.
People say they love manual transmissions, too. They walk right past the manual Tacomas and Jeeps and buy an automatic.
People say they love station wagons. Then they go to the Volvo dealership and walk right past the V60 and buy an XC60.
People say they want a cheap car. Then they walk right past the base model Corolla and throw down $50k on a Rav4 Limited.
Only enthusiasts and weirdos like me will buy one of these.
A company whose audience is enthusiasts and weirdos must charge a shit-ton to stay in business. $20k isn't a shit-ton and if their strategy is to make up the difference on upgrades, they're not selling cheap trucks anymore.
I know what Americans, in aggregate, want. They want a big-ass SUV with heated and cooled seats with a screen that stretches across the entire god damned dash, 360 degree cameras, RGB mood lighting, 47 speakers, and second-row captain's chairs that make getting to the third row easy.
I own 3 cars, a Fiat 124 (MANUAL) Spider, a Volvo V70, and an Alfa Romeo Giulia.
But I am a weirdo, and because of this those companies are about to go extinct (in the US, at least).
I'm the guy that ran OS/2 and BeOS until the bitter end. I prefer writing software in Ada. I had a Saab.
I am literally and actually a subject matter expert on this shit.
I know what normal people want, and this ain't it. I know this because I want it.
are you sure that people want "trucks" the size of tanks or is it that the US is now in an arms race focused on vehicle size? Could it be that reasonably sized vehicles are just not available?
The auto companies' argument about what consumers "want" is mostly nonsense.
i hate trucks because they're big and trash up my neighborhood with their noise and size, just don't belong in the city. but since some neighbors have started driving electric (rivian, cybertruck), I tolerate them so so so much more. it's amazing how just making them electric has changed (and I hope, continues to change) the gestalt of my block.
Which is its ultimate downfall, unfortunately. It being an actual pickup truck means that for all practical purposes you will also need a car, with all the additional headaches of owning more wheels to go along with it, and at its price point plus the price of a car you may as well buy one car with some truck-like features (i.e. the pretend pickup trucks that have become so popular).
That's really expensive, I'm actually in the process of replacing the plastic front and rear bumpers on my 1999 W210 Benz and just the plastic parts add up to over $1k before paint. Having a shop do the whole thing would probably cost $5k or more. I'd rather pay up front whatever it costs to have steel body panels than deal with plastic.
people when a tesla doesnt have a knob: “outrageous. there couldnt be any benefit to that!” people when this car has no paint or speakers: “… take my money.”
In a 2-door vehicle, you can just lean over and roll up the window and toggle the lock on the other door. If you've ever had an old car then you'll know the annoyance of a broken electrical motor.
This is a plus, in my book. The fewer crappy electrical gizmos the better. I had the same question, hope the locks are manual with no keyless entry or hackable key fob.
Why the downvotes on this comment? If you're not sufficiently curmudgeonly to sympathize with this sentiment, there's lots of other cars for you. I'm sure you can find a subaru outback with a built in purple hair dyer or whatever you want.
Power window "regulators" (the unit that holds and raises/lowers the window) are usually similar in price and weight to cranked manual window assemblies, and can be cheaper. A small motor is not at all expensive and is a less specialized item than a window crank handle and gear unit.
What could save money is not needing to run any wiring whatsoever into the door - if the doors can be made with no speakers, lighting, crash sensors, switches, power locks, or power windows, then the assembly becomes significantly simpler and therefore cheaper since there's no wiring harness to fish (usually a manual production step), no holes and grommets, etc.
But if power windows are going to be an option, I'm not sure how this plays out. Do the power windows come with a wiring harness that requires the user disassemble the interior and fish the wiring? If it comes pre-wired, then the choice for manual windows is actually quite strange and possibly more expensive.
That's why I'm wondering if locks are manual as well. If there's no wiring at all going into the doors then presumably the doors will be cheap. But if they have power going in for locks already, power windows shouldn't be a costly addon.
Lots of trucks are still for work, but they have gotten so expensive more people than ever are considering them as luxury purchases.
Electric windows have been a luxury item for generations.
Traditionally, with an F-150, they were just much slower, prone to failure and expensive to replace.
Especially if you often go in & out from a gated area where you have to roll your window down every time and use your pass or talk to the guard :\
Or roll them all down whenever it has been parked in the hot sun, to quickly let out the overheated air before the air conditioner can become very effective. If you have A/C, or even use it at all :)
Window motors may not last much longer than a set of tires then, and cost as much to replace, often without warning. You're supposed to be able to afford it anyway.
However in the late 1990's the manual knob was moved to a stupid place, and it became impossible to lower the window in one quick second any more.
I can only imagine that the automotive engineers were constantly being bathed in the luxury of their environment and never even put enough test vehicles having no options through any kind of ergonomic comparison.
For the longest time these kind of things were built to provide an extreme amount of comfort for someone having a similar stature to Henry Ford. Almost lasted the entire 20th century before there was such great discontinuity.
Engineers probably didn't test drive any having manual seat adjustment, on long trips either. Otherwise they would have done better than to have an adjustment bar blocking the entire area under the driver's seat in such a way that about 25% of the footroom was lost, which was formerly available as you occasionally adjust your posture for endurance.
It was like expensive sportscar people started designing trucks. You don't sit upright in a sports car so the space is not wasted there. No more twin I-beam front suspension either, you didn't really want a truck that tough any more in the 21st century did you?
They didn't know any better. At least they once did.
And who doesn't like luxury?
Automatic locks is another one, once very seldom seen except in things like Cadillacs. That's why people envied them so much for decades, and when they finally came within reach of the mainstream they flew off the shelf.
The question is... how many farmers / ranchers need these pickups? There seems to be like an absolutely crazy competition for vehicles for a very narrow group of people.
A mandatory part of today’s safety features is a digital rear-view camera. Typically, this view pops up on a modern car’s central infotainment screen, but the Slate doesn’t have one of those. It makes do with just a small display behind the steering wheel as a gauge cluster, which is where that rearview camera will feed.
The $20K is after incentives, so it's actually $27,500. That still compares favorably to Ford's closest offering, the F-150 PRO, which is $54,999 (pre incentives):
The Ford comes standard with the same range as the upgraded Slate, though. The slate can tow 1000lbs, and hold 1,433 lbs, vs the Ford's standard 5000 / 2235, respectively (you can upgrade the range and towing capacity on the ford):
Not including a bluetooth capable am/fm radio / speakerphone on a fleet vehicle seems dumb. This cut what, $100?
I can easily see Ford cutting $10K off the cost of the Pro. It looks like it has power windows, and it definitely has an infotainment system. Also, the two row cab adds lots of weight + cost and makes the bed smaller.
Anyway, competition is good. Hopefully slate will make something with an upgraded suspension / power train for $10K more, and maybe eventually a larger one with ford-compatible conversion mounts (for custom work trucks, etc.)
It's meaningless to compare a small city truck to something like a full-sized truck, they are totally different classes of vehicle. I get that ford doesn't make a small electric vehicle, but that doesn't make the lightning the "closest offering".
A more reasonable comparison is probably the hybrid Maverick, which appears to be popular (at least around here), has 4 doors and actual features, and starts at around $25k.
I don't think you can actually buy one for that. They were tacking on an extra 10k as soon as they came out and eventually just moved the price up by like $5k and they still generally sell for higher than that.
>Is there another EV offering that's closer and available in the US?
No, that's the point, it's filling a niche that basically nothing else does right now. The closest alternative would be a small electric car paired with a small utility trailer. Something like a Nissan Leaf and one of those $500 trailers from harbor freight. Which added up and with discounts probably costs fairly similar to this.
"strong safety standards" are what got us to the point of 5000lb pickup trucks and A-pillars that are so wide they arguably kill more people (predominantly pedestrians & cyclists) than their constituent airbags save.
It is cartoon villain tier to compromise the visual range of the driver at the safety expense of everyone outside the vehicle, who is not shielded by 2 tons of mass.
Much of what is wrong with automobiles is a severe inability to think in higher order terms.
I want a generator hookup in the bed. A 5kw generator will get me all day and then when I'm done for the day charge the battery and provide me other generator benefits.
I think many consumers want a simpler "dumb" car, just look at sales of the 5th generation 4Runner. That car came out originally in 2010 and they sold it through 2023 with barely any upgrades and their best sales years were all in the 2020's.
Lots of people say it's because offroading got popular but I think it's also because that car was "dumb" compared to more recent offerings. And personally as an owner of a 4th generation 4Runner, one of the things I like most about is that it's "dumb".
And the worst thing is that Elon could've been a living legend by building/funding colleges and schools focused on the tech his companies need, software development, robotics etc. Or even given out million dollar scholarships for the very top students.
And he still would've been worth over 250 billion easily.
Instead he chose to buy the president and start "optimising" the government with AI.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43801711 and marked it offtopic (because it turned into a generic thread that has nothing to do with the topic that was being discussed in the parent comments).
There's a question about his actual goals in government.
He's an ambitious person. And AI enables a degree of surveillance state that we find it difficult to even begin to imagine. All the logistical difficulties of something like Orwell's 1984, of the Stasi having 1/3 of Berlin on the books as informants against the other 2/3, go away completely. We have more cameras than ever. Every person gets to enjoy the kind of focus that went into tracking down Luigi. DOGE has exfiltrated all our sensitive databases to servers that they control; Every 'Chinese Wall' intended to ensure some kind of separation of concerns has been broken down, almost certainly including various formally classified intelligence-gathering campaigns. You can't necessarily stuff that genie back in the bottle. If somebody wanted to be... not president, but authoritarian leader of a post-democracy, Musk would be well positioned technologically.
It wouldn't be inconceivable to set up an AI to do all the same sort of fraud & identity theft attacks against an individual that for-profit blackhats do, or that a Kiwifarms harassment campaign can do, without much of any actual staffing. Only DOGE starts out with your social security number, your tax records, your drivers' license, license plate reader records, web history, everything. That individual could be a Wall Street Journal editor who wrote something Musk dislikes, or ten thousand Redditors who are making fun of Teslas.
If somebody wanted to be... not president, but authoritarian leader of a post-democracy, Musk would be well positioned technologically.
of course, that was his very explicit goal. Thiel backed Curtis Yarvin, who came up for the plan for this and called it RAGE. google it, it's all written down. they hoped to put in Bezos or Zuckerberg and have a more efficiently-run dictatorship replacing our democracy. because they didn't understand politics, they got the ketamine addict instead, who renamed RAGE to DOGE so he could also use it to power a crypto pump-and-dump.
*edit: and because it was never a realistic plan. because they didn't understand politics
> And the worst thing is that Elon could've been a living legend by building/funding colleges and schools focused on the tech his companies need, software development, robotics etc.
Could he, though?
I mean, he might have the cash, but if you look at his history you don't see that much interest or respect for basic academic principles, or even any basic academic achievement whatsoever.
He conveys an image of someone who is mentally trapped in prepubescence, and who repeatedly does things that a prepubescent kid does to try to gather admiration. I meant who desperately tries to pass themselves off as elite gamers? How long will it take until he moves on to DJing? That's not someone who has any interest in founding education institutions.
The man does have an army of terminally online sycophants, which I now wonder whether they are astroturfed.
> I think the point is he could if he was a different person.
That statement is pointless. The critical factor is not money, it's willingness. You do not even need to be the world's richest man to put together a school. There are pro athletes with a fraction of the wealth that already do meaningful investments in education.
> Musk's past statements about his educational background, however, have been, at best, imprecise. He has claimed on several occasions to have received a physics degree in 1995 — a claim that was never fully true but which may have aided Musk's early business career.
The Snopes article confirms the comment you're replying to. The sentence you left out, before your quote:
> The University of Pennsylvania considers Musk to be a graduate of both the economics department and the physics department.
And right above that, from the University of Pennsylvania:
> Elon Musk earned a B.A. in physics and a B.S. in economics (concentrations: finance and entrepreneurial management) from the University of Pennsylvania. The degrees were awarded on May 19, 1997.
Elon has proven to truly be the dumbest smart guy ever. He alienated Tesla’s core customers; tree hugging liberals, and anyone who cares about sustainability. The GOP nor their voters care and never will. I called this Tesla stock crash months ago; did not act on it though.
One interesting thing is that he seems completely unaware that he is the problem. Stepping back from DOGE to focus on Tesla again. He thinks that him getting closer to Tesla will help save the brand, when it's exactly his association with it that caused the damage in the first place.
The best thing he could do for Tesla would be to step aside.
> I called this Tesla stock crash months ago
TSLA is currently up 5% MoM despite really, really horrible earnings and outlook. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent sometimes.
Nor do I, I'm sure he's aware it's propped up on nothing but fumes and vibes. I was just commenting on OP wishing they had shorted TSLA months ago. Easy to say in hindsight, is all.
I think less people care about it politically than you think. Most people I know who have Teslas stand by the product even through Elon’s dumb shit.
I think people care more about their own convenience. There’s nothing else in our market that’s even comparable. People talk a lot of shit and it wasn’t great to start but FSD is on a different level now, especially on newer cars like the new Model Y. Having a car that mostly drives itself is the best purchase I’ve ever made.
It doesn’t seem to be slowing down sales in Seattle. New Model Ys are everywhere here.
It is definitely slowing demand. You can see it in the Q1 numbers and the discounts on vehicles.
You can ask anyone who buys used EVs in Seattle. There is a glut of Tesla sellers and not many buyers.
Like it or not, your car says a lot about you. People bought Teslas because they liked what they said and now they are avoiding them because they don’t like it.
Apologies for my shitty comment; too much doom scrolling and too much crappy 30 year old hiphop. And apologies for writing something that sparked more than a dozen child comments full of divisive crap. Looking back i wasn't really doing the HN comment vibe I'd like to see myself, indeed...
The fact that so many "climate activists" and environmentalists turned on him confirms my suspicion that they didn't think so highly about the earth or climate change in the first place. They care about partisan politics and their tribe more than the planet.
Be wary of confirmation bias. I don’t find it unlikely at all that Tesla owners have sincere environmental goals that could be overshadowed by other concerns. Let’s afford each other the grace of being rational expected utility maximizers.
He spent hundreds of millions to get Trump elected, so that now the EPA is gutted, the closing of coal plants has been halted, and federal lands are set to be drilled and mined into oblivion. This is what climate activists correctly opposed and continue to oppose in opposing Musk.
Customization, no previous owner that you have no idea how they took care of the vehicle, less chance of complications and expensive fixes, warranty, it's a new pickup that doesn't cost $50k+, etc.
No it doesn't. An electric vehicle takes < 18 months to become carbon negative. Nobody buys a used car expecting it to last than 18 months. If it does, replacing your car every 18 months is not carbon friendly.
We're talking about new cars not used ones. Wait a few years and you'll be able to get one of these for 10k too. It makes no sense to discuss used car prices when talking about how much a new one costs.
I like it but minimalism always fails for complex products because everyone wants a different 80% of the features cut. You can already see it in the comments haha.
I don't know what laws need to change, or what needs to happen, but for the people in the southern united states, nearly every one of us would be a reasonably priced gas truck. There are no options. I had to buy a grossly overpriced F150 for double what I think it's worth because there's no other option. These fuel economy laws in the USA make no sense. While this truck is neat I guess, there's 0 use case for it for people who really need trucks in the USA.
For anyone curious, if you made a similarly sized gas-powered pickup with an i4 engine, it would be penalized more than a full-sized pickup for being too fuel inefficient, despite likely getting much better mileage than an F-150 because, since 2011, bigger cars are held to a lesser standard by CAFE[1].
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_average_fuel_economy...
Automotive industry is one of the biggest scams on planet earth. One of my favorite cases recently is how Suzuki Jimny is banned in Europe and US because of emission standards allegedly, so the little Jimny is emitting 146g/km but somehow there is no problem to buy a G-Class that is emitting 358g/km oh and surprise surprise Mercedes are going to release a smaller more affordable G-Class [1].
[1] - https://www.motortrend.com/news/2026-mercedes-benz-baby-g-wa...
Manufacturers must hit a level of CO2 emissions on average across their whole fleet. As such, Suzuki is choosing to discontinue the Jimny because of the tougher fleet average targets starting in 2025. Overall you’re right that it’s a bit of a fix; Mercedes ‘pools’ its emissions with other manufacturers/brands. It currently pools with Smart, but may also pool with Volvo/Polestar? [0] It’s such an obvious approach to ‘game’ the targets, it’s a wonder the EU didn’t see it coming when they introduced the scheme. [0] https://www.schmidtmatthias.de/post/mercedes-benz-intends-to...
This is why its so important to be super careful with how you write regulation - because even if the intent was good, it's so hard to both anticipate unintended second- and third-order effects, and it's so difficult to update after you've pushed to production.
Just like code, regulation isn't intrinsically valuable - it's a means to an end, and piling lots of poorly-written stuff on top of each other has disasterous consequences for society. We have to make sure that the code and law that we write is carefully thought out and crafted to achieve its desired effect with minimal complexity, and formally verify and test it when possible.
(an example of testing law may be to get a few clever people into a room and red-team possible exploits in the proposed bill or regulation)
> This is why its so important to be super careful with how you write regulation - because even if the intent was good, it's so hard to both anticipate unintended second- and third-order effects, and it's so difficult to update after you've pushed to production.
It seems that the goal is to pressure automakers to improve the efficiency across their entire line instead of simply banning low-efficiency models altogether.
If an automaker discontinues a low-efficient model in order to have access to a market, isn't this an example of regulation working well?
Did you read the parent comment?
> so the little Jimny is emitting 146g/km but somehow there is no problem to buy a G-Class that is emitting 358g/km
This is an example of a manufacturer discontinuing a more efficient vehicle while continuing to sell a larger vehicle that is significantly less efficient.
That's the opposite of what you want. So, no, this is not an example of regulation working well.
This refers to two different manufacturers, with two different approaches.
To meet the overall tougher targets (95g/km average) Suzuki is discontinuing certain models which release higher levels of CO2 to reduce their average. This is presumably the intention of the regulation - to drive manufacturer behaviour.
Mercedes is, OOTH, pooling with other manufacturers who presumably have emissions to spare, and likely paying them royally for it[0]. They're not alone in this approach, but some would argue it's against the spirit of the regulation, even if it ultimately complies with the letter.
[0] https://www.motor1.com/news/747225/tesla-earns-1billion-sell... - note that Tesla doesn't pool with Mercedes; this is just an example of the value
If we Zoom out and look at the net-net efficiency, is there a Steelman argument? I’m wondering if this is a locally based optimization that provides manufacturers with more flexibility to optimize across their fleet.
I don't quite understand. Even if the intent was to to provide manufacturers more flexibility, the fact that a much more efficient line was discontinued as a result of the regulations implies that the result was less efficiency.
Maybe I misunderstood. Could you explain your idea in more detail?
I don’t see the issue in that though. If the target was to keep the average emission down across the entire country and if inefficient brand A decided to merge with efficient brand B to keep the average down that seems like it still adheres to the spirit of the law
Seems more like it meets the letter of the law.
The spirit was surely be too accelerate efficiency by ensuring all manufacturers improve. That has been negated; reducing the necessary efficiency for some manufacturers just because others are doing well.
It's like if you allowed multiple people to mix blood samples for a DUI check. Sure, there'd have to be less drinking over all, but some would still be drunk af and the effectiveness of the law would be greatly reduced.
Not a great analogy. CO2 emissions are a global phenomenon, so the average emission level is exactly what matters. Drunkenness is not.
Reasonable criticism of the analogy, but the point was/is that this chicanery weakened the effect of the legislation allowing more CO² than would otherwise have been the case. Thus, the spirit of the law was not respected.
Yeah it's not really "gaming" anything.
A last effort to extend the many favors granted to the dying german auto industry
They likely saw it coming… and deliberately did it this way.
All local industry distorts their relevant politics. There’s lobbyists in the EU too.
The EU economy has a lot of car manufacturing, so cars are probably a big deal in Brussels.
Especially in Germany, which has several major manufacturers (Daimler-Benz, VW, BMW) that are important to the economy. Additionally, VW is part owned by the government of one of the states, which is why they are frequently favored by the government. Despite various scandals at VW, there are rarely any serious consequences for the company, because the government always finds a way to make trouble go away.
And Germany is fairly influential in the EU so they probably extend the protection of these companies to the EU level.
EU politics are basically French, German politics vs smaller countries now, I think. The triangle balance of France, Germany, UK has been replaced by a more centralised but also more diffuse model, although Poland seems to be becoming more important.
> The EU economy has a lot of car manufacturing, so cars are probably a big deal in Brussels.
Car manufacturing is a strategic component of a nation's defense infrastructure. It goes way beyond trade protectionism.
Is that weighted for individual car popularity? Because couldn’t you put three push cars in your lineup that you don’t realistically expect to sell and be fine?
AFAIK the average emissions are based on cars that were actually sold. So yeah, it's weighted for popularity in a way.
Link not working
Weird; it was truncated somehow.
https://www.schmidtmatthias.de/post/mercedes-benz-intends-to...
I wonder if that's why Ford, Ram, and Nissan all at the same time decide to discontinue their mini cargo vans a year ago.
If you're talking about the ford transit (I'm just guessing) but maybe the tariff rules changed? IIUC The transit was shipped to the US from europe as a "bus" because it was configured with car seats on board and then they would strip the seats and ship them back to europe. Buses are exempt from tariffs otherwise municipal public transit would be even more in the drink.
This is the Ford Transit Connect. They're known as mini cargo vans and popular with trades and for city driving because they're slightly smaller than a mini van. The equivalent to the Transit Connect was the Ram ProMaster City and Nissan NV200. They all were discontinued within two years of each other.
>This is the Ford Transit Connect.
isnt that a VW made in Poland?
The Jimny is my favorite example of a cool little vehicle that would address a glaring hole in the U.S. market.
The situation here is pathetic. We can't have truly small trucks or sport-utes because of obviously incompetent or corrupt regulations.
Is it really banned in Europe? I've seen quite a few of them in Germany
The Jimny or similar Suzuki models would not be offered for sale in the U.S. because it’s basically the latest iteration of the Samuri, which died there after Consumer Reports falsely claimed that it was dangerously prone to rollover.
The Samuri, sold in India as the Gypsy and used extensively by Indian police, did rollover alarmingly often until the 1993 model when the track width was increased by 90mm.
Yeah but look at it. It's a tall vehicle. Of course it's more likely to roll over. It's tall so that it can go over things. It has a purpose. Don't drive it like a sports car and dont haul your family in it on the daily. People bought utility vehicles and used them as family haulers and then bitched when they rolled over. It's stupid. Drive a car.
It's like complaining that you bought a boat, but the water surrounding them is dangerous and you could drown in it. So we need to make it work on land so that you can take the kids to school in it without drowning.
After the mid 1980s, SUVs were consistently and explicitly marketed and sold to families as passengers vehicles.
I think the idea may have been that these would help with bad Indian roads — even our potholes have potholes — but the police neglected to account for having to participate in the odd car chase now and then.
I had rented a barebones Jimny last month when I was in Auckland for the week. Not saying it was prone to roll. But holy hell was it feeling like I could roll that bad boy on some curvy gravel roads. I also loved it.
I don't recognize it as being a Samurai descendent.
Related note: I just saw a Suzuki Sidekick on the road in L.A., in Geo Tracker trim... a rare sight nowadays. It sounded like shit, but with a robust platform a vehicle like that would be just what the U.S. market lacks: a burly SMALL sport-ute.
Example #5621 that a simple carbon tax would be miles better than the complex morass of regulations we currently have.
That's overly reductive.
1. Poorer people tend to drive older vehicles, so if you solely encourage higher fuel economies by taxing carbon emissions, then the tax is (at least short-term) regressive.
2. You can work around #1 by applying incentives for manufacturers to make more efficient cars should lead any carbon tax
3. If you just reward companies based on fleet-average fuel economy without regard to vehicle size, then it would be rather bad for US car companies (who employ unionized workers) that historically make larger cars than Asian and European companies.
4. So the first thing done was to have a separate standard for passenger vehicles and light-trucks, but this resulted in minivans and SUVs being made in such a way as to get the light-truck rating
5. We then ended up with the size-based calculation we have today, but the formula is (IMO) overly punitive on small vehicles. Given that the formula was forward looking, it was almost certain to be wrong in one direction or the other, but it hasn't been updated.
All carbon tax is inherently regressive but that's also trivially fixable. Make it revenue neutral and give every citizen a flat portion of the total collected revenue. Bam, it is now progressive, since on average richer people will spend more on fuel (and therefore the tax) even though it is likely a much smaller percentage of their spending.
Every single one of your ideas has problems that are solved by a carbon tax. Taxes are simple, they accomplish what you want, and they don't have loopholes. A carbon tax will _never_ have the unintended consequence of making emissions worse. Many of our current regulations, including the one I was responding to do exactly that because they actually cause people to buy larger trucks than they otherwise would with worse fuel efficiency.
A carbon tax might not on it's own be enough to solve the problem (especially if you set it to low), but no matter what level you set it, it will help. Thanks to unintended consequences, many of our current regulations are actively counter productive, while _also_ having negative economic and other costs.
All costs are regressive to people with less ability to bear them. By making them not regressive we don't change behavior! It doesn't matter if they're regressive if the objective is to get people to not drive or to burn less gas. Shifting the cost to the rich doesn't change behavior and it doesn't reduce actual carbon. There's a lot more low-income emitters than high income ones.
> Shifting the cost to the rich doesn't change behavior and it doesn't reduce actual carbon.
Shifting cost to the emitters is a better way to put it. If a factory can make 10m in upgrades over time to reduce their carbon tax burden by 15m over time, they are definitely going to do it. So I disagree: I say it does change behavior and it does reduce actual carbon.
> There's a lot more low-income emitters than high income ones
Whether that's true or not it does not mean a carbon tax would not 'reduce actual carbon'.
Drivers of ICE vehicles are the emitters.
An ICE vehicle sitting in a driveway with its engine off emits no pollution (that is, after the initial impact of manufacturing and delivering it).
The fuel/carbon tax would still be behavior-shifting for low-income emitters because it would still apply to low-income emitters per marginal unit, and that part is likely overall regressive because fuel is a larger expenditures for low-incomes.
However, the part where the resulting revenue is pooled and payed out in an equal amount back per capita is progressive, since that payment is a greater fraction of a low income. Desirably, it also means that low-income people emitting less than the average would make money overall: consider a household consisting of a single mom and two kids that take public transit to work/school.
It would change behaviour more, not less.
If you set the carbon tax at about $1/gallon of gasoline, the corresponding carbon rebate would be about $1000 per family per year.
That wouldn't affect rich people much; neither the $1/gallon nor the $1000 extra income is significant. But many rich people get rich by being penny-wise, so many would change behaviour, by buying an EV or similar.
But for poor people both $1/gallon and $1000 per year is significant. If gas was $1/gallon more expensive, poor people definitely would drive less.
The real hardship for the poor here is they cannot float that $1/gallon for a year before getting the $1000
The same thing happened with electric car purchase incentives in New Zealand. The poor cannot afford to buy a new car - so only the well off received the efficient car discount incentives.
The trickle down as those cars depreciated in value was years away.
That doesn’t really sound like the worst thing?
Someone has to buy them for full price before they show up on the used market 5-10 years later.
That doesn't make sense because the second hand car is not cheaper by the amount of the subsidy. Say subsidy is $20k, second-hand car might eventually be $6k cheaper (and the discount time value of money means that the $6k is actually less than $4k). Giving the wealthy person $20k, and the poor person less than $4k is strange.
New Zealand used car market is likely very different from the market where you are. The cheapest Model 3 I could find was a USD18000 for a 2020.
Subsidies make sense if the environmental gains outweigh the costs of the subsidies.
Subsidies: there was a purchase subsidy, charging stations were subsidised, and I think electric cars are not paying their fair share of road maintenance (much of our road costs are paid for by an excise tax on usage via petrol-tax or heavy-vehicle-milage).
That math doesn’t add up. If I buy a $100,000 car for $80,000, and I sell it to someone for $60,000, the recipient still gets a $40,000 discount.
And if you pretend that there is no subsidy, and the original owner paid $80,000 just because it cost that much unsubsidized, the second buyer still gets the same discount off the original purchase price.
So the fact that the car was originally subsidized isn’t relevant.
The context is about when cars reach the poor - your example of someone spending $60k is irrelevant.
A poorer person in NZ spends at most a few thousand on their car. The original retail price is nearly irrelevant by the time it gets to someone poorish (however maintenance/parts costs do matter for old cars).
The financial benefit of a discount mostly goes to the people that own the car while it depreciates as it trickles down.
Context: In New Zealand, the vast majority of people drive second hand cars (mostly imported second hand from Japan). A 20 year old car is regarded as newish in New Zealand. I am well off, so I have two second hand cars, my daily driver is 2006 I think, and I have a 1996 4WD for other stuff. New cars are only bought by the well off.
I hear you. The numbers I provided were manufactured to illustrate the math and support my argument, not to be representative of a typical price.
I thought about it some more but it is hard to explain.
I wonder if your mental model is that a $20k discount applies at all future prices - so that when the car is sold for $5k that it's "actual" worth is $25k.
My mental model is that when the car is sold at $5k it is worth $5k and the $20k discount has disappeared (the value captured by the early owners).
Background: I'm a top 5% earner but I have friends who are struggling financially.
My opinion is that the discounts is money paid for by our taxpayers into overseas pockets, that benefits a few well off people. Strangely enough the discounts were introduced by our more socialist party, and removed by the incoming less socialist party. I don't believe the discounts are an equitable use of government funds.
I am also extremely sceptical that there is enough environmental benefits: the policy appears green but perhaps it is not (greenwashed).
My original point is that any subsidy increases the number of cars that are sold, which downstream increases the number available on the used market.
Basic supply and demand. Increases supply keeps prices down
Road damage increases by the fourth power of axle weight. So up to a rounding error all road damage is caused by trucks.
The rebate can be paid out more frequently than annually.
Having a carbon tax seems to be the most fair way to combat climate change; unfortunately in practice it is political suicide. Australia had a carbon tax in 2011 and was quickly repealed in 2014. Likewise Canada also implemented such a tax in 2019 and was repealed this year prior to their election. People like to say that they want to help the environment, but when it comes time to vote they vote against such policies.
Canada ultimately repealed the carbon tax because it was used as a political cudgel against the Liberal party that enacted it by the Conservative opposition in a sustained fashion for several years.
Which is dismaying because carbon taxes are a conservative solution to this problem and IIRC the first political entities to suggest the implementation of them in Canada were Conservative.
At the end of the day you have a nontrivial amount of the population, and many in positions of power who just outright deny environmental concerns and climate change as an existential threat.
They aren't going to approach this problem in good faith and it isn't obvious what the solution to their nefarious influence on policy should be.
Canada's implementation had two problems:
1. The textbook implementation involves 3 parts: tax, rebate and tariff. Canada only did the first 2. They were in talks with Germany/EU to create a carbon tariff zone, but that never happens. Without the tariff the carbon tax is massively unfair to local producers.
2. The rebates were almost invisible. If they would have been cheques in the mail it would have had much more impact psychologically.
But I agree, the main problem was denialism and its use as a political cudgel. It should be hard to argue that carbon tax is stealing money when all of it is given back, but they successfully did that.
Broadly agreed. IMO the Canadian carbon tax had a marketing problem. It should have been called a Carbon Dividend. First, it would have replaced the negative connotation of the word "tax" with the positive connotation of the word "dividend -- and it would have been more accurate to how the program actually worked.
Second, and probably more important: the rebates showed up in your bank account with a description that didn't make the source obvious enough for laypeople. Had people seen monthly "CARBON DIVIDEND" credits in their bank accounts, they would have noticed.
It was never called carbon tax, but carbon pricing. It being knows as carbon tax was the result of of opposition efforts. The same efforts and results would have happened had it been called dividend or anything else.
In official communications it was called the Canada Carbon Rebate or previously the Climate Action Incentive
Both of which were terrible marketing wise.
What makes "rebate" terrible but "dividend" good? They accomplish the same thing in my mind. In fact I think calling it a "dividend" would be a pretty unconventional and contrived usage of that word.
The feds had it labeled, "Canada Carbon Rebate", and to even get that they had to fight the banks.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/carbon-pricing-rebates-land...
The Australian implementation had a lot of problems. Instead of being (something reasonably loophole free like) a tax levied on fossil fuel consumption it was a scheme that applied to the 500 largest emitters. These emitters then (crucially) estimated their own emissions minus offsets and paid tax on that.
The issue with this is that it creates a whole parallel (and largely fake) carbon accounting world. Fake estimates, fake offsets, a complex web of compensating subsidies - but real public money.
The field of carbon taxes is tricky because we can imagine simple schemes which handle a few scenarios in a fair way (ok, fuel! we know how to tax that) but once you start thinking about agriculture or construction you quickly get into complex estimation. You then end up with armies of carbon accountants who spend all day looking for loopholes and rorts.
Yes, carbon taxes are tricky, with loopholes and grifters etc.
But it's still substantially simpler, with fewer loopholes and grifters than any of the effective alternatives proposed.
You can give the rebate based on prior year or estimated usage at the start of the year, and then repay at the end of the year if it was too much, like with healthcare subsidies.
The rebate is a fixed amount, no need for estimation.
Are you sure? Gas consumption is notoriously inelastic. West coast gasoline is already a dollar or more than it costs on the east coast. Do poor people drive less in California than in Florida?
Gas consumption is inelastic in the short term, but everything is elastic in the long term.
If you want proof of this, just look at what happens to sales of large vs small cars when the price of gas changes.
I don't know man, gas prices have been consistently pretty high for the last couple of years, meanwhile almost every small car has been discontinued- VW Beetle and Golf, Fiat 500, Honda Fit, Ford Fiesta and Focus, etc... this class of cars basically just doesn't exist anymore.
I think everyone drives less in California than in Florida. (Google says ~14,500 miles annually per licensed driver in Florida, versus ~12,500 miles in California.) Gas prices are a factor in this.
California law requires a special blend of gasoline, which is a lower volume market, which increases the cost. The remainder of the cost difference is transportation costs or taxes.
https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/our-work/programs/fuels-enforcment-pr...
Yes, a number of reasons contribute to the additional cost. But that's irrelevant, we're discussing the impact of higher costs, not the cause of them.
> By making them not regressive we don't change behavior!
I'm poor. I could get just the $X back as my carbon tax dividend and continue with my current lifestyle. Or I could make choices that emit less carbon, which will cost less since they don't have a carbon tax cost to them, and save an additional $Y on top of the $X I'm already getting.
What do I do?
I mean, I assume that most people who are in a position of financial stress continue with their near-term need to commute to earn a living, and bear the cost of a tax that hurts them.
The government's job is to say that in aggregate, they people better off from the overall reduction in carbon emitted.
My opinion is that trying to make consumption taxes non-regressive is a fool's errand. If it needs to be progressive, figure out what the total dollar contribution needed and pick a rate that when scaled with incomes yields the outcome needed.
A revenue-neutral tax (like GP proposed) could, in theory, change behavior. I don't know enough about human behavior to say how it would work in practice.
Let's say that instead of taxing carbon, we pay people a bonus for emitting a below-average amount of carbon (proportional to the amount that they are below average by). If the amount is in a certain range, it will be too small an amount for wealthy people to care about, but large enough for poorer people to do things within their means (e.g. carpooling) to try to get it.
The results would hit certain geographic areas much worse than others, and (if priced enough to change behavior) would also probably depress car sales, which are two reasons why the federal fuel tax has been flat for over 30 years.
Think about how much easier that is to game though.
The original suggestion could be collected at point-of-sale for carbon emitting products. Gasoline, airplane tickets (based on average for the flights), even electricity are easy to measure and charge at the point of sale.
In your example, the person has to prove how much they didn’t emit, which is way harder in practice, to get the credit.
Why tax the gasoline but then the airplane ticket and not the kerosene?
And similarly i would extrapolate to do we tax the buyer of electricity (which could be green sourced) or the manufacturer - the gas burner. Or maybe even at the first point of contact with the carbon source, the oil company.
I was making an analogy to a revenue-neutral carbon tax. That is tax all of those things, but cut every taxpayer a refund for an equal share of the revenue. This is ultimately identical to paying people for having below-average use.
> Let's say that instead of taxing carbon, we pay people a bonus for emitting a below-average amount of carbon (proportional to the amount that they are below average by). If the amount is in a certain range, it will be too small an amount for wealthy people to care about, but large enough for poorer people to do things within their means (e.g. carpooling) to try to get it.
So you're saying that the government should incentivize poorer people to sell one of the last bits of their functional autonomy for what would be trivial amounts? "We'll just hang onto to this for a bit until you decide to stop going anywhere or make friends at work".
You are correct that most consumption taxes are intrinsically regressive, but you can turn pretty much any consumption tax into a progressive one by simply taking the money and redistributing it at a flat amount per person.
I believe this would be more fair to children who are the ones who will be most impacted by climate change in the end.
I believe there are even some governments that use this approach, but many of them don't make it feel as significant as it should. You should get a big fat cheque in the mail every month as if you won the lottery.
It's hard to see any of this as "trivially fixable." Taxes are inherently political, politics are complicated, changing incentives on this scale are pretty much impossible in our political system.
"Taxes are simple... and they don't have loopholes" is not at all how taxes work in the US. Perhaps your imagined perfect carbon tax is simple, but a simple tax with no loopholes is not likely to happen. Everyone wants a break or exception, and many of the interested parties are powerful.
This is mixing two questions: whether a system can be elegantly designed and do the job without major market distortion, versus the question of whether various actors will stand in the way to prevent it.
You could say the same thing about zoning. Higher density is better for affordability, but faces opposition from landowning existing residents. Does that make it wrong, or not worth pursuing? No, and that particular movement seems to be getting traction despite the political opposition.
I read "trivially fixable" as "there is an elegant solution to this," not that "it is easy to get it politically passed."
As we learned in the 90s with email, an elegant solution that doesn't take human nature into account isn't worth pursuing. There used to be a joke checklist we'd send to each other about this.
> I read "trivially fixable" as "there is an elegant solution to this," not that "it is easy to get it politically passed."
The huge problem with this line of thinking is that it's easy to identify a half-dozen key players standing in the way of your elegant solution and it would be easier to remove them from the situation than change their minds. It's an attractive idea that can become a fixed idea.
^ In addition, I find it notable that the political party that is in favor of more regressive taxes is also against a carbon tax.
In an ideal world, I'd like the tax to be made more progressive, but I'll take anything!
> Make it revenue neutral and give every citizen a flat portion of the total collected revenue. Bam, it is now progressive,
Unfortunately, poor people don't have the cash on hand to hold them over until they get their Carbon Stipend on April 15th.
It's going to hurt poor people to charge them more at the counter, even if you give them more later. The stipend is just going to end up paying for less than the interest the tax created on a credit card.
I see the carbon tax as a 'stick' (to penalize undesired behaviour, in this case emitting carbon), but it needs to be coupled with a 'carrot' to encourage the desired behaviours.
I'd like to see a carbon tax coupled with massive investments to make public transit legitimately good. There are too many places where there is no viable alternative to driving, a carbon tax will unnecessarily punish those people without giving them a reasonable alternative.
The carrot is doing the things you want to do like getting from A to B or building a home.
Government ‘carrots’ are almost universally a terrible idea because they codify specific solutions. Instead you can get the same effect more efficiently with a carbon tax large enough for people to notice.
Finally, some common sense!
I'll boil it down to:
It's the most efficient mechanism for internalizing external costs.> since on average richer people will spend more on fuel
Why would you think so? People driving older cars, not being able to afford to fly - will certainly spend more money on fuel for their car.
Rich people use more energy. That’s been shown by loads of studies.
Maybe they drive a more efficient car, but they own much larger houses which are heated or cooled consistently, they travel a lot more, and they buy things with embodied carbon emissions.
Right, but now you're talking about adding the tax to the whole economy, not just car fuel?
That's close to impossible to implement. You'd need to track production and usage of everything in an extreme detail. Plus tracking all purchases (items + services) to a given person. So complete state surveillance of citizens. Globally.
We're talking about a carbon tax. By definition it is not on car fuel, but on carbon.
You don't need state surveillance or tracking purchases. You just need to get to the source of the problem. Hydrocarbons leaving the ground.
At the hydrocarbon level, it's much easier to track. Oil and gas is mostly extracted by very large corporations and transported by large infrastructure. You don't care what happens to it once you've produced it - but you do need to put a levy on the hydrocarbons before they're sold on. The people who use those hydrocarbons all have higher costs which pass on to customers.
The biggest problem is international borders. If another country isn't applying carbon tax, then you need to make an estimate of the embodied energy of a product at the point of import. Or encourage them to tax carbon. But neither of those require surveillance. Once the product has been imported, you don't care who buys or sells it because the tax is already paid.
> That's close to impossible to implement.
For a carbon tax, I think you only need to track imports, and domestic extraction of coal, petroleum, and natural gas.
„Only” track imports?
I think customs already tracks this. Smuggling oil and coal into the US at any meaningful scale seems very unlikely.
Right, but how do you track carbon in imported goods?
You don't. We already outsource all kinds of things (pollution, human rights violations) now.
Tax all fuel. So those energy consumption of wealthy cost more?
Ok, let's assume you do. Let's tax all fuels 300% in the US. Now all manufacturing stops as your production costs are all over the roof. Everything is imported from countries that do not have these taxes.
What problem was solved here? None.
> Everything is imported from countries that do not have these taxes.
Finally a good use for tariffs!
Do you think flying evades the carbon tax?
Yes, if you apply the carbon tax only for the fuel at petrol stations. I am talking about realistic-to-implement solutions.
Aviation fuel is dispensed at a limited number of places; it would be easier (or just as easy) to implement a higher aviation fuel tax than a higher auto fuel tax.
It's trivial to implement auto fuel tax - it's already in place in most of developed countries.
There's an auto fuel tax in the US. Increasing that from $0.184/gallon for gasoline and $0.244/gallon for diesel to say $1.50/gallon and $2.00/gallon would ensure massive losses for that party in the next two or three election cycles.
Increasing the tax on aviation fuel to $2/gallon wouldn't produce massive shifts in the next several elections, therefore it's easier to implement.
We already have a carbon tax, you pay it when you buy the carbon. 3 cents per liter federally and an additional 18 cents per liter in California specifically.
Some European countries have total taxes to the tune of 90+ cents per liter (50-60% tax) with current gas prices, for reference. (~65ct/l for the energy/carbon tax, specifically)
I don’t think that level is sufficient to cover the externalities.
This tax is only assessed on road transportation. It ignores aviation, industry, or any one of the other sources of carbon.
> 1. Poorer people tend to drive older vehicles, so if you solely encourage higher fuel economies by taxing carbon emissions, then the tax is (at least short-term) regressive.
You give it back to poor as a income-phased out refundable tax credit. Crucially, base it not on how much they drive or consume, but on their income.
Name it something like the "Worker's Energy Credit". In the worst case, it cancels out the carbon tax spent by them commensurate with their lower income.
In the best case poor people who don't drive much actually come out ahead, and it's just a very progressive sales tax.
The rich might hate it, and call it "redistribution", which is fine because that's exactly what it is, and what taxes have always been, but this one would redistribute downwards instead of upwards, and incentivize lower carbon emissions by those who can afford it.
This is way too complicated. You just give it to everyone unconditionally and tax it as income. We already have progressive graduated income taxes with a huge exempt class, we don't need to layer anything on top of that.
Why don't the poor just buy smaller cars? Less weight - less pollution. Nobody needs a to drive a pickup, unless they run a farm or construction firm. A car weighing less than a ton would be perfectly enough for 99.9 % of drivers.
> Why don't the poor just buy smaller cars?
They do buy smaller cars. But they still spend a much greater percent of their income on gas. Worse, most of the auto industry has upsized their entire vehicle fleet. It's not as easy to find small used cars as it once was. They also are less likely to have jobs they can remote work, and can't afford to live close enough to the workplace to use transit.
Also many poor people need a larger car for their work. I'm not talking about a vanity pickup, but something more like a small pickup or a work van. Others may have many children to drive (maybe their own and others if they live in joint family situations).
Their solution is to buy a 3rd or 4th hand large vehicle.
Giving it back based on being alive on Dec 31 seems the best solution to me. (It’s very difficult to game and if you give 900 billionaires under a million bucks in total, it’s just not that big a deal…)
We manage to phase out ACA subsidies at 400% of the federal poverty level, so I don't see why we couldn't use a similar mechanism for an energy tax credit.
You can. It will cost political capital and erode the clarity of the messaging about the purpose of the tax. It also gives politicians one more thing to dick around with later.
Personally, I think it’s letting the perfect be the enemy of the 99+% perfect.
> The rich might hate it, and call it "redistribution", which is fine because that's exactly what it is, and what taxes have always been, but this one would redistribute downwards instead of upwards, and incentivize lower carbon emissions by those who can afford it.
Larry Page would be pumped. His annual salary is $1.
I feel pretty strongly that adding exceptions and loopholes to taxes only benefit wealthy people, which is the opposite of the intent.
I would be interested in reading a study where all the tax laws in the country were burned down and rebuilt, with no loopholes or exceptions. Also, eliminate borrowing against a stock portfolio. That is downright evil.
> I feel pretty strongly that adding exceptions and loopholes to taxes only benefit wealthy people, which is the opposite of the intent.
It depends what the exception is.
If the exceptions are "we treat a form of income received disproportionately by the rich a 'not income' and tax it at a lower rate, and on top of that we add an extra tax on top of income tax on labor income, and cap the larger part of that extra tax, too, to avoid burdening high earners", that helps the rich, sure. But there are plenty of exceptions possible that don't do that.
> Larry Page would be pumped. His annual salary is $1.
The tax would be on consumption, the credit would be based on income, so Larry still pays when he buys gas (if not for his cars, then for his planes).
> I would be interested in reading a study where all the tax laws in the country were burned down and rebuilt
That would burn down the country. Tax policy and the economy are a ship that has to be gradually turned in the optimal direction, just like how for the last 40 years tax policy has been gradually redistributing growth/wealth upwards. Sudden changes (like we are seeing now with indiscriminate tariff policy) are what results in the most harm to the poor.
> Also, eliminate borrowing against a stock portfolio. That is downright evil.
Agreed, or just heavily tax borrowing against a portfolio above, say, $2M/year. That way you don't penalize working people borrowing against 401ks or taking home equity loans for home improvements.
> Larry Page would be pumped. His annual salary is $1.
Salary might be $1 but what is his effective income when he files his taxes? That is what he is taxed on, which includes things like dividends and selling of stocks.
There’s nothing wrong with borrowing against stock, the evil part is the step-up in cost basis when the billionaire dies that prevents them from paying any tax at all.
It would be a good deal for the country to let the billionaire use their skills to grow wealth without interrupting it and tax them all at death.
Carbon taxes become progressive with the simple step of returning the revenue to taxpayers as a dividend payment using the existing social security payment infrastructure. Richer people have such outsized carbon footprints that most people would get back more in dividends than they lost in higher costs.
If you want to reduce carbon emissions, if the tax is regressive or not does not matter as long as you tax emissions. If you want to mix too many things, you will not get a good solution for any.
> 1. Poorer people tend to drive older vehicles, so if you solely encourage higher fuel economies by taxing carbon emissions, then the tax is (at least short-term) regressive.
The idea that policy makers care about this in any meaningful sense is absurd given the EV mandates, as EV's radically change the lifecycle costs of cars in a way that is absolutely destructive to people who aren't wealthy.
EV's lower the 'fueling' cost but shift part of it into large cashflow crushing battery replacement costs.
Automobiles have been a significant engine in elevating less wealthy americans because you can buy a old junky car for very little and keep it limping along with use-proportional fuel costs and minor maintenance. Even if it's an inefficient car, you use it to go to work, so you're making money to pay for the fuel. Less work, less work fuel required.
EV's significantly break the model and will push many more less wealthy people onto predatory financing which they'll never escape. Yet policy makers refuse to even discuss the life-cycle cashflow difference of EVs, and continue to more forward with policies to eventually mandate their use.
> it was almost certain to be wrong in one direction or the other, but it hasn't been updated.
It's been broken all along. We've had decades to fix it.
Meanwhile jet fuel for private jets is (and remains) not taxed at all, even in the EU.
This is a common trope, but is incorrect, at least for the US.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_Sta...
> Meanwhile jet fuel for private jets is (and remains) not taxed at all, even in the EU.
Not correct. Fuel for private aviation is taxed, including jet fuel and avgas. However, there are very few "private" jets, most are operated by some company, and therefore not private. Jet-A1 for a truely privately operated C172 with a diesel engine is taxed.
Which is bonkers. If ever there was a thing that should be taxed it's jet fuel for private jets. 300% tax on private jet fuel would be reasonable.
The emissions just to shuttle rich people from one side of the country to the next (For some, multiple times per day) is insane. You should need to be a billionaire just to afford flying private jets and it should still eat a significant portion of your income if that's what you choose to do.
And for what? Like, we live in the modern era, why does anyone need to travel from NY to Florida to Texas to California in a day?
I have a suspicion the reason why super wealthy people like say Musk but he isn't the only one hate subways and high speed rail is because they fly everywhere. You might like if you could get on the subway in Glen Park and be at lands end in half an hour. You might like getting on a high speed rail and being in LA in 4 hours.
These guy will never ride a subway or take a train anywhere.
LOL on an e-bike I can beat BART to SFO from Glen Park unless you time both to start at just the moment BART arrives instead of at a random moment. If you want a Glen Park to Lands End to take under 30 minutes, the cost would rival the Iraq War.
Looks like the trains are running every 30 minutes.
A super easy solution that doesn't cost the iraq war is adding new trains and running them every 15 minutes.
You'd have to deal with lower occupancy trains as a result, which means it's not as cost efficient.
Many politicians campaigning for green energy (aka AOC) also fly on private jets everywhere so that they can fight the oligarchy - this behavior isn't restricted to wealthy businessmen alone.
Maybe you shouldn't base your assumptions of the world on politically charged clickbait headlines... Did her and Bernie use a private jet? Quite possibly. Does that mean they fly "everywhere" on private jets? Certifiably false.
Depressingly, I think that's why a law to stop this behavior won't pass in the US. Wealthy and powerful people love their private flights.
Doesn't mean that anyone engaging in this behavior should get a pass nor that we shouldn't keep advocating for such a tax.
I'm no Musk fanboy, but it is funny you mention him not liking subways or high speed rail because didn't he try to build a subterranean high speed rail?
>didn't he try to build a subterranean high speed rail?
_for cars_
The hyperloop was a shit idea from day one and thus far no one has been able to make it work. It's also entirely possible that Elon Musk floated this as a distraction to stop the development of "regular" high speed rain in California[1].
The Las Vegas "loop"[2], on the other hand, is basically a parody of a subway - with a fraction of the capacity.
> In July 2021, the peak passenger flow was recorded at 1,355 passengers per hour.
As a comparison Toronto's subway can handle 28,000 passengers per hour[3] per direction or more.
[1] https://www.jalopnik.com/did-musk-propose-hyperloop-to-stop-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Las_Vegas_Convention_Center_Lo...
[3] https://dailyhive.com/toronto/ttc-toronto-subway-station-rid...
Did I say it was a good idea? I was merely pointing out that there's evidence that he is not the best example for people that hate high-speed rails and subways.
>Stop the development of high speed rail in California
I thought that got funded, what happened?
You'll note to two things that ties the hyper loop and the Las Vegas Loop together is private cars.
Don't discount that these guys find ordinary people to be scary and disgusting.
What makes a jet private? Should Trump's Boegin 757 count as one? What if an airline is flying a jet with no passengers? Cargo jets?
The same thing that differentiate a private car from public transportation or freight, I would think. This distinction isn't a particularly novel problem.
We don't differentiate these in any significant way. Do buses in your country pay different rate for fuel?
There are vans carrying 6 people on international routes in Europe, is this public transport? Private? Anyone can book it.
Well actually, lots of places have special fuel for farm vehicles that are exempt from certain taxes. It's dyed a certain colour so if you get caught with that colour of fuel in your vehicle you can get in trouble. So its not a crazy thing to suggest that we tax different fuel at different rates.
Ffs
Are you saying used car sales would have a carbon tax? I've never heard anyone suggest anything like that. It's just a tax on new items.
Looks like as long as only positive change is allowed to touch the poor, there will be little change.
Going to let us burn because not doing so would be regressive.
TIL poor people can't pollute, so their market segment shouldn't be incentivized to cut pollution.
TIL that US car companies won't make smaller cars in the face of different regulations, even though they made larger cars in response to current regulations.
The only way to avoid perversions is to tax the problem directly. The market will adjust to all proxies in unintended and harmful ways.
A disincentive on a thing you don't want makes people choose another thing that you may or may not want.
The only way to avoid perversions is to incentivize the things you want.
Taxing cigarettes led to vaping. Maybe less bad but still a nuisance.
Are you agreeing with me, or did you drop a negative twice?
You're statement is not true.
Disincentives don't make people make good choices, they make them make different choices.
Incentives guide people to make a specific choice.
Yeah that’s the truth. The mass of poor people are the predominant polluters. They produce little of value and pollute a lot. So the question then is whether you care about the environment or about the poor and most people would rather the latter.
This.
I think the best way is to tax fuel itself. This way worse mpg result in more tax.
Tax diesel more than gasoline, LNG less.
This is already done, in Europe most of the fuel costs are taxes.
Thereby penalising existing vehicle owners who can’t switch to a more efficient vehicle overnight.
We have to come up with a rigorous alternative that doesn’t disproportionately affect lower income folk, because people tend not to be overly concerned about nebulous concepts like the climate impacts on unborn future generations, especially when my carbon impact at the margin is negligible when taken in context of global population.
If it is an issue - then option is to have less driving. Take a bus once in a while. Or bike.
Or switch to another old vehicle. Take old Golf instead of RAM, etc.
That makes sense, but there would be no incentive to switch to an engine that emits less carbon for the same fuel consumption (if such a thing exists)
You don't create carbon out of thin air, it's from the fuel, so burning the same quantity of fuel will result in the same quantity of carbon, no matter how the engine works. Therefore a tax on fuel is a tax on carbon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_ethanol_fuel_mixtures#E...
Ethanol blends get worse MPG, and entail additional carbon emissions in creation. They do not reduce carbon emissions.
What is the point of the link?
Unless you play in the nuclear physics, Carbon in is Carbon out. Carbon in fuel is Carbon out of the engine.
Incomplete combustion is a big component of emissions, and it's exactly what you're saying doesn't exist
Yes but since incomplete combustion is inverse correlated with fuel efficiency (unburned fuel is wasted fuel), it's not really a trade off. What is a trade off is NO emissions vs fuel efficiency. Burning your fuel oxygen rich will burn of more fuel, but also makes more NO (due to higher temperatures if I remember correctly).
Those eventually degrade to CO2 so the increased warming from them compared to co2 by mass is temporary, like with methane.
By definition, more carbon is less efficiency. Efficiency is about how much of the hydrocarbon you turn into heat. Diesels often burn a little dirty. That's partly because diesel engines don't burn all the fuel
We already do in the US (but the money mostly goes to road maintenance)
Apparently not enough, as USA has quite cheap fuel. Add 100% carbon tax and people will start to pay attention to MPG ratings. With x2 price increase gasoline in USA is still cheaper than in Germany.
Isn't that what a carbon tax is? Adding a tax to the fossil fuel based on carbon content.
The purpose of the CAFE regulations is very explicitly to favor American automakers who make big trucks.
It wasn't the intended purpose. It turned out that way because the Detroit lobbyists were smarter and more motivated than the government policy people, and they bamboozled them.
The congress critters knew what they were doing and didn't do it for free.
That was one of several purposes.
This has been a known problem and could be changed if the political will to make common sense policy changes and corrections when needed was anywhere near existing. Unfortunately, we live in a [political] dystopia
> a simple carbon tax would be miles better than the complex morass of regulations we currently have
Doesn't this just punt the morass into the magic variable of one's carbon footprint?
How about this: fleet efficiency standards are stupid, anachronistic and counterproductive. Scrap them. Then, separarately, create a consumer-side rebate based on a vehicle's mileage. (Because a gas tax breaks American brains.)
> How about this: fleet efficiency standards are stupid, anachronistic and counterproductive. Scrap them. Then, separarately, create a consumer-side rebate based on a vehicle's mileage. (Because a gas tax breaks American brains.)
It's a good concept that is also ripe for abuse with anyone who has some amount of "fuck your rules" money. Same reason why fines that don't scale with income/earnings in some form often do nothing to deter "the rich".
I certainly like carrots more than sticks, but we need a couple of sticks as well.
Scaling fines with income only works to hard stop behavior, at which point just make it illegal. Most fines are proportional to damages.
Criminalizing fossil fuels is insane. The fines should cover the externalities.
> Scaling fines with income only works to hard stop behavior,
No, it makes it so that the outcome is more equally felt across all income levels.
What does someone affluent care if they have to pay a $100 speeding ticket or a $20 parking ticket? That's just the cost of business for them.
>No, it makes it so that the outcome is more equally felt across all income levels.
Because you want to... hard stop behavior. Parking violations cause harm, so the fine should be a function of damage to society, not some weird fetish to make people feel pain.
If behavior is so unacceptable that you want to prevent it altogether, criminalize it.
why can't we just tax the gas at the pump? this is, at least, what I'm used to in Europe.
We do. But it’s a super regressive tax. Lots of very poor people depend on a bad MPG car to get to work and live.
If you subsidize polluting life-styles, you'll get pollution.
You think the rich suffer from pollution and car dependency? It's not at all clear that taxing gas will lead to worse outcomes for the poor. It's entirely clear that subsidizing pollution from the poor will lead to worse outcomes for the planet.
What isn’t clear about the fact that increasing commuting costs for those living paycheck to paycheck leads to a worse outcome?
Because you're only considering first-order effects. Behaviors, markets, and systems will evolve around the new rules. Public transit could improve. People could trade in SUVs for hybrid sedans. People could carpool. People could bike. People could walk. Corner stores could re-open. People could demand zoning changes, instead of fighting every nearby development.
that's a different problem. US cities used to have good publhc transport, but the urvanization policies since 50s is car-centric. plus, because of the American cars having huge engines they have bad MPG. The current situation US is in is nothing to do with the tax regime.
I don’t think it would be possible to produce a carbon tax that’s simple
Tax the fuel. Gasoline now has a $X/gallon tax, as does propane, as does coal, whatever.
What is the difficulty with that?
Not clear what is meant here. Does ethanol from corn count? Methane from waste dumps? Gray hydrogen? Wood pellets? Ammonia?
Electricity from unclear source?
Human ingenuity is infinite. It is not enough to enact simple rules, people will just produce electricity with hydrogen and claim it green if it will make them profit. If it will help them evade carbon tax. Nevermind that hydrogen came from some extremely polluting process involving damaging our planet atmosphere and everyone's health.
Well, you don't need to tax the ethanol from corn or methane from waste dumps or wood pellets, or ammonia itself. You would tax the oil/gas/coal that came out of the ground that was used to fertilize the corn, process the corn, transport the corn, and distill the ethanol (otherwise it's double taxation). You don't need to tax the wood pellets or the stove they're burned in, or the electricity, just the carbon that is burned to make and transport them. So this is largely irrelevant.
A better question would be for imported items and services. How do you prevent tax shifting from carbon emission havens, which is no different from financial tax havens now. You tax them at entry using the most beautiful word, "tariffs". If an importing country doesn't tax carbon or carbon tariff their imports then you tariff them. Interestingly, it would then be a higher tariff for air transport than shipping. Where it actually get complicated is services, which people really don't like taxing. But if I run a LLM datacenter on coal in china or make bitcoin burning middle east oil, or consult on green projects on Indonesian gas those should be tariffed as well, and that's more difficult.
It’s extremely regressive. You’d need to also give a rebate based on income level.
Give everybody $1000 (or whatever) to offset that. Ends up being neutral for some folks, a net benefit to the poor, and a net cost to the rich. This is already how lots of jurisdictions handle regressive taxes.
That’s the excuse that is used for agriculture. They sell a vision of a Fisher Price toy farm, but make policy for giant Midwest farms.
The proverbial blue collar truck owner is already screwed. Random surburban dude should be paying through the nose for his F-250. Create demand for fuel efficiency, and you’ll have cars like my dad’s 1993 Escort Wagon, that got 45mpg.
Tax the poor for carbon emission. They'll adjust. People will walk, bike, take the bus, car pool, and buy used hybrids instead of mustangs.
PS, regressive use taxes are 100% moral, fine, upstanding, and ethical.
> regressive use taxes are 100% moral, fine, upstanding, and ethical
Turns out you are wrong.
Life-style should never be subsidized. God forbid that someone feels the repercussions of their life-style, which is the only feedback mechanism that will ever cause change.
My moral system will stop global warming and save the planet. Your moral system will destroy the planet and kill billions. Everyone needs to be responsible, including the poor. Tough.
You don’t know anything about my moral system. I know that you declared all regressive use taxes in all cases as morally right.
But a system that makes it so you must drive an ICE vehicle to participate in the economy, makes the price of food directly indexed to gasoline costs and then provides tax breaks to the rich who can afford to buy new electric vehicles while increasing the taxes on the poor who can’t is not 100% morally right.
There are lots of ways to introduce a gas tax that are ethically sound but they aren’t simple and the idea that _any_ use tax is morally just is idiotic.
If interested in a case study, have a look at Canada's experiment with it.
Fuel is already taxed. What would a "carbon tax" add here?
And what you’re describing is exactly the reason Kei trucks aren’t a thing despite most farmers actually liking them for their utility.
You can’t import them unless they are old because we want to protect the automotive industry. But we can’t build them new either because they don’t meet the safety standards (FMVSS) and are penalized more for being fuel efficient because the standards are stricter for smaller vehicles.
To be fair, kei trucks are horrible in crashes too. That’s a big part of states starting to ban them.
Motorbikes are much worse in crashes than kei trucks, we are more than happy to make, sell and operate them. I don’t actually buy the “unsafe” reasoning. It’s also perfectly street legal to buy and drive cars and trucks from the 60s with abysmal safety ratings.
They’re horrible in crashes in the North American region. That’s because the average vehicle size in North America is much, much bigger than the vehicles in the Kei trucks’ region of origin. And streets in North America are, on average, much, much wider and permit higher speed traffic than those in Japan. The cars themselves aren’t inherently unsafe; if you keep them mostly on private property and only take them out on low-speed public roads with light duty vehicles, they’re still operating in an appropriate context. Also pretty appropriate in historic city centers where the roads aren’t too fast and the trucks and full size SUVs aren’t too numerous. But yeah, take one out on the interstate boxed between two semi trucks, an F-350, and a Suburban and you’re going to be in real danger.
Fine print: The truck in the link is only $20K after government subsidies/rebates. So if the government gives my tax dollars to buyers of this truck, then it will cost $20K.
Electric vehicle tax credits are non-refundable tax credits meaning you can't get a credit for more than you owe. [1][2]
Which means no one is getting your tax dollars to buy vehicles (though there may be some infrastructure or manufacturing grants for companies).
[1] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12600
[2] https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/tax-credits-for-individuals-wha...
That's not really true.
If the taxes someone would otherwise pay are going to their electric vehicle instead, somebody else has to make up the difference.
So yes, other people are getting my tax dollars to buy electric vehicles. It just takes two steps rather than one, if you want to look at it that way.
Is the standard deduction giving people your tax dollars? Anyone who itemizes?
What if someone declines a promotion and thus doesn't increase their income and pay more taxes? Is that also taking your tax dollars?
Sure, yes, if the government doesn't follow PAYGO[1] (which they almost never do) and offset tax expenditures (tax incentives) with reduced direct spending and government debt increases then maybe, some day, some portion of your tax dollars may get indirectly spent on this.
But how do we really know? Do we know what other secondary effects will come from these tax incentives?
If electric cars catch on maybe the government will get more revenue somewhere else (there are North American manufacturing requirements to qualify after all) or have to spend less revenue on something else (surely burning oil must have some effect).
Or maybe the person getting the electric vehicle then uses it to make more money and pay more taxes than they would have before (unlikely but possible).
But, directly, they're getting back their own money. The real issue with the credit is that it disproportionately favors people who already make a lot of money (but taxes also disproportionately tax people who make more money so maybe that's fair).
[1] https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/RL31943
> But, directly, they're getting back their own money.
It doesn't matter. Everyone else is now paying for all the federal government services they consume. Other people are paying for that. It's literally that simple.
Congress doesn't retroactively raise tax rates to make up the difference. If the government budget ends up in a deficit, which obviously it does, not just because of this but for many reasons, that is financed via debt. This isn't passed to the population as higher taxes, but as inflation, which affects everyone equally, including whoever got the tax credits in the first place.
First of all, you're wrong about how debt is financed. It's not via inflation, it's by taxes. Interest payments accounted for 13% of the federal budget last year. That's enormous. (Yes inflation reduces the value of debt over time, but debt carries interest which generally outweighs expected inflation.)
Second, Congress absolutely adjusts tax rates as well. Not precisely one-to-one to match spending each year, but over the long term it's all got to add up. Every dollar the government spends today is paid with people's taxes either today or their taxes tomorrow.
Third, the person who received the tax credits isn't being affected "equally". If 1% of people get the credit, but 100% of people pay for it, then the people who receive the credit end up hugely ahead in the end, while the other 99% lose out. So yes, for the 1% of people getting an electric vehicle tax credit, it is almost entirely paid for by the other 99% of people.
Goverment debt is reduced by increased taxes and/or reduction in services just as much as it is by "inflation". Further, inflation doesn't affect the person who got a $7,500 individual tax reduction as much as someone who didn't.
However instead of taking the credit yourself you can transfer it to the dealer at time of purchase to use toward the purchase. You can transfer the full $7500 credit regardless of how much tax you eventually end up owing for the year.
So, should I wish to purchase a vehicle this tax year, I tell my HR to adjust my income withholding such that I owe 7,500$ come tax time and then reap the rewards?
Or is there more to the incentive structure?
Withholding isn't relevant here. Non refundable means it can't cause the government to net pay you money: that is to say, it can't make your refund larger than your withholding.
Adjust my withholding to generate a debt to Th enticement that I claim the rebate on? I think you’re thinking the other direction.
What you have withheld is not part of the equation. It is your tax liability that matters.
I’m confused here, wouldn’t me underpaying on my income generate a liability that I can then claim this rebate on?
You can still get a refund with this tax credit, but it has to be a refund of taxes you paid through things like your payroll tax.
Non-refundable means that if the rebate drives your owed taxes below zero you don't get the negative tax debt back.
If you don't earn much money most of your paid taxes go to SS and medicare rather than income tax, so the rebate may not do anything for you. But if you make at least median income you should be able to fully use this rebate.
If you're retired and buy one of these trucks you'd be wise to realize $100k in investment gains in that year in order to fully exploit the tax credit.
Let's make up an example. Let's say you earn $75,000/year and the tax rate is 10%. So you owe $7,500 in taxes. That is your tax liability. It doesn't matter if you have your employer deducting $144 from your weekly paycheck or $0 from your weekly paycheck.
https://apps.irs.gov/app/understandingTaxes/student/hows.jsp
The government still gives you back your money in a refund if you overpay them.
Though, of course, you don't earn interest on it while the government is holding it.
>Which means no one is getting your tax dollars to buy vehicles
Then who is making up the difference between the tax that would have been paid, and the credit reduction?
Even finer print: the $7,500 federal incentive is a tax rebate. If you don't have a $7,500 tax liability, you won't get the full amount. (this also applies if you transfer the credit to the dealer at point of sale). I mean, money is fungible and all, but your particular tax dollars aren't going to people who buy EVs, they are just paying less in taxes.
>this also applies if you transfer the credit to the dealer at point of sale
No, it does not. See Q4 at the following link:
https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/topic-h-frequently-asked-questi...
My understanding is that the dealer has to have the tax liability. IANATL, YMMV.
>money is fungible
And then you contradicted yourself 2 phrases over.
It's ~28k without them, particularly when considering recent inflation it's an attractive price... inflation corrected it's in the vague ballpark of other small IC trucks when they were still available.
E.g. a early 2000's Nissan frontier base model was $23k in today's money. It was a somewhat better speced (e.g. more hauling capacity) and much better range, but this new car likely has significantly lower operating costs that would easily justify a 5k uplift.
So I think it ought to be perfectly viable without the subsidy, especially so long as the absurd CAFE standards continue to exist giving EV's a monopoly on this truck size.
Yes, and you will benefit, because the role of the state is to advance the collective and common good.
That's why we have TeH gOvErNmEnT.
As opposed to other prices that are not the product of a political economy?
My favorite thing to come out of CAFE regulations was the Aston Martin Cygnet. It was just a re-badged Toyota iQ whose sole purpose was to raise the average fuel economy within their fleet.
Later they made a one off version for Goodwood that has a V8 stuffed under the hood.
> My favorite thing to come out of CAFE regulations was the Aston Martin Cygnet. It was just a re-badged Toyota iQ whose sole purpose was to raise the average fuel economy within their fleet.
Maybe that's a good thing. It compelled Aston Martin to provide their customers with a fuel-efficient option.
Nobody looking for a fuel efficient car would look at Aston, and nobody looking at Aston would go for a fuel efficient car.
Which was borne by its sales: sold for nearly 3 times the price you'd have paid Toyota for an iQ, it sold all of 600 units in two years before being cancelled, Aston's second shortest production run. The shortest was the Virage which sold more than 1000 units in a year.
At some point they offered a free Cygnet if you bought one of their other models.
Rebadging doesn't add any meaningful consumer choice.
I have a small(*) twenty year old i4 pickup and I regularly get cash offers for it while out and about. There is a lot of demand for the small inexpensive and relatively fuel efficient utility vehicles that the government currently prohibits manufacturing.
(*Ironically, though small it has a considerably longer bed than many currently produced larger and less fuel efficient trucks... I'm mystified by trucks that can't even contain a bike without removing a wheel or hanging one over a gate. Looks like the bed on this EV is a bit short too, but a short bed on a small truck is more excusable than a short bed on a huge truck)
This is largely why all the vehicles around us have become supersized. It's completely idiotic.
It's also who sedans and compact cars have largely ceased to exist. The vast majority of new vehicles are crossovers or _light trucks_, which aren't held to the same emission/efficiency standards.
> It's also who sedans and compact cars have largely ceased to exist.
Consumer demand is still an important factor.
Sedans and compact cars are still out there, sitting on dealer lots with reasonable prices.
Yeah but the only way to protect myself if hit by a freight train is to also drive a freight train.
Consumer demand is driven by marketing.
Anybody know how it got to this point? It can't be because of regulatory capture, right? I don't think small cars are getting made for the US because of SUV mania and something like a 67 MPG requirement for the Honda Fit based on it's build.
> I don't think small cars are getting made for the US because of SUV mania and something like a 67 MPG requirement for the Honda Fit based on it's build.
The famous 67MPG requirement was for a hypothetical 2026 model year car
But Honda discontinued the Fit in the United States in 2020, long before the hypothetical 2026 target.
The reason is consumer demand. People weren't buying them. There are thousands of lightly used Honda Fits on the used market for reasonable prices, but they're not moving.
Yes, the regulations are flawed, but that doesn't change the lack of consumer demand.
> The reason is consumer demand. People weren't buying them.
I think this over-simplifies things. Strict milage standards force a set of compromises on ICE car design that make them both shittier and more expensive[1]. Why would anyone buy such a product when they can get an SUV instead?
[1] Some examples: turbochargers, CVTs, start/stop systems. All of these increase both the cost and complexity of building as well as repairing the car. And with higher complexity comes higher chances for something to fail as well so reliability suffers.
> Why would anyone buy such a product when they can get an SUV instead?
Isn't this just a circular way of admitting that people actually wanted SUVs?
This doesn't explain why the used car market is full of very cheap cars like the Honda Fit for much less than a new SUV.
> [1] Some examples: turbochargers,
Have to disagree. These are a great way to downsize the engine and maintain the same torque output. Yes it's more parts, but modern OEM turbochargers are very reliable. If you can reduce the number of cylinders from 6 to 4 or 3, that's a net win in moving parts, consumables, and repair costs.
> This doesn't explain why the used car market is full of very cheap cars like the Honda Fit for much less than a new SUV.
Is it really? Just to check I looked at carmax and found this kind of price:
2016 Honda Fit LX $16,998* 26K mi
You can get cheaper ones in the $11k range with like 110k+ miles on them, is this really a meaningul price difference?
But they only wanted SUVs because government nerfed sedans.
> both shittier and more expensive
> Some examples: turbochargers
I disagree that turbochargers are shittier. For most people, hell even for a large subset of people that only want to race their cars on a track, turbochargers provide huge benefits. Yes, they add complexity and cost; they also vastly improve fuel efficiency, create the best torque curve possible on an ICE vehicle, and substantially improve power output. Sometimes you actually need more complexity to build a better system. I think turbochargers are a marvel of modern engineering.
And while it's subjective and admittedly more enthusiasts prefer naturally aspirated to turbocharged, I personally prefer the character of a turbocharged engine. I'd rather hear turbo whistles than a whining V10.
If what you want is a reliable commuter, because knowing you can get yourself to work is more important than even fuel efficiency, then turbochargers are a clear net negative. I think most people view their car as a tool first and foremost, and don't have the luxury to view it as a toy.
> V10
Lmao what
Turbocharged cars have been reliable for a while now. There was a time when people said the same thing about fuel injection - because it is objectively more complicated than carbureted engines. But as time went on and they became more reliable and cheaper the only people that care about carburetors now are enthusiasts because they have so many drawbacks. It's the same thing with turbo engines today, except they're already reliable and better to drive (assuming you ever want to merge onto a highway). If you consider the higher RPM typical for NA vehicles they're arguably less reliable over time. If you include rising fuel costs turbocharged is arguably cheaper over the lifespan of the vehicle.
Buy whatever you want. But most people's perceptions of 'reliable' for cars is based entirely on rumors and hearsay and has nothing to do with data. Most awards for reliability are marketing gimmicks and aren't based on useful data.
What I know for sure is anybody talking about V10 engines is obviously utterly divorced from normal person reality, and I can't take any of their suggestions seriously.
Performance does not matter to the majority of car buyers. Reliability and capability are what matters. Whether you can count on the car doing what you need it to do. Even fuel economy is second to those. Anybody talking about the sound of turbochargers, performance and V10 engined (seriously, WTF) is totally out of touch.
I am happy with my 1.6L EcoBoost Ford Mondeo. It gets good fuel efficiency and has plenty of power to climb hills.
The Honda Fit had none of these. It was just a tiny car with a tiny engine.
It's just that Americans do not buy tiny cars or tiny engines.
“Reasonable prices” open to some debate. There’s such a premium to the Honda nameplate that the prices that “lightly used” ones go for make them a tough proposition over buying new. (Which of course, is no longer an option for the Fit.) From a look at prices in Canada, used 5-year-old 2020 model Fits are going for more than they did new.
Repealing these Obama era rules would go a long way to restoring automotive affordability. Can't undo cash for clunkers though
It's worth noting that CAFE standards have been in effect since the 70's, and disincentivized small vehicles since long before the 2011 updates.
> since 2011, bigger cars are held to a lesser standard by CAFE[1].
... and this is why American cars got so huge, if anyone was curious.
The US is falling way behind in electric vehicles. If BYD could sell in the US, the US auto industry would be crushed.[1]
What went wrong is that 1) Tesla never made a low-end vehicle, despite announcements, and 2) all the other US manufacturers treated electric as a premium product, resulting in the overpowered electric Hummer 2 and F-150 pickups with high price tags. The only US electric vehicle with comparable prices in electric and gasoline versions is the Ford Transit.
BYD says that their strategy for now is to dominate in every country that does not have its own auto industry. Worry about the left-behind countries later.
BYD did it by 1) getting lithium-iron batteries to be cheaper, safer, and faster-charging, although heavier than lithium-ion, 2) integrating rear wheels, differential, axle, and motor into an "e-axle" unit that's the entire mechanical part of the power train, and 3) building really big auto plants in China.
Next step is to get solid state batteries into volume production, and build a new factory bigger than San Francisco.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BYD_Auto_vehicles
I think one of the biggest problems in the United States is the misallocation of ambitious people. The highly educated and ambitious people see finance, government, tech, and corporate executive tracks, as the way to convert their energies into social status.
Even startups these days seem to be a case of too many chiefs, not enough Indians.
When Elon gets excited about displacing his engineers on a whim with H1Bs, why would any highly educated ambitious person want to work for Tesla?
> (...) why would any highly educated ambitious person want to work for Tesla?
To that dimension I would add ethics as well. It's very hard to justify working for the likes of Tesla when being mindful of the attitude the company and company representatives have with regards to basic issues ranging from workers rights to totalitarianism.
I mean, that's one way to get Indians!
Well the problem is US wants to be the world's managers. And all we cared about is writing messenger apps. Totally missed the boat on building things, like houses, boats, and most of all new weird things we don't even have a concept for.
Watching nearly the entire software-financial complex burn to the ground when the vaunted "moats" dry up is going to be a hell of a sight. All this AI hype is just going to end up commodifying the very thing that the entire industry is built on: management of processes.
Places that understand that physical production cannot be abstracted forever will prevail.
Agreed, and this is a somewhat recent phenomenon (see wtf happened in 1971)
For example, we have 100+ drone startups in the United States. But our overall drone production capacity (hammers in Civ) hasn't actually increased. We just have 100 companies buying grey market from Vietnam and Indonesia, many of which came from China originally.
The way the system should work is if you want to do a drone startup, you need to build a drone factory. That's what the money is for.
If the startup fails, maybe the market leader buys the factory for cheap. This is how the automobile industry was in the United States - a bunch of those companies went bust, but the factories were often kept online by the winners.
> Well the problem is US wants to be the world's managers.
I think the problem is more nuanced than that. The US was effectively "the world's managers", in the sense that their economic might, entrepreneur culture, and push for globalization resulted in a corporate structure where the ownership and executive levels were US whereas non-critical business domains reflected the local workforce, whether it was the US or not.
This setup worked great while the US dominated the world's economy and influenced their allies and trading partners to actively engage in globalization.
Now that Trump is pushing for isolationism, of course things change.
I would push on how well GDP measures "economic might".
If I were to tell you a country over five years grew its GDP 5% in 1900, that would mean houses and roads and factories and mines and a whole range of things were built.
In 2020, 5% real GDP growth could be an increase in the value of various services. In fact, you might not need to change the physical world at all to achieve that growth.
GDP made sense in 1900, back when it took so much labor to keep us all alive and well that we could think of any economic activity as a proxy for progress towards that goal--a goal we could all agree was good. Our concept of value was mostly aligned with our values, so more = better.
Nowadays we're more in conflict, partly just because we can afford to be without risking immediate starvation. Billions get spent on swaying an election this way, more billions get spent on swaying it that way. Dollars spent in both directions count as GDP even though each one has another dollar on the other side pushing in the opposite direction. And it's not just elections, everywhere we're building moats instead of solving problems. It's a very busy way to not go anywhere.
We need to move from scalars to vectors--progress towards some goal--otherwise we're just patting ourselves on the back for working hard to no effect.
Services are all basically a proxy for the physical world though. Other than things like art and media that people value for their own sake.
Google and Facebook?
I'm not entirely sure what your question is - are you asking how Google/Facebook are proxies for physical thing?
Google, at its core, provides a service that helps you do physical things more quickly. If I need to replace the cruise control buttons on my car, I could go to the library and source a manual, or I could just search Google.
Facebook marketplace increases the efficiency of trading physical goods.
The Facebook feed is probably most akin to cigarettes.
The problem is that things like houses and boats became political tokens and/or don't have the same profit scaling as software. Housing is mostly restricted by political opposition that made it very hard or even illegal to build much. Building ships is labor intensive which is expensive here, but AFAIK at least construction of navy ships has become a bargaining ship that gets moved around to support senators rather than being allocated to the most efficient place. In general it also seems like unions in the US are somehow more of a problem than in Europe or at least Germany where I grew up. They seem less powerful here but somehow less reasonable.
>we
Andrew Yang launched a presidential campaign based on this idea, he wrote a book:
“Smart People Should Build Things”
I think the bigger problem is we filter for conmen. You can become a billionaire for vaporware and are less likely to if you actually ship something.
There are plenty of smart people who are highly passionate about things other than money. The problem is a large portion aren't at top name universities and doing don't have the connections. Problem is, they spent all their time learning their craft and not how to market their ideas.
I disagree that it's just because those jobs pay well. Look at what people are investing in and how it works. We throw tons of money at obviously bad ideas, obvious cons, and anyone that took a semester at Stanford. There are plenty of Bitcoin billionaires! There's tons who have made riches off the VR hype wave before that.
I agree that we put too much focus on finance and the like but I think more importantly we have a system where you can get ultra wealthy for producing vaporware. It's much easier to build hype than build a product. You still get people who become millionaires & billionaires by shipping things, but we created a system where we reward conmen. Ultimately, the con is easier than the actual job.
There's a lot of that tech can do but let's be honest, our industry has capitalized on the boom and bust cycle and accelerated it. We're not the only ones, but we're a big player and it's easier to hold our own community accountable than get others to change.
Can you demonstrate that this misallocation is worse in the US than it is in other countries?
They go where it's feasible to go. As long as regulation hamstrings industries, it'd be idiotic to build there. Ambitious people just want everyone else to get out of their way so they (I) can build stuff - and they'll go where there's less resistance.
Oh, there's a "tax credit" to make it easier? Sounds like more paperwork & friction. No thanks!
That's one reason Tech is such an attactor. Low barrier to entry.
Because compensation?
The US automakers lost the plot a long time ago, and have just been sucking out money without innovation or improvement since.
When California and the EPA tried to legislate lower emissions 9 years into the future, the US automakers sued to block saying it was impossible. Japanese automakers were already selling vehicles that met those standards.
When they badly, badly screw up, they just get bailed out with public funds and then go on to pay execs tens of millions of dollars a year and fat bonuses. Guaranteed profits no matter what made them lazy and uncompetitive.
They’re all dying
> When they badly, badly screw up, they just get bailed out with public funds
When this happens, I think it's only fair that the bailed-out company becomes publicly owned. If I'm forced to invest in a company with my tax dollars, then I damn well better be treated as an investor. Where are my shares? Where are my dividends?
When the USG bailed out banks via TARP during the 2008 financial crisis, it did so by buying shares in those companies. It later sold those shares for a $30.5 billion profit.
If GMC had been “publically owned” it would have been gutted for profits (kickbacks) by its bureaucracy and politicians and been long dead by at least a decade. Bureaucrats are not good at running companies and private companies should not be providing public services (prisons, toll roads). I don't know why Americans have become so unpragmatic and either all in on “government doing everything” or “private corps doing everything” when life is never ever that simple.
GM and Chrysler went bankrupt and were partially bailed out, the CEOs were replaced and the Government took a stake in the companies, which eventually paid off.
There also is the chicken tax which has been protecting US automakers in the pickup truck space which has lead to then leaning much more into that. Together with absurd CAFE rules that benefit huge cars and more beneficial tax write-off rules for vehicles over 3.5t regulation has lead to US automakers focusing on cars that are absurd by international standards.
- "BYD did it by"
Also the many systemic, industry-wide factors discussed last week in
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43692677 ("America underestimates the difficulty of bringing manufacturing back (molsonhart.com)" — 1010 comments)
I agree with the gist of that piece; focusing on specific engineering choices (important as they are) is missing the forest for a particularly interesting tree. Any American EV maker is heavily disadvantaged right now, no matter how clever they are.
BYD's allowed to sell in Europe. They're not crushing the market here. They're not substantially cheaper, or better for what they offer for the price compared to other manufacturers.
Within only a few months I see more Chinese Electric cars than Tesla (or us cars generally) on swiss streets.
Depending on what you are looking for they are WAY cheaper than comparable cars.
No way I'd trust them. When you crash them or they have a battery fault, the doors lock you inside before the battery catches fire. Many videos of this happening inside China with one recent event in the West.
> No way I'd trust them. When you crash them or they have a battery fault, the doors lock you inside before the battery catches fire.
This matches reports from Tesla users. The cybertruck is specially prone to this sort of design problems.
Only cybertrucks I've heard about catching on fire where the ones purposely set on fire. While I'm sure it happens I doubt it's any higher than any other vehicle on the road
Why is that a common failure mode in a crash? I can't think of a reason or bug that would lead to the doors locking after a crash.
Fail-safe designs are more expensive because they require redundancies, fully manual linkages, or just non-centralized control.
The Cybertruck went with daisy chained PoE automotive Ethernet variant. The same cables delivering power to subcomponents handle data. Damage/problems in a single component can not only bring down the network but kill power to all the car's subsystems. It means less wiring in the Cybertruck (and lower production expense) at the cost of durability and fail-safety. Someone looked at TokenRing Ethernet and said "yes that is best".
I think it's a well intentioned safety feature that was never fully thought through. Locking the doors in a crash can prevent a passenger from being ejected from a vehicle. However, if there is no reliable way to unlock the door once the acceleration forces have subsided, you've created a death trap.
Most cars lock as you start driving, I assume the issue is they’re not unlocking when crashed.
Are there not similar videos of Tesla, or other electric cars doing the exact same thing?
There's a mechanical latch release handle integrated into the doors, but they are very much not meant to be used during normal operation and are designed to be inconspicuous. This seems to cause at least some people to fail to operate them during a fast-paced emergency situation.
Can you share some of those videos here please?
That sounds like some kind of tiktok scare lol
VW is selling more EVs in Europe than BYD.
VW is not an American car maker. There are way more European cars in Switzerland than either Chinese or US. Obviously. Also more Japanese tho
EU import taxes designed to make them less cheap than local cars do that.
China has one of the least free trade regimes in the world, their currency controls alone amount to potentially more than Euro tariffs on cars and that’s just one part of their governmental stacking of the deck for their manufacturers.
I think it’s easy to look at the outputs of their industries and compare them extremely favorably to the outputs elsewhere, especially in EV.
But once you start comparing tariff adjusted pricing it gets much trickier much faster.
The EU has imposed tariffs and levies on BYD, totaling 27% [1].
[1] https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/companies-markets/chinese-e...
BYD could slash european prices by quite a bit. They price them competitively to take advantage of the margin. The increase in price compared to their domestic MSRP is pretty wild, 2x in some cases. In a race to the bottom, they will win.
You're right, but comparing Switzerland to America... You need a car to live in 90% of the USA. That said, talking only about specs or prices is pretty reductionist. If anyone on this forum could forecast car sales based on pre-delivery marketing, you know, become a billionaire investor.
What went wrong is that the federal government didn't build or legislate a national charging infrastructure to match the scale of the interstate highway system.
They could have strong-armed the states into it with a combination of funding the construction and the way they mandated the 21 drinking age: by threatening to withhold highway funds.
They definitely tried... $7.5 Billion worth. It's on pause now :-(
https://www.govtech.com/transportation/federal-funding-for-e...
I don't think they actually tried. They created a fund... and then did nothing to implement the intended result.
And how many stations did that yield?
Isn't this lack of forward thinking somewhat the general problem now?
From an EU perspective the world as it has existed in the living memory is a world shaped by decisive US-actions. The way EVs have been approached were anything but that. Arguably neither did Germany, because of the way their politicians are entangled with the car manufacturers.
Germany actively hampered it by promoting diesel as THE greeen fuel.
Yes, as I hinted at in the last sentence of my comment.
> They could have strong-armed the states into it with a combination of funding the construction and the way they mandated the 21 drinking age: by threatening to withhold highway funds.
Yea let's give the federal government more power. That's going so well right now.
> Yea let's give the federal government more power. That's going so well right now.
Investing on a nation-wide infrastructure grid that fundamentally changes the nation's energy independence is hardly a reason to mindlessly parrot state rights cliches.
The current issue is the president ignoring legal limits of his power and breaking laws right and left. While his party cheers on.
While useful parts of the federal goverment are destroyed, because they dont serve ultra rich.
In a way, the current administration perfectly demonstrates the value of a strong federal government: a kakistocratic, kleptocratic regime wouldn't dismantle the "administrative state" if it weren't an impediment to their criminality, incompetence, and rapacity.
NATIONAL-scale projects are exactly what the federal government should do. I specifically referred to the Eisenhower interstate-highway system. Those are the kind of grand undertakings that transformed our country, and which the current administration can't even conceive... let alone articulate or propose.
Read about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System
The Chevy Spark EV is an incredible vehicle and has been my around town go kart for the past 7 years. Cost me $11k (!!) as an off lease purchase.
I adored my Spark EV til it sadly died (fairly scarily, on a highway access road) one day. Chevy was never able to repair it and ultimately gave me a nice payout after paying for a rental for me for nearly a year.
But if you sold the Spark EV for 20k today with like 120mi of range, it would be perfect and would satisfy all my needs 99% of the time. Even mine (13k all in) was great here in LA with ~60mi of range. I loved how small and easy to park it was without feeling cramped to me at all. If it had CarPlay I'd've said it was the perfect car haha.
It's a shame they haven't rebooted it yet as a pure EV. It's right there in the name!
>2) all the other US manufacturers treated electric as a premium product, resulting in the overpowered electric Hummer 2 and F-150 pickups with high price tags
They had to in order to build the manufacturing capacity without literally bankrupting themselves. As GM has shown, once they had the expertise and manufacturing capabilities, they could quickly move downmarket. By all accounts GM's entry into the space has been a raging success, moving downmarket with the Equinox being available for as low as $27,500.
They obviously aren't to Tesla level sales numbers yet, but they're growing rapidly and I would not count them out of the fight.
https://insideevs.com/news/746177/general-motors-record-2024...
> dominate in every country that does not have its own auto industry.
That's because they plan to have a small number of huge factories to keep costs down.
But that means they need cheap ships, and can only sell to places with no car tariffs - which tends to be the countries without an auto industry.
In terms of BYD dominance, one needs to keep in mind the subsidy that the Chinese government is providing, such that they can sell cars below cost.
https://www.shs-conferences.org/articles/shsconf/pdf/2024/27...
Just 2018 to 2022, BYD received $5.9B. And that doesn't include all the indirect subsidies that went to suppliers like the battery manufacturers.
It's a part of Chinese government strategy of "build it and they will come". Massively subsidize select industries, dominate the market.
Which is why the EU has put high tariff's on the cars.
That is not that much in terms of subsidy for a critical industry. I tried finding the awards for Tesla but the articles lump in government contracts and report the figure to be in tens of billions. I am sure they have received a comparable amount of funding. BYD has just been able to make better use of it I suppose.
BYD buses are operating in the US.
> 2) all the other US manufacturers treated electric as a premium product
This is because the LITERALLY CAN'T make money of a non premium product.
And for Tesla is just because Musk is stupid and went ALL-IN on self driving. They literally believe that the market will drop by 80% because of self driving. That's why the only build robotaxi and no model 2. Against the advice of basically everybody in Tesla leadership.
You're probably right about BYD, most people only see price and whether it's reputation is at least "ok". I personally will never buy that big of a purchase from a Chinese company until CCP is no longer in charge.
Exactly how will BYD's 400k vehicals "crush" the US auto industry? They could give them away for free and not even make a dent.
They are doing a lot of advertisment and promo in Germany which has a active and kinda stable car Industrie.
Pretty sure they plan to disrupt any market
> 3) integrating rear wheels, differential, axle, and motor into an "e-axle" unit that's the entire mechanical part of the power train
Obviously an electric vehicle is so much simpler than one with a gasoline engine. We have seen it already with lawn mowers who shrank from huge tractors to nimble robots.
An in particular when you don't start from the Autobahn-eater type of cars.
Do you own a BYD? It’s not that great. Build quality is subpar. Problem with investing in China is that once tech transfer ends, there’s no promise that these companies are capable of continued innovations. It’s basically an ecosystem dependent on outside innovations that they can “transfer” and tweak. That’s the whole “communist” economy in nutshell.
You missed a big elephant in the room 4) China did a significant subsidies for BYD factories. If USA did similar % wise thing to Tesla then we would’ve have $20k teslas driving.
China subsidized EVs in the same way that America did (tax credits), and less aggressively so. Unless you mean incentives from Shenzhen and getting taxi companies to early adopt? They also added incentives in getting a car at all in cities like Beijing (EVs started out in a different lottery allocation for plates)?
It's more like BYD winning the race in China's auto industry. China has over a hundred automakers, most making low-end cars.[1] Some are state-owned, some are province-owned, some are privately owned. BYD is privately owned and doing well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automobile_manufacture...
Did you mean to say sodium batteries instead of lithium in your "BYD did it" sentence?
No. Five years ago BYD introduced their "blade battery", which is a lithium iron phosphate battery built up of plate-like "blades" in rectangular casings.[1] Wh/L is about the same as lithium ion, Wh/Kg is not as good, and Wh/$ is better. It will survive the "nail test" and does not not go into thermal runaway.
Today, most of BYD's products use this technology. It's been improved to handle higher charging rates. Seems to work fine. Lithium-ion has better Wh/Kg, and it's still used in some high-end cars, mostly Teslas. BYD's approach has captured the low and medium priced markets.
BYD has announced that they plan first shipments of cars with solid state batteries (higher Wh/Kg) in 2027. Price will be high at first, and they will first appear in BYD's high-end cars. Like these.[3] BYD has the Yangwang U8, a big off-road SUV comparable to the Rivian, and the Yangwang U9, a "hypercar". Just to show that they can make them, probably.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIt5z4wT9RE
[2] https://electrek.co/2025/02/17/byd-confirms-evs-all-solid-st...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHWXx1KsvVY
> Like these.[3] BYD has the Yangwang U8, a big off-road SUV comparable to the Rivian, and the Yangwang U9, a "hypercar".
I really did not expect to open this and have it be presented by Kryten! Fun surprise! :)
By 4) stealing patents and technology off of American companies
I was curious about this statement and did a search and could not find anything about it.
It appears that EV technology is new enough that it's Chinese companies that are the ones innovating, especially in battery technology.
I don't really see how any car company can "fall behind" in EV.
Fundamentally, IMO, EVs are such a simple concept mechanically that any company capable of building a conventional ICE vehicle can build an EV.
It's glib to say that - obviously there's a lot of unsaid complexity (battery back cooling, fitting into the frame, and so on), but the actual drivetrain component is just so simple. That EVs are still expensive is to me a sign that production hasn't ramped up yet. So long as production is limited EVs will remain a luxury product - but I can't imagine that's going to continue for all that much longer with an increasing backlog of used EVs on the market and decreasing battery prices.
Even if there were no improvements to be had in the vehicle itself, improvements in manufacturing processes determine how expensive the product is and thus how competitively priced the vehicle can be. Falling behind on price means falling behind on market share which means falling behind on efficiencies of scale which often means going out of business or at best becoming a niche producer.
Honda and Toyota weren't able to outcompete US manufacturers in the 1980s by offering higher performance vehicles but by delivering similar quality products at lower prices by making use of superior production techniques like Lean and JIT inventory management.
Are you serious? EVs have been the biggest disruption in the auto industry. It has created major corporations who made the attempts of traditional manufacturers seem obsolete.
VW Group and Stellantis totally failed to compete with Chinese manufacturers and were driven out of the Chinese EV market almost entirely. Competition is extremely fierce.
>That EVs are still expensive
Look up what they cost in China.
>So long as production is limited EVs will remain a luxury product
Around 50% of new sales in China. Not "luxury" in any meaningful way.
The issue is that EVs do not differentiate themselves by power train. They differentiate themselves by battery and software.
I LOVE it! THIS is the kind of truck I'd be looking at to replace my 1998 Ford Ranger.
Here is what could be potential deal-breakers:
- Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.
- Lack of good charge management and battery conditioning. Either that, or a cheap and easy to replace battery pack. I'd really like both!
- Comparable hauling and towing capacity to the 1998 Ford Ranger. Those numbers aren't exactly impressive, but I do use the truck as a truck, and I occasionally need the hauling capacity (weight).
- Bucket seats. I need a bench seat so I can take my wife and dog. Think weekend glamping trips. Picture 8 shows a bucket seat. It doesn't look like that would work.
If anyone from Slate is reading this, this is how I'm looking at this truck. FYI, I'll be comparing this to the Ford Maverick.
> - Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.
Noooooooooo! No apps, please! Finally a car not tethered to and dependent on your phone, and we already have our first request to app-ify it!
EDIT: Ughhh, according to the video that another user posted, it looks like there's an app, and yes, "updates" go through it :(
> - Lack of good charge management and battery conditioning. Either that, or a cheap and easy to replace battery pack. I'd really like both!
Yes to a simple battery system!
> - Comparable hauling and towing capacity to the 1998 Ford Ranger. Those numbers aren't exactly impressive, but I do use the truck as a truck, and I occasionally need the hauling capacity (weight).
Yes!
> - Bucket seats. I need a bench seat so I can take my wife and dog. Think weekend glamping trips. Picture 8 shows a bucket seat. It doesn't look like that would work.
Yes, definitely. It being a 2 seater is kind of a deal breaker for families. You really want a bench seat to at least stick a small child between the driver and passenger. Back in the day, we'd stuff 3 kids between two adults, but these days the Safety People would have a heart attack just thinking about that.
The article mentions an SUV upgrade kit that will bolt onto the back of the truck. Ugh, OK I guess. Sad that that's the way it will probably have to go.
1: https://youtu.be/cq1qEjwSYkw
> Yes, definitely. It being a 2 seater is kind of a deal breaker for families.
What you need is not a pickup truck. Catering to families means expensive bells and whistles, like entertainment systems, etc.
> Back in the day, we'd stuff 3 kids between two adults, but these days the Safety People would have a heart attack just thinking about that.
Rightfully so. Back in the day we did so many things we shouldn't have, and survivorship bias makes us default to thinking it was ok. As kids, we used to go barrelling down dirt roads in the back of pickups or played in the backs of station wagons. There's a reason automobile deaths have gone down.
> Catering to families means expensive bells and whistles, like entertainment systems, etc.
It absolutely does NOT mean those things.
Cars didn't have entertainment systems for nearly a century and families did just fine.
<Get off my lawn>
My entertainment system was the window. Observe the world, not just whatever AI-generated garbage some algorithm pushes to a small screen 8-10 inches away from your eyes.
</Get off my lawn>
And aside from a window, you know what's better than a car infotainment system?
A physical holder for a personal pad device.
The amount of not-invented-here, duplicate functionality that car companies execute poorly, when buyers already have devices that do that well, is ridiculous.
The biggest benefit of aligning manufacturing costs for profit should be jettisoning the "post-sale" revenue streams that drive complicated built-in tech for current cars.
And also, you-know, 100% A+ on getting back to "customize your own car, because it's cheap and supported"!
Owners being afraid of doing what they want with their devices/vehicles has to stop.
> The amount of not-invented-here, duplicate functionality that car companies execute poorly, when buyers already have devices that do that well, is ridiculous.
Like when GM invented their own computer to put into their cars instead of just buying one off the shelf decades ago
Lol, yes we just throw a phone and a Tablet with headphones to the kids.
Yes! By far the biggest feature here is "no infotainment" which leads directly to "hard controls for HVAC," that alone is a killer feature! They should double down on that concept and make the truck work perfectly with no apps at all and no OtA updates too.
No OTA updates would be a killer.
What is the need for OTA updates for an EV, once you remove the autopilot and touch screen? Genuinely interested, I would guess there is none, right?
OTA updates are considered bad? What?
OTA updates on my truck have vastly improved suspension response and cruise-control/ lane-assist features. My wife's car has had OTA updates that improve her cars charging curve, and have implemented recalls for stuff like brake light response when regen braking.
Sure one could say these things should have worked perfectly from the factory, but that's not realistic: not with my cars, not with your cars, and not with this new brand either.
The only alternative I see here is the old fashioned way of having to bring it to a dealership. I would rather have an entire foot of ingrown toenails over dealing with dealership service centers of any brand.
Patches and OTA updates just scream "We know ahead of time our product is defective." Arguably OK for software (but I'd argue not), but not even remotely OK for cars.
>"We know ahead of time our product is defective."
All products are defective. Full stop.
Cars are necessarily complex and have a lot of software to get the safety, comfortable, and reliability we expect today.
Most vehicles get some sort of recall; usually minor. I just checked the NHTSA recall website and every car I could think of owned by people I know (~30 vehicles) had some had some recall.
Cars should have an easy way to update. I’m generally against always connected cars (which are the norm today), but there must be some way to patch them.
I don’t like the idea of cars having cellular modems in them (my mind goes to nefarious implications), but having a way to securely update it without having to bring to a mechanic would be nice.
>All products are defective. Full stop.
Nothing can be made to work over an infinite temperature range, or for an infinite period of time, but a product that can meet its specifications, for its design life, is in no way defective. That happens all the time, for example with electronics:
Every component in your computer or phone, down to the smallest resistor and capacitor, has multiple pages of documentation characterizing it's performance, and is individually tested to ensure it meets the stated capabilities. Each trace on the circuit board is tested to make sure it is complete and not shorted to any other trace, and once assembled every component is verified to be correctly installed. This means designs can be proven to always operate within the specifications of every component.
This isn't some fancy military-spec process; it's standard operating procedure for petty much every electronics component or assemblies manufacturer. At the volume manufacturing equipment handles, it's much cheaper and easier to automate qualifying and testing everything, at every step, than dealing with the ramifications of manufacturing a bad batch.
There are occasional bad parts that do get into the mix, but it's usually a pretty big scandal. From botched industrial espionage leading to a plague of defective electrolytic capacitors in the early 2000's to management pressure at Samsung leading to the release of a defective battery design on Note7 phones, there are occasionally products that should be recalled for defective hardware, but with a design consisting of hundreds to thousands of parts, on almost every phone or laptop ever produced, every component has lasted past the useful life of the product and, except for ware items like batteries and displays, would continue working past the useful life of the human using it.
If kept simple, as is doable with an electric drive train, and especially if devoid of non-embedded software (a field which seems to have no interest in error-free designs: https://xkcd.com/2030/) a recall-free and provably capable vehicle is completely doable.
I’m not exactly sure what point you are trying to make. The specs to which you refer are also specs which the component are _rated_ at. But that’s still only a (very high) % of components. Issues do arise with individual components. Unless it is wide spread, it is not a scandal. I have worked in the industry as well as do it as a hobby. You have a very rose colored view of it.
Lemon phones make it into the hands of consumers. I had one myself a few years ago where it overheated and shut down. One offs don’t make the news because you bring it in and it’s swapped out.
What is the need for OTA updates for an EV, once you remove the autopilot and touch screen? Genuinely interested, I would guess there is none, right?
Yes, and no.
I've only started following this recently, but a lot of OTA updates aren't just bug fixes, they're additional features.
My wife's car recently got a free OTA update which upgraded her radio to get HD stations. A previous update allowed her car to start recognizing more types of School Zone and Night Speed signs.
I've read that every year (February, I think) Tesla pushes out a big update that adds features. However, the last two Tesla pushes included a bunch of features that came standard with my wife's (much cheaper) car years ago.
You could certainly argue that her car should have come with HD Radio enabled from the start, and ditto for the Tesla features. But to suppose that all OTA car updates are nothing more than more invasive tracking and bug fixes is not strictly correct.
HD Radio tuning is built into the FM tuner, but was disabled in software. It's patents are still in effect, until 2030, so your wife's car manufacturer likely recently obtained a patent license to tune into HD Radio stations. Why they didn't negotiate a license from the get go may be a mystery, but there's no development reason it wasn't capable on day one.
Tesla, on the other hand, has promised capabilities that haven't been developed yet, something they wouldn't be able to do without OTA updates, which is a sensible reason to feel animosity toward their reliance on them.
Ok but this car doesn’t have an infotainment system and it doesn’t detect road signs.
> It absolutely does NOT mean those things.
I don't personally disagree with you, but today it pretty much does.
Anyways, my point is that this is designed as a utilitarian, cheap truck that covers the use case that most pickup trucks are actually utilitarian for, like local farm or light duty construction work. It's got a short range, no entertainment for long drives, etc. The article doesn't even say if it has AC (Slate's site seems to have images that allude to it having it).
The OP wants something for families, which exists and costs more because most families want more. They want good, cheap, and available when you can only have two. Even with gas/diesel powered trucks, there's a huge difference between the utilitarian ones construction workers and farmers buy and beat up and the expensive "luxury" quad-cabs that families now buy because minivans are too uncool.
If you consider a fur baby a family! :)
I want something much more utilitarian than what is being pitched to today's families. If you want a Quad Cab, Infotainment systems, and yadda, yadda, yadda - the market already has options. Lots of them.
If you want a cheap, light duty truck similar to what a Chevy S10 or a Ford Ranger used to be, then you're pretty much SOL.
> My entertainment system was the window. Observe the world...
The world is pretty freaking boring when it's just pavement and the 5,000th time you've passed the same strip mall, gas station, and McDonald's. The same dirty snowbanks on either side of the same gray asphalt under the interminably gray winter sky.
Maybe you lived in a place of wonderful natural beauty, or a vibrant urban street culture. A lot of people don't.
I concede that the way much of the US looks from car windows might be bad for people's mental health, but I doubt any of the badness is prevented by playing music or listening to podcasts in the car.
Some interesting people find your examples interesting: perhaps native to their personality.
However I strongly believe we can cultivate fascination with the droll.
A gray worldview might possibly say more about you.
Is a gray grain of sand interesting? Blaming a local world for being boring seems overly negative.
The world is pretty freaking boring when it's just pavement and the 5,000th time you've passed the same strip mall, gas station, and McDonald's. The same dirty snowbanks on either side of the same gray asphalt under the interminably gray winter sky.
And yet, somehow the children survived and thrived.
They learned to make up games, to entertain themselves, and to -- perish the thought -- talk to other human beings in their own family! /shudder/
Did they?
I hate to tell you, but a lot of them didn't thrive. Some of them didn't even survive. Some of them didn't have families that particularly want to talk to them. Or when they were spoken to, it wasn't exactly healthy.
Just because maybe you had a great childhood, doesn't mean everybody did.
I hate to tell you, but a lot of them didn't thrive. Some of them didn't even survive.
Citation needed.
Maybe we shouldn't pretend that a small number of exceptions are the norm. Nobody is saying that every child had a completely happy childhood. But there's absolutely nothing wrong with not being entertained 100% of the time. Being bored is a good thing.
Just because maybe you had a great childhood, doesn't mean everybody did. Let's not look at the past through rose-tinted glasses.
I think you're projecting.
You... need a citation for that?
I don't think you're conversing in good faith here. And it's not helpful or appropriate on HN to accuse someone else of "projecting".
Boredom is not fatal. Bring it on.
So you're cool with living in extreme poverty because it's not "fatal"? "Bring it on"?
Lots of things that aren't fatal are still very undesirable.
Boredom is so essential to human mental health, that after we automated it away with the industrial revolution, we had to reinvent it (we call it "meditation" now) to stay sane.
Being alone with your thoughts for a few minutes is not in the same class as being unable to afford food or medicine. Get out, troll, this isn't Reddit.
>Cars didn't have entertainment systems for nearly a century and families did just fine.
ARE WE THERE YET? ... ARE WE THERE YET? ... ARE WE THERE YET?
That was before smartphone and tablets were common
Kids will return to imagining Sonic running along the car
you mean "finger-man running on the side of the road and jumping over buildings"?
we would've called it parkour if we had known what parkour was back then
I never heard it quite put that way, but yes, I did something very similar.
{insert Sonic ring sound in your head}
The alphabet game still works if you teach them to read.
I respect the “old person yelling at clouds” disclaimer lmao.
Honestly, I got bummed when I found out this was an electric vehicle, I wish there wasn’t a chance for my vehicle to get bricked through an over-the-air update, and I personally would like to have a basic stereo with an aux input just so I can listen to FM stations or Spotify while I haul a bunch of DIY materials around without having to install my own speakers.
My friend keeps telling me to get a truck for my next vehicle, and while this truck doesn’t make the cut for me, hopefully future trucks made either by Slate Auto or other manufacturers inspired by them will add juuuust the right amount of creature comforts to win me over.
Could you talk us through the over-the-air update concern?
Or read books!
Read books, and/or knock yourself out with dramamine.
Is written in the article that it can fit more seats. And if you click through the pics you will see it.
> Yes, definitely. It being a 2 seater is kind of a deal breaker for families
I believe I saw there are plans for some sort of SUV conversion.
> Catering to families means expensive bells and whistles, like entertainment systems, etc.
IF it could just get a bluetooth signal from an iDevice or some Android thing, that would probably suffice for a basic option. If the owner needs more than than, let them install (or have installed) some sort of third-party infotainment head of some sort.
Back in the old days, cars sometimes had a single speaker and that was plenty sufficient for listening to music.
Station wagons from the prehistoric era were family cars and had bench seats, and only had a Radio…
You had a radio?
I'd want the mobile app to be an auxiliary, not a requirement for operating the truck. Keep the dashboard simple.
I'd be worried that once an app got a foothold into the product, the company would be unable to resist the urge to spread the app's tentacles across the entire vehicle, adding connectivity and telemetry and DRM, integrating it into the other car's systems, adding remote-this and wireless-that, and then inevitably the product would end up just like the turd cars we have today.
I have a iron filter that works via app. All configs can be done with button presses on the valve but in a much more tedious process/workflow.
It connects via bluetooth and not WiFi. If the company goes belly up, I'd just need the APK and an android phone to continue using the app to configure the valve and see/download water usage data.
Fast forward 20 years when I can't install the APK on android v79, I'd need an older phone to run the APK.. but that seems to be pulling hairs.
Apps would be great, it's how you handle the backend to it that's the gotcha.
I also have a water softener with an app that no longer works that had it's backend shut down. It can still be configured via the valve head button presses, but none of the "smart" usage data is available. As an example of good design, this is a perfect dichotomy of one company doing it well and one company doing it un-well[sic].
Not only the backend, but what happens 40 years in the future, when our phones don't run the app anymore, or we're all on phones that are totally unlike the phones of today, or if we don't even have phones or apps? I would expect the car to still work after that long, and making it dependent on a technology that is specific to a particular decade risks premature obsolescence.
I'll be ecstatic if my iron filter lasts 40 years.
I saw in another post that a person said there's a difference between "device dependent" and "device augmented" that really resonated with me.
There's diminishing returns on everything, and just throwing your hands up on any subject as bad/good might be a disservice.
If I live through an era where phones are no longer a thing and APKs are a thing of the past.. then I either...
A. Don't use the iron filter like that anymore. (manual programing now) B. Get a new iron filter. (ewwwww) C. Keep a legacy-device for the purposes of programming the iron filter. (doesn't need any internet connection or subscriptions)
(C) would be my most liked solution.
> ...what happens 40 years in the future, when our phones don't run the app anymore...
40 years? How about, like, 3 to 5 years? Remember when Apple decided to kill all 32-bit iOS apps for new hardware? I have an old iPod and iPhone 4S with "landlocked" software I enjoy using but can't anymore because Apple.
Phone manufacturers have shown they don't give a damn about allowing old software to function. Physical devices tied to software is a terrible idea.
Fully agree. We may have to keep a 40 year old phone around in order to just use a 40 year old car's companion app.
Relying on a mobile app is relying mobile operating system compatibility over the years and is just asking for combinatorial methods of obsolescence via OS/app/library breaking changes, plus if your old phone breaks, etc. Open sourced mobile app with open sourced back end might be somewhat acceptable but otherwise it's just asking to be bricked as soon as one of the companies involved goes under as we have seen time and again just in past couple of years.
Not an app, but an API. And an app on top of that, if desired.
Also there are evergreen interfaces, so to say. An RS232 / RS485 connector that serves 115kbps 8N1 serial interface and runs a VT220-based TUI should still be serviceable 40 years from now (VT220 was released 42 years ago). A now-modern web-based GUI also has a great chance to be serviceable 40 years from now.
100% agree. I would be fine if they had an estimated time-to-fully-charged displayed on the screen. I don’t need to know the status of my vehicle, personally. I would imagine a third party system could be implemented to achieve most of what one would need.
Nice idea in theory. In practice, apps imply ongoing OTA connectivity, which means the truck will be updated to show ads or at the very least collect and sell all my driving information to any dirtbag that can rub two nickels together. Connected devices can alter the deal so they will, after all I've lost any leverage against them after I purchased the vehicle.
If the vehicle had an open interface (maybe via CAN bus over the OBD2 port?), then DIY and aftermarket apps become possibilities.
I think legally they would need to require using an app for their back view camera. All new cars in the United States after 2018 need one and I don't see how it would work without using the phone/tablet as a display.
The article says the rear camera feed will be displayed on a screen behind the steering wheel which doubles as the speedometer and charge display.
That seems like a clever and reasonable compromise to comply with a particularly bad regulation.
The regulation did exactly what it was designed to do: take the base-model Nissan Versa off the market and prevent any low-cost vehicles from competing in the US market. (Remember when brand-new cars were available for under $10,000? Inflation adjusted, that was still less than $15,000)
Sure, ultrasonic sensors have a better outcome than backup cameras in a cost-benefit analysis (https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/nhtsa-2006-25579...) and allow you to simultaneously look out the windows and get feedback from the sensor, but allowing them would have allowed for the sale of cars too cheap to have infotainment systems, and that was not the goal of the regulators.
I don’t have a problem with the regulation. Slate is trying to build a safe, affordable, electric vehicle. Having one display for all information seems like a good way to save cost.
You need an app. You could make steering to the left only available in a 50 USD per month subscription but steering right is free or something like it.
> Noooooooooo! No apps, please!
I wish devices could have web servers and web-based UI rather than thick "apps" that end up rotting when device manufacturers arbitrarily decide that old software won't work anymore (cough, cough-- Apple-- cough, cough).
I know we can't because "security", no end-to-end over the Internet anymore, etc. >sigh<
It seems like we've engineered the networking and software ecosystem to promote disposable "smart" devices. It's almost like somebody profits from it. Hmm...
Why, we of course could if we cared. Let the car offer a wifi access point. WPA3 is secure enough, but you can of course have an extra layer of TLS inside it.
For the extra paranoid, a car could have a USB socket that pretends to be a wired network interface, offering DHCP.
Run a web server for car diagnostics and maintenance when connected to this interface. Do it from the comfort of your laptop, or anywhere anytime using your phone. Zero chance of remote exploits, if you set the things correctly on the car side. An ESP32-based system with $5 BOM would suffice to provide this.
Not with off the shelf protocols. Yes WPA3 is plenty secure, but any AP advertising the same SSID with the same key would allow the device to connect. So how do you know that you're connected to your car, and not to the black hat AP next to it?
From there, you can have as much TLS as you want, but that still won't give you server identity unless the server certificate is signed by someone you already trust. So a generic web browser would be screwed, because you either add SlateTruckCertificateAuthority to the globally trusted list, and then you still have to deal with revocations and certificate expiry, or you use some other CA that is willing to delegate. There's no good support for self-signed certificates or pinned certificates, and even if there were, the initial connection would be tough.
Unfortunately this really isn't a well-solved problem. Bluetooth can get you part of the way there, but it only offers really good security in theory (in practice it is constantly having issues) and it is intrinsically limited.
First of all, the SSID and password should be unique. Then, you can have a QR code printed in the owner's manual, and inside the glove compartment, or something. There's a standard for QR codes for connecting to wifi, so you don't have to type in the long and cryptic password.
But I don't see much incentive to produce a fake wifi AP for me to connect to with my car diagnostics. I'm not going to punch my bank account and password into it anyway. If I'm misled to alter the battery charging settings for someone else's car, or for a pretend mockup of the car controller, I don't see what the perpetrator could gain from it.
Then there must be a button on the car dashboard, or near, which I should press to activate the AC (it does not need to be up all the time), and press again to switch it off. This can serve as an easy way to check if there's doubt. The interface may have a function like headlights on / off as a simple way to check that the connection works.
A locally-hosted web interface would likely be easier to reach a given level of security than a centrally hosted interface, but obtaining and renewing SSL/TLS certificates is a requirement for HTTPS interfaces, and are designed around centralized and frequently updated centrally hosted systems, so it's only really doable with a different protocol.
It would still be easy to have a locally-hosted interface, over any other protocol, with an open-source client that could easily be ported to any future hardware and operating system.
A web server and UI is much “thicker” than a REST API. The problem is that the API used to talk to the app isn’t open to the owner.
> Yes to a simple battery system!
Battery balancing and conditioning does not need to be fancy, and does not need a fancy screen; a couple of LEDs should suffice.
But I'd like my batteries charged competently, recharged efficiently while braking, worn uniformly, and kept at reasonable temperature. It's not hard to do completely automatically and invisibly; a quality electric bike would have it.
> - Lack of good charge management and battery conditioning.
Why should it lack that? That's a tiny piece of software in the charge controller, which on this vehicle ought to be some tiny microcontroller.
In car it requires liquid cooling and from conversations I've had with former Tesla engineers, exquisite control over power quality.
Just ask a Nissan Leaf or Chevy Bolt owner.
EV battery engineer here. It's not hard. Battery management systems are often over engineered but the state of the art is fairly straightforward and will allow battery packs of sufficient size last 200k miles or more easily.
I dunno the PhD electrochemist that I know who spent a long time teasing out the conditions and requirements for megapack operation didn't think it was trivial. That's also the reason Tesla pays Jeff Dahn so much money. A million miles/20k cycles is the goal.
> exquisite control over power quality
So a... 16 bit microcontroller?
The electrochemical interface where lithium intercolates into the anode and cathode of the battery experiences microscopic electric field variations that, depending on the local surface geometry, lead to side reactions and battery degradation. The hardware that converts DC to DC and DC to AC must be designed to mitigate the voltage ripple and harmonics that exacerbate the localized electric field extremes that prematurely degrade electrode interfaces and battery electrolytes. State of the art BMS and rectifier components are much more difficult to build than you might think.
Correct me if I'm wrong but your comments do not suggest that the end result of this engineering cannot be very simple, elegant, and hopefully even inexpensive if built at scale. Instead, they suggest that the team who builds it needs to know what the heck they're doing.
No argument here. What are we even talking about?
> Yes to a simple battery system!
But you realize this will make cold-weather range suck and on-the-road charging suck, right?
Preheating the battery and cabin on "shore power" is something EV buyers just expect at this point because that can consume 2-3kWh of energy (equivalent to 6-10 miles or 10-16 km). That's almost 10% of Slate's range (see below).
Preheating the battery about 10-15 minutes before you arrive at a supercharger is another expected feature. It can increase charge acceptance rate by over 50% (reduce charge time by 1/3).
The 150 mile range is extremely optimistic given the size of the battery and shape of the truck. With just 5% top and bottom buffers, you'd need to achieve over 3.1 miles/kWh... which is the consumption expected of a small aerodynamic sedan. I would bet real money that highway range (at 75 mph) for the small battery is less than 120 miles from 100% to 0.
Highway speeds are worst case scenario so maybe you're right but I doubt it.
Your charge rate acceptance number is surprising to me, I've never seen anything like this in my years of experience designing EV batteries. Preconditioning helps extreme fast charging but isn't necessary for 1-2 C charges at all unless it's very cold out.
There's some caveats to this depending on the exact chemistry but if anything the newer semi solid state NMC cells are even less dependent on this and can charge down to -20C.
> - Bucket seats. I need a bench seat so I can take my wife and dog. Think weekend glamping trips. Picture 8 shows a bucket seat. It doesn't look like that would work.
Take her car on those trips then. You wouldn't complain you can't take a Miata camping, why would you complain you can't take a 2-seat pickup? camping? The product isn't trying to do everything. It's trying to be the minimum viable truck and be good at it. And just like the purpose built roadster you give up unrelated stuff, like family hauling.
> You wouldn't complain you can't take a Miata camping, why would you complain you can't take a 2-seat pickup? camping?
Because 2-seat pickups used to function this way. It's okay to pine for functionality that has been lost, particularly when a new product like this comes along and gets your hopes up.
>Noooooooooo! No apps, please! Finally a car not tethered to and dependent on your phone, and we already have our first request to app-ify it!
What car is tied to your phone? A mustang mach-e, for instance, does not require your phone at all. It has a FOB for opening the doors and starting it, you can program the charging times from the in-car screen.
The app is optional, exactly as it should be. This car DESPERATELY is going to need an app when it comes to charging whether you know it or not. With no in-car screen you'll have absolutely no way to control charging which WILL come back to bite you.
>Yes to a simple battery system!
"simple" in this case will add cost. Nearly every EV has the battery as a part of the structural frame of the vehicle for a reason (there are some niche exceptions in China). Nothing is impossible, but I don't see them making the battery easily swappable, while also being structurally sound, and keeping the low price point.
> DESPERATELY is going to need an app when it comes to charging whether you know it or not
I don't own an EV. What for? Do you really need more than a button or two and some leds?
In addition to the sibling comment, you want to be able to check if the vehicle is charging and everything is fine remotely. EVs randomly stopping charging for various reasons is not rare at all. You want to get a notification.
You want to know when the vehicle finishes charging so you can vacate the public charger.
You want to be able to reduce the current when the charging is tripping breakers wherever you are.
Controlling your charging. You shouldn’t be charging more than 80% for daily driving unless you want to destroy your battery.
You will almost assuredly also want to be able to precondition if you live in a cold climate.
Again, why do you consider those things as better done via a smartphone and an app, versus using the already built-in screen (the one behind the wheel)?
As I’ve already stated, I consider it better done by both. I don’t think forcing one or the other is a good user experience.
Every preview I’ve seen has stated that display is for the speedometer and backup camera, and that’s it. It’s not an input device.
I absolutely agree with you on the NO APP thing. I too just want air conditioning knobs and that's it. A truck from 1980 that is an EV that can haul lumber to build a house.
I think you're assuming a mobile app would mean that the car is dependent on your phone. Just because an app can be connected to your car doesn't mean the app controls your car.
Bench seats are almost certainly not coming back in modern low cost vehicles due to side impact safety regulations. They aren't _illegal_ but its extremely difficult to meet those standards with a bench configuration and ironically probably why a budget pickup is less likely to have them. Cutting those corners by not having a bench at all is an easy way to save money in the design.
The hauling and towing is another one. Unfortunately batteries are much heavier than a combustion engine and take away from the total capacity of the vehicle. It's curb weight is 500lbs more than the 1998 Ford Ranger. Same thing, budget vehicle means budget suspension, so its weight lowers the capacity instead of increasing the cost of the suspension.
The problem with bench seating is not side impact but accidental steering wheel input during hard cornering. In the typical 10 and 2 hand position having your butt move makes your shoulders move, the shoulders make the hands move, and now you’re understeering. Understeering on a mountain road likely means death, and on other roads a ditch or hitting a phone pole.
Steering position has been taught as 9 and 3 for a long time now… but still fair point. You can add a bit of alcantara to the seat to help you stay in place though. My RDX has it for the sporty-ish trim and it helps.
It’s never 9 and 3 in a turn though is it. It’s more like 8 and 1. Or just 1.
It's actually more like 8 and 4 or even 7 and 5 to keep your hands and arms out of the way of the airbag
And then your problem is oversteering which puts you into oncoming traffic.
Skill issue. 100k miles on bench seats in full size sedans to full size pickups, including mountain roads, and nary a problem.
Literally survivor bias.
So you agree: skill issue.
> understeering
Is that even possible in cars with ESC?
I had no idea bench seats had such an impact to side impact safety regulations. Thanks for that insight!
It also makes sense that the total capacity of the vehicle would diminish, but at the same time, and engine isn't weightless (though neither is an electric motor). If I had 1,500 pounds capacity, then I should be good to go.
The rear seats of almost all new cars are bench seats though. Is side impact safety requirements the same or apply the whole side of the car?
I believe airbag requirements prevent this because the middle seat would require a console mounted airbag where infotainment systems normally live
I suspect GP is misremembering why bench seating went away. Bench seats for the driver can lead to steering errors which can result in crashes.
There are other reasons too.
1. Cars that offered manual options needed a center console. Japanese imports would always have a manual version, even if that version wasn't in the US. Same with European.
The only one alternative is a column manual shifter which is horrible to use.
You couldn't use a forward floor shifter unless you want to shift between the legs of the person in the middle.
There are dash mounted shifters but would probably hit the middle person's knees. Not sure since these are rare and usually European (fiat multipla) /Japanese
2. At a point a US safety requirement was all front passengers needed either an airbag or a automatic shoulder seatbelt, basically it ran along the door with a motor when the door closed.
Automatic shoulder belts were cheaper than airbags so manf usually picked that option but don't work with middle seats since they need a door/column for the rails.
3. Minor, but, additional side safety rules increased door thickness. Both sides pushed in more making it uncomfortable. Fine in rear but front, as you mentioned, is a danger to steering.
4. Smaller import cars due to gas crisis in 70s that US companies (eventually) copied that combined with reason (3) made the middle seat basically useless
> 1. Cars that offered manual options needed a center console. Japanese imports would always have a manual version, even if that version wasn't in the US. Same with European.
Maybe in cars, but even when trucks still had a manual option, the S10/Sonoma as well as the full size GMT400 had a bench seat in the 90s/00s and a floor manual shifter, and it all worked pretty well. None of them shift like a Porsche, but especially in the full size trucks the center of the bench wasn't too bad if you weren't a large person, and they're generally pretty pleasant to drive.
You're right though that a truck could offer a floor shifter manual or a column auto because it's an easy conversion.
European cars did have the 4 on the floor but that's dated and these didn't have an automatic for the US (afaik).
I'm looking at the period when bench seats died though. A major change in car sizes and the dominance of imports.
> You couldn't use a forward floor shifter unless you want to shift between the legs of the person in the middle.
I’ve been in one of those. And I may or may not have been the child stuck sitting there. Mercifully only a couple times, because I was horrified. It felt like a child had the power to get us into an accident. 0/10 would not recommend.
I had an experience travelling across Kyrgyzstan recently in the middle front seat. The gearstick was just to the side of my leg, but changing gears invariably meant hitting my leg with it. It was a long 10 hours.
Hah, I was thinking of the fond memories I have of sitting in the middle seat and my dad letting me operate the shifter for him.
You're 100% right, they are used in semi trucks where it's not usually an issue.
It's also a horrible shifter experience even for regular commuter cars where performance isn't a priority. Considering how it's one of the three constantly used controls in a car it would likely hurt sales in a sedan.
> Same thing, budget vehicle means budget suspension, so its weight lowers the capacity instead of increasing the cost of the suspension.
Leaf sprung solid axle is great for doing things on a budget.
But it's probably impossible to put one in a new vehicle because the hiring pool of the automotive industry is too indoctrinated against that sort of stuff at this point.
> - Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.
I get that cars have these, but my PHEV (which I don't often charge) lost its app when Ford pulled the plug as 3G was sunsetting and I don't think I'm missing anything. If there's anything wrong with the car, it can show the check engine light (or whatever it's called when there's no engine).
> - Lack of good charge management and battery conditioning.
Seems like a little early to declare this on a vaporware product? I don't think you need a screen or an app to have reasonable battery conditioning?
Anyway, I would love small trucks to return. I had a 2007 Ranger and I have a 2003 S-10, and there's nothing in the US new vehicle market that fits the small truck niche anymore. CAFE standards can't be met with a small footprint truck, so we only get large footprint trucks. But EV trucks don't have efficiency standards, so maybe we'll see the niche again. (I think you could maybe hit the CAFE standards with a single cab ranger and a hybrid drive train, but I also think automakers prefer to sell luxury trucks rather than base model trucks)
This is why it's so hard for companies to introduce stripped-down or small models of anything: People will tell you how much they want it, but as soon as they see it they realize they actually miss something from the models that are already out there.
It happens with small phones (iPhone mini) to laptops and cars. There are comments throughout this thread claiming that everyone would be buying small sedans if not for CAFE regulations, but we have plenty of small sedans on the market that aren't selling well.
It always comes down to market demand. The big companies have market demand figured out better than many give them credit for, even if it's not exactly the product you want.
I'm grateful they don't make truly stripped down models of cars anymore, because those were always what would end up in the rental car inventory. Every time I'd rent a car, it felt like I was taking a step back in time.
Now all rental cars actually have some reasonable set of features, without you having to pay for any up-sells.
You should try renting in New Zealand. It literally is a step back in time, lots of companies mostly rent very old (20 years plus) Japanese models. So cheap though.
So the rest of the economy should suffer to subsidize your rental.
Huh, lack of an app is a major plus in my book
> Lack of a mobile app…
At the 6 mins and 40 seconds timestamp on this video (https://youtu.be/cq1qEjwSYkw?t=400) he shows the car app that will tell you current range, etc
I'd recommend folks watch the video – it's fascinating.
The truck gets OTA updates through your phone and not some LTE modem. It doesn't have one. They moved all car management including OBD-like functionality to the phone, too, which I think is awesome.
This is how I want the interior design philosophy of manual controls to be digitized – with digital control. I'd pay $10k more for physical buttons, though.
Only if the phone app is open source, or at least the api, alllll of it, is public so no one needs the default app nor is limited by it.
Alternatively, maybe the overall simplicity will mean that a 3rd party full computer replacement would be feasible even without any official help from the manufacturer.
I’d be good with no updates. Ie make it simple enough that there shouldn’t need to be updates.
And if there’s something major maybe you download it onto a thumb drive and plug it in.
I’m tired of my vehicle being changed without my consent.
I mean yes, but also this is a complex new prototype vehicle. I can assume that there may be mistakes/ non ideal things that they only catch post production.
As long as the fixes are a long the lines as bios updates (not required per say, but may fix bugs or edge cases) then that seems reasonable.
Oh sweet. Delicious. Very reassuring. Was really hoping this thing was going to be device agnostic.
My 2015 car had 3g "smart" features that no longer work since 3g has been sunset in the US. Awesome to see forward thinking of a smart feature-set that can be updated with a module you'll likley already have an upgrade path for.
> $10k more for physical buttons
No you wouldn't. 3rd party buttons on Tesla is $400.
Ugh. Yuck. Very disappointing. Was really hoping this thing wasn't going to be phone dependent.
There's a difference between phone-dependent and phone-augmented. I don't know the details of the truck, but I think a happy medium would be for an app to exist to augment the truck's abilities and allow at-home updates, but to not require the app or phone to just use the truck (even for long periods; i.e. you could go forever without using the app and the truck will just keep working in its current state).
Bucket seats. I need a bench seat so I can take my wife and dog.
Ah, there's the problem. You have violated Pauli's "spouse/dog size exclusion principle". You need to either have a dog that can sleep curled up on the spouse's lap during the trip, or a dog big enough that the spouse can sleep curled up on the dog.
Bench seats also aren't a panacea, I still feel the burn of my dog's stink eye when then girlfriend was prompted to center of bench seat and dog on the side.
This sounds like the feature creep tesla always struggled with.
also, no mobile app? that is a feature.
The appeal of this vehicle is that it IS like your 1998 ranger, not: mobile app = data collection = monetized vehicle = mobile upgrades = basically all the things that are bad with technology.
Honestly, all these "monetized experience" companies forget that (like matt ridley's rational optimist says) with trust, trade is unlimited.
You'd be surprised to learn that you can drive a Tesla without a mobile app.
1. Even though they aren't required to have OBDII, every electric vehicle has some kind of management interface, although manufacturers do often lock out users and third-party mechanics. Slate seems to show an interest in allowing third-part modifications and repairs, so I doubt that will be an issue. No matter what they do, I sure hope it doesn't require me to install their software on my phone or computer to access it, although I have no problem with them providing it.
2. Only very early first-gen electric cars, like the Nissan Leaf and Smart Fortwoo, were shipped without effective battery management. There's no reason any manufacturer would do that now, and I doubt any battery supplier would want to work with them, if they tried.
3. The Slate truck will be more capable. It has 201 hp and 195 lb-ft of torque, significantly outperforming the 117 hp and 149 lb-ft of torque in the standard-model 1998 Ranger. How they quantify hauling and towing capacity may have changed since the 90's, but you can rest assured that it is more powerful.
4. Designing an optional bench seat would be easy, but getting approval to sell them would be expensive, due to current safety regulations. This could likely only happen once sales volume is large enough to justify the long approval process for that variation.
Number four is likely the only holdup. If the SUV accessories are easy to install, it may still be worth considering, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's a long process for their first generation. Most auto manufacturers can't design an easy-to-install hard-top, on their first try.
> a cheap and easy to replace battery pack.
Battery expansion is a user installable option. It might not be as easy to replace the main battery, but the expansion battery will be, and will make it easier to install newer tech down the road, etc.
> I occasionally need the hauling capacity [of a] 1998 Ford Ranger
Then rent a suitable vehicle for the occasion.
- Your example Ford Ranger[1] seems to have towing capacity of 6,000lbs (~2700kg), and a payload capacity of 1,260lbs (~570kg).
- Compare that to the worst model Toyota Hilux[2], which has a payload of up to 1240kg, and can tow 2500kg. These can be rented for like $65 AUD per day (~$40 USD).
[1] https://www.kbb.com/ford/ranger/1998/specs/ [2] https://www.redbook.com.au/cars/details/2019-toyota-hilux-wo...
This truck has 150 miles of range at 100% charge with no weight. I like the idea of the truck, but you won’t be doing “glamping” with it and you probably won’t be using the battery for anything but driving
I think you are way off on the target demographics. The idea is to have a car that is minimalist in nature, which does mean:
- no app - no bells - no whistles
Slate.. I will add one more thing. If you will make it spy on me like all the other new cars now, its a nogo either. I might as well just get an old car from 90s... which amusingly will still work for what I need it to do ( move some stuff around ).
Same. Only thing missing for me is is a gas engine and manual stick shifter.
Same. Though this looks like the first EV I might actually consider.
Same, though the company trying to reuse the International Scout name got my attention. Physical controls and an on board gas generator.
I grew up with an (already old, and by the time we got rid of it years later, hilariously rusted-out and with tires containing more fix-a-flat than air) Scout and their announcement ad for the electric one hit a bullseye with me.
I don't really do new cars (too expensive) but damn... if I had enough cash to not give a fuck, they'd have been well on their way to selling me one just with that ad. Really well done.
Please no apps. Please no smart phone garbage.
I'm kind of excited by their App idea. They don't have an infotainment, speakers, etc. You can just use your phone + their app + bluetooth speaker.
It really depends. The model for a smartphone app is that the app is eventually abandoned, leaves behind old platforms, or just drops previously-owned functionality when the business needs to make a few more dollars. If you can do EVERYTHING outside of the app I suppose it's not so bad, but if you rely on the app for basic functionality you're absolutely setting yourself up for failure in the future.
> - Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.
Wait, you actually want your car to upload all your data to someone else's cloud for them to sell?
> Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.
Would be nice if they had a protocol locally for a 3rd party to step in an offer their own offerings here.
They could offer an API kit or sdk so people could make open source apps for it.
Lack of a mobile app is the single BIGGEST reason I just reserved one. This is precisely the truck I've been wanting.
(Well, a PHEV would be even better, but I can deal with pure BEV.)
I also Love the direction of this truck. It would be nice if they installed speakers…two door and a small sub and just left a space in the dash for a standard radio of your choice. Or at the very least cut out the spaces and run wire so installing a proper stereo isn’t a nightmare. I don’t need “infotainment” but I do consider a radio with decent sound to enjoy the ride standard equipment.
> I still want an app to manage charging
Consumers with preferences like yours are the #2 reason (after new regulations) that modern cars are terrible
Hopefully it comes with an OBD socket you can connect to as with all other cars.
That should provide basic diagnostics/stats. No need for "apps".
It's actually not required for EVs - Tesla has started to drop it from recent models. I bet these guys would omit it as well to save money.
Or use it because using an existing standard makes everything that needs to interface with it cheaper/easier.
The subheading said Digital Detox. Means no App. For apps, get a Muskmobile .. the ones running with high beams on all the time.
From the FAQ:
Beginning in 2026, you’ll be able to find charging stations using the upcoming Slate App.
https://www.slate.auto/en/faq
it doesn't explicitly answer whether the app will satisfy your criteria, but there'll be something.
I will add: power windows. We can hope that’s an upgrade. It’s been a long time since I hand rolled down a window.
That said, I preordered two. I love this.
There is an app - see about halfway down this page https://www.slate.auto/en/charging
> Lack of a mobile app.
OVMS was originally developed for the Tesla Roadster and then adapted to the Leaf, ...
https://www.openvehicles.com
> - Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.
God, please, no. Why on Gods green earth would I want that? Stop doing this to stuff. It is an abomination. I am sure many others echoed this point but holy crap. No. I am all for technology. But I do not want some tracker in my car. Apps are anathema to my freedom.
The Maverick apparently has poor build quality but I'm hoping Toyota comes up with a pickup using the same small footprint + bare bones + hybrid drivetrain formula.
Toyota already has the Toyota Hilux Champ @ 12k USD https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hNYwTVPUkQ
The Japanese companies have been making kei trucks for 70 years. They've never been sold directly in the US and never will.
They don't want our chicken
https://www.autoblog.com/news/why-the-chicken-tax-still-cont...
Holy crap! And it will have a manual option! Love.
There will be no way this will be sold in the states. You would have to live in some place like Thailand or Costa Rica.
I read that as comparing it to one of Ford's cheap cars from the 70's. Which would be a low bar to meet.
I just mean poor vs trucks from Honda or Toyota. I don't know if there's anything from a US brand that has comparable build quality and engineering these days.
> I'll be comparing this to the Ford Maverick.
This truck might just steal the thunder from an EV Maverick, and Ford can't release that soon enough.
>Lack of a mobile app.
FFS, do you want your dishwasher tethered to the cloud too?
False equivalence, but yes, I do.
Your passion is something that market researches for this company should salivate over, especiall from a curated forum like HN.
Unforuntatley, this company and this project are VC expenditure "throw away projects", made to fail.
No motor vehicle satisfying NHTSA can be made in america for below 20k cost of materiels, nevermind msrp. This article and the company are pitching that this is "realistic" due to cutting costs of paint, radios. Which...are pennies on the dollar compared to what satifys US road requiremnents for EV; safety, suspension, manufacturer support, parts availability, reparability. Are they skimping there too? will this 2025 electric vehicle have LEAF springs?
20k is the pre-production estimates. When in history has that not balloned especially for car platforms made in USA? What will a made in USA replacement lead acid accessory battery cost? 3k?
Once this goes over 40k (which, is guaranteed. A mazda miata which is as bare bones as it gets, old technology, is still 32k base, and thats made in a cheaper labor market.), the funding will back off, and all the R and D money wasted.
Please research these vehicles:
https://www.chevrolet.com/suvs/trax?evar25=Vanity_Trax_20170...
https://www.nissanusa.com/vehicles/crossovers-suvs/kicks.htm...
This is extremely refreshing. I think that it would be possible to make something like this in the US for under $15K even. Cars and trucks are so over-engineered and come with tons of low value options intended to drive up the price.
For a case in point, consider that headlights that turn on and off automatically in response to darkness (or rain) are not a standard feature on many cars, yet they include a manual switch that costs more than a photosensor only because of the trim-level upgrades.
Cars could include a slot for a tablet but instead come with overpriced car stereos and infotainment systems that are always light years worse than the most amateurish apps on any mobile app store.
As should be very clear by now after the 2008 US auto industry bailouts and the 100% tariffs on Chinese EVs, the US auto industry is heavily protected and faces virtually no competition, which is why a common sense vehicle like the one in the article sounds revolutionary, though I imagine BYD could deliver something a lot more impressive for $10K if allowed to compete in the US without tariffs.
To be honest most of those accessories are actually incredibly cheap at manufacturing time and several have a direct impact on safety (e.g. ensuring people don't drive around with lights off). The cost usually comes as companies use them for pricing tiers where they market them as suggested extras to ratchet up profits.
Driving with your lights off at dusk or dark gets you (rightfully) pulled over by law enforcement in CA. It's well-correllated with driving under the influence.
I'm a huge fan of many car safety regulations, but this isn't one.
(Sign me up for car-hiding-in-blind-spot notification lights on side mirrors, though, those are great)
I don't understand what you're saying here - you think it's good to have your lights turned on - but you don't want them to automatically turn on?
Because of my ADHD I would constantly get pulled over if automatic lights were removed
You and I both!
I think they mean that it gives a clear signal to LEOs that the person driving is likely distracted/unfit.
Everyone makes mistakes. It's important to make it easy to do the right thing.
That doesn't make any sense. Eliminatung DUI is not a matter of detection, and automatic light sensors save lives.
It could make sense. We don't know the numbers.
Let's say net X lives are saved each year because of automatic lights turning on.
Let's say net Y lives would be saved each year without automatic lights, via more effective detection of drunk drivers and stopping them before they kill someone.
Is X > Y? We don't know.
> Eliminatung DUI is not a matter of detection
There are a lot of avenues to decrease DUI, among which one is effective detection combined with enforcement.
Okay, let's compare it to: Let's not make auto-pilot mandatory in planes, because sometimes a copilot has found that a pilot was drunk when taking off manually.
Even if there was a drunken pilot epidemic that causes 10 plane crashes per year, and autopilot only prevents 1 plane crash per year, it would be ridiculous not to make the autopilot mandatory and rely on its absence to catch some of those drunken pilot crashes.
I don't agree. Why would that be ridiculous?
In the example you give, if the copilot catches the pilot more than 10% of the time, then the swap to mandatory autopilot kills more people than not doing it.
I hardly think it would be ridiculous to want to save more lives.
The EU has done lots of reach on road and car safety, there's lots of data out there - just perhaps not in the US as many American made cars have significantly lagged behind in terms of safety features.
I don't know if it's an EU rule, but in my (European) country cars are required to have their lights on at all times, even during the day. The lights switch on automatically when you start the car
I'm baffled that daytime running lights are not mandatory on all models of all cars in 2025. My 13 year old Grand Caravan has them, though I suspect it's because it comes from the Daimler Chrysler era.
I love to baselessly praise europe as much as the next idiot in the comments but most North American models that got DRLs before it was legally required got them because they've been required in Canada since the 90s
After I visited Iceland where it's mandatory, I liked the improved visibility so much I turn my lights on for every single trip. It was not a takeaway I was expecting to have from the trip.
It's a good idea in some places. An overcast winter's day in the North isn't that well lit by default.
The EU also is far more strict on DUIs.
There may be something like that that does make it counterintuitive. Usually those kind of Malcom Gladwell paradoxes end up overstated.
There would be other factors, like drunk people are probably safer with their lights on too. Lane keeping probably makes it harder to detect drunk drivers too but also may make them safer.
This is simply because police don’t do their jobs. It would be trivial to simply wait outside bars at 2AM and give out tons of DUIs but a significant percentage of the population are alcoholics and this would result in massive blowback against the police.
Go to any small town watering hole at 2AM to see this in effect. The police have no legal obligation to prevent crime or enforce laws. None.
I'll do you one better, car headlights should never be off while the motor is running. Just like motorcycles since the 70s (maybe 80s?).
No switch at all, ignition on, headlights on, period.
Niche counter example:
Parents who sit in their idling cars for (fucking) ages while their cars are facing the tennis courts thus blinding the player on the other side of the court for however long it takes them to either turn their car off, drive off, or someone to tell them turn their fucking headlights off.
How long have you been holding that one?
It's only been a recent thing, noticeably more frequent the last couple of years.
Before that I've not had to intervene at all, as far as I can remember.
There aren't that many courts where cars park facing them, but my home courts are one of them ;)
Along similar lines would be those people who constantly start up their cars in campgrounds after hours for whatever reason.
Simple solution: when the wheels start rolling, the lights come on.
I'd still prefer to override both on/off though.
Personally I feel like cars with headlights in the daytime on days with good visibility can be too noticeable. I find myself giving them too much attention because they stand out more in my visual field.
When the oncoming cars do not have headlights on I find it easier to give them just enough attention to see that they are behaving normally leaving more attention to devote to things other than oncoming cars.
>Personally I feel like cars with headlights in the daytime on days with good visibility can be too noticeable. I find myself giving them too much attention because they stand out more in my visual field.
Especially the cars with the projectors that bounce around.
I like this. Turns out a few countries require DRL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daytime_running_lamp
But what about for electric cars? Maybe whenever the car is in anything other than P, and for 5 minutes after P?
Canadian vehicles require this by law.
BYD is also heavily subsidized by the Chinese government.
If the us were not to fight back, the non subsidized industries would die, Chinese would stop subsidizing, rack up the price and competition would be too difficult to start again because of the monopoly on lithium and advance on technology.
It's been done thousands of times with other industries and countries.
Most recently Google, who had been giving Android for free when windows phone were licensed and Samsung tyzen cost money to develop, then forced manufacturer to accept outrageous terms to ship Google play service in their phone when all competition was already dead, is now under scrutiny for antitrust.
China’s approach to funding BYD is meant to replace much of the capital it might raise in freer markets, providing subsidies, tax breaks, and preferential policies to offset limited access to liquid equity and debt markets.
This support, totaling $10-12 billion from 2018-2022 plus in-kind benefits, mirrors the role of U.S. automakers’ $160-220 billion in public market raises and $50-100 billion in private capital, but with less financial risk for BYD due to state backing.
I think what people are missing is that EVs can be dramatically simpler to manufacture than internal combustion vehicles. This leverages manufacturing advantages and so with or without subsidies, China has big advantages due to its advancements in manufacturing tech.
Recall when China started making hoverboards for a fraction of the price of a Segway? Making EVs at scale required largely the same manufacturing pipeline.
It is the foresight of China’s industrial policy, not the amount of subsidy that has created the manufacturing powerhouse China has become.
US attempts are crude (sledgehammer) methods that leave the market far less free with mostly downside for everyone and no industrial policy goals, only domestic incumbents being protected from reality.
The lack of freer markets is itself a response to the biggest subsidy the Chinese government provides its manufacturers, the currency controls.
RMB is undervalued by ~10-30%, with latter being extreme estimates, pegged to usd with small floating band. It's minor advantage vs executing competent industrial policy that durably drives production costs down fraction vs competitors. Add 10-30% to PRC EV production costs and western (especially US) producers still nowhere near.
That’s _just_ the peg. The other currency controls include the prevention of currency outflows by Chinese capital and the restriction on foreign holders of Chinese debt. All of that drives the costs down.
My personal opinion is that the Chinese EV would dominate in a completely free market, but we will never know.
My broader point is that it’s weird to say that the cash subsidies make up for the lack of freer markets capital, that’s double dipping.
Currency controls drive costs down (really loss/inefficiency) in the sense that it contains misallocation like illicit capital flight, i.e. stashing grafted funds meant for industrial programs abroad. That's less advantage than mitigating the disadvantage of legacy of PRC corruption - not double dipping, but ensuring sauce stays in the domestic bowl to be dipped at all. And ultimately "freely" competing with reserve USD privilege is a stacked game - the currency controls themselves aren't subsidies, they protect employment of subsidies, i.e. ensuring higher % of X gets directed properly to industry, rather than mansions in vancouver, it's not a multiplier like X*2.
If the argument is that currency controls gives PRC a more stable basis for financing industrial policy (deal with fluctuations and keep domestic captive bond buyers), then sure, but that layer is levelling the playing field. Ultimately it comes to productively using actual allocated $$$ for indy programs to develop durable competitive advantages that can be sustained in lieu of subsidies. VS printing more billions to bail out legacy auto as domestic job programs - which op was replying to, everyone protects domestic auto, even PRC also has to prop up some SEOs, but they also focus on indy programs that's just about hammering pure industrial competitiveness to eventually build comparable item for fraction of the cost.
IMO why this proposal is exciting. If US producer can figure out how to produce somethign that's only 50% more expensive then PRC versus 200%, then it's a huge win.
> It's been done thousands of times with other industries and countries
False
Not a terribly compelling argument
BYD could totally avoid the tariffs by making in the USA (well, they were planning a factory in Mexico, and tariffs on car parts will kill that if something doesn’t change). They already set up a bus factory in SoCal. My guess is that Chinese automakers are still hesitant about introducing their brands to Americans given politics (Volvo and Polestar are Chinese owned but I think the design is still mainly done in Sweden?).
Japanese, Korean, and European brands already make a lot of vehicles to get around tariffs, although it makes sense for some sedans to be made abroad given American lack of interest in them (so economy of scales doesn’t work out), and sedans typically not being tariffed as harshly as trucks.
> BYD could totally avoid the tariffs by making in the USA
Or concentrate on the 80% of the worldmarket that is not the USA
Ya, this only applies if they even want to sell passenger cars in the USA. They definitely don’t have to.
They're very popular in Australia.
Chinese investment in the US is inherently risky. For example TikTok. BYD would be stomping GM and Ford. The next thing you know, they would need to sell their factory.
Companies spending money to navigate tariff regimes adds tremendous cost and inefficiency that makes everyone worse off.
Wouldn’t they still need to pay tariffs on all the parts they manufacture in china? Maybe I’m misunderstanding the tariffs but it sounds like Chinese companies would have to build completely separate supply chains to keep the US market
Before no, or at least not very high tariffs. Now I have no idea, Trump’s story changes daily. However lots of US made autos are using Chinese parts so they are all affected to some degree.
>I think that it would be possible to make something like this in the US for under $15K even.
The closest this comes to is a Dacia spring. Which is not a great car. The dacia could not be made at US labor costs. 15k is an absurd price, Chinese companies can do it because they pay Chinese labor costs and have serious economies of scale. Unless you sell hundreds of thousands of these a year AND pay US workers like Chinese ones, 15k will not happen.
Dacia Spring launched in Romania at 6000$. Now it's 15-18000$ just because they can.
4 door Jimny are ~$15K in Dubai.
>heavily protected and faces virtually no competition
Huh? Out of the top 25 vehicles sold in the US in 2024, 16 of them are non-US automakers. Just because the US is actively blocking China from dumping heavily subsidized vehicles into the north american market, doesn't mean they "face no competition". Kia and Hyundai alone show that it's VERY possible to break into the US market if you have even a little bit of interest playing fair.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/g60385784/bestselling-cars...
The only real way to break into the US market is to have factories in the US. Trucks in particular are protected by the notorious 25% "chicken tax", which has been in place since the 1960s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
>Trucks in particular are protected by the notorious 25% "chicken tax", which has been in place since the 1960s.
And yet, that applies to everyone, including US automakers, which is why Ford had to do unnatural things to import the transit from Europe.
They aren't protecting US automakers, they're trying to retain some semblance of manufacturing in the US, which I'm fully in support of.
Both because those are well-paying jobs and because it's a matter of national security.
> they're trying to retain some semblance of manufacturing in the US, which I'm fully in support of. > > Both because those are well-paying jobs and because it's a matter of national security.
Why should manufacturing jobs be well-paying? Human productivity has not kept up with business improvements at all. A contemporary robot can assemble car modules much faster than a robot from, say, the 60s. A human now works at the same speed as a human from the 60s.
I don't think this is true. Yes robot capabilities have increased but those business processes also make people more productive. I recently toured the F-150 assembly line and it is clear a lot has been done to improve worker productivity.
"Manufacturing jobs" doesn't mean doing the same job as in the 60s. Human productivity improves by offloading more to machines/tools/processes while having the humans manage other things. A human making cars now is not moving their limbs twice as fast as humans in the 60s, they're using tools that get the job done 3x faster than the person in the 60s. The jobs are actually quite different across time, but we colloquially call both "manufacturing jobs".
> They aren't protecting US automakers, they're trying to retain some semblance of manufacturing in the US, which I'm fully in support of.
"The US can't make anything" is an absurd delusion. We are the second most productive economy in the world.
> Both because those are well-paying jobs and because it's a matter of national security.
We are fully capable of meeting our defense needs already. If you really care about reinforcing our military-industrial capability the best way to do it is to arm Ukraine.
> in the US for under $15K even
People say stuff like this. When you buy a $1 USB cable from AliExpress that probably took 25 seconds to manufacture, okay, that makes some sense, from that narrow point of view. But then the courier is going to spend like 3 minutes futzing with delivering it to you. Someone is paying something, no? You have an incomplete picture of costs, and hopefully your answer to the example conundrum isn't, "Delivery drivers are underpaid."
It's more complicated than features leading to a bill of materials and time in a factory.
It costs at least $15,000 to replace a roof in San Francisco, and maybe closer to $60,000. It costs basically nothing to manufacture roof tiles, and the whole thing can be done in a day. If you could answer the question why, and persuasively, you know, run for mayor.
It's a $20k, street-legal, EV modding platform. Sounds like you can mount your own infotainment system. Just an electric motor, battery, and chassis, and the rest is up to you. Isn't this what we've been asking for?
Yea, it's pretty exciting. I'd like to see how much more they could strip out to reduce the price and still have a viable commercial product. I guess I'm living firmly in the past, but $20K still seems to be a high price for a car. Then again, I haven't bought a car new since the 90s, so I'm probably just an old fart who hasn't grokked what things cost today. I still remember the day when the base-model Corolla started costing more than $9999 and I thought the world was coming to an end.
EDIT: Yep, I'm just old. Another commenter linked to a "10 cheapest new cars" list and there seems to be a price floor of around $20K. No major manufacturer seems capable of making one cheaper!
1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43794523
According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics[1], $9999 in 1995 is equivalent to $21,275.25 today, so it's a pretty spot on price for a barebones car.
[1]: https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm
Except, with advances in computational design and engineering, manufacturing automation, and moving to plastic for the body I would expect a reduction in price, in real terms. Not impressed.
>Except, with advances in computational design and engineering, manufacturing automation, and moving to plastic for the body I would expect a reduction in price, in real terms.
Except with all the safety equipment, crumple zones, airbags, sensors, etc. I would expect an increase in price.
And this back-and-forth here is why the folks at the BLS have a hard job. Both options— a car in 1990 is a car in 2025 and real value/utility is unchanged and price should be compared 1-1 ignores that cars are actually better now. But at the same time you literally can't buy a new car at 1990's quality so the additional value/utility might not actually be wanted by some and so this in effect makes real price go up.
> moving to plastic for the body
Some of those $10k cars in the 90s had more plastic in the bodies than cars today, e.g. Saturn S-series, where all body panels below the belt-line were plastic.
It isn't necessarily the cost savings one might expect though, because steel panels can also be load bearing and part of the crash structure, which is not really practical with plastic panels.
Cost savings wasn't the reason for the Saturn plastic panels, IIRC -- they were intended to make the car more durable; they were hard to dent. Some Saturn salespeople would kick the side of the car, hard, to demonstrate their resilience.
Those cars always looked great on the used car lot because they never had any door dings.
With plastic panels, that means they're replaceable. Possibly even swappable (custom 3D printing?). This just adds to the "modding platform" they could be marketing to.
Steel panels can also be made to be replaceable. Plastic has to be because it can't be welded to the frame.
In fact, on modern cars many times these panels are replaced.
If you get a big enough dent in a door, a good body shop will offer to replace the outer skin instead of filling with bondo. They cut the weld on the inside of the door all the way around, take off the shell, and epoxy a new one on. The body shop owner told me that the epoxy is actually stronger than the factory weld.
Yes, bodywork is quite a mature discipline. I was presuming the parent commenter meant user-replaceable, i.e. bolted on.
> The body shop owner told me that the epoxy is actually stronger than the factory weld.
Often this is because the special high strength steels used in vehicles today depend on proper heat treating to attain their strength, and welding can compromise this. Many OEMs even specify panel bonding for repairing particular crash-critical parts of vehicles now because of this.
It's mostly because the factory welds are the result of someone running numbers until they find the bare minimum whereas the autobody guy would rather not risk it.
The OEMs have proper repair procedures that are the correct way to fix the vehicle, and if the autobody shop is reputable, they follow them. And the stated reason OEMs specify panel bonding instead of welding is:
1. because UHSS is sensitive to heat, and robots are much more accurate in how they heat than Jimmy with a tig torch, and they were programmed by a process engineer, where as Jimmy welds until 'it looks good'.
2. welding may compromise anti-corrosive treatments on the inside of inaccessible cavities, which can lead to corrosion issues
e.g. https://rts.i-car.com/crn-24.html
A crappy shop will certainly just weld panels in without any regard for materials engineering, but it results in a crappy repair.
The Pontiac Fiero has notoriously bad plastic panels.
Modern cars are almost universally safer and more fuel efficient than the older models. And in many cases faster.
In nearly all cases they're faster. 10+ second 0-60 times used to be pretty normal for "regular" cars. Now days, people will complain that a car is slow if they can't put down 7 second 0-60 times. And "quick" boring cars of today are as fast as sports cars of the past.
The 1996 Ferrari F355 Spider and the 2025 Hyundai Elantra N both have a 0-60 time of 4.8 seconds.
The average price of new cars sold in the US last year was nearly $50k. The manufacturers make more money from expensive cars than cheap cars, and people keep buying them, so that's what they sell. Before they canceled the Fit, Honda was selling almost 10 times as many of the larger CR-V each year.
You can find numerous new cars for sale in Mexico for under $15k USD.[0] Even Europe has several new cars under €20k.[1] These are the same manufacturers we have here, but lower cost models that are only sold in lower-income countries.
[0] https://compra.autofact.com.mx/blog/comprar-carro/mercado/au...
[1] https://techzle.com/the-cheapest-new-cars-of-2024
Most of those models are not real. They exist, but they don't make many of the base model and if you attempt to purchase one, it is a 4-18 month lead time.
I was in the market in Mexico last year, just looking for a cheap city car with a warranty for when I am there. I test drove half the cars on that list, the other half I immediately eliminated after sitting in the driver's seat for under a minute.
You can think of those base models like MSRP GPUs right now. They exist on paper, but good luck actually getting one for MSRP.
In the end, I didn't purchase any of those and got a two year old certified preowned vehicle with the top trim and comfortable seats from a dealer with a warranty for about $3000USD more than the cheapest actually available model of those linked in your post.
I guess I'm living firmly in the past, but $20K still seems to be a high price for a car.
You're not even living in the past. Our 20 year old Scion xB cost us $20K out the door new (granted, that's with most of the paltry list of options added, $15K base). And that was a cheap car at the time, Toyota marketing to "the kids".
The last time $20K was "a high price" for a new car was probably before most HN folk were born.
For those price-comparing, it is $20K after the federal incentives. So, its real cost is around $27K which makes it way more expensive than what the article claims.
Keep in mind $20k in 2025 dollars is the equivalent of ~$10k in 1997 dollars, if that helps set your frame of reference
According to this, there is only one new car model of any kind selling for under $20K in the US these days
https://www.carfax.com/rankings/cheapest-cars
One would be wiser to based on annual depreciation in real $ plus time value of purchase price. I suspect out of new trucks a tacoma would be the cheapest since the depreciation is low to negative (IIRC recently a Tacoma was worth more 1 year old than new).
All new car brands/models will not have comps for several years. Even folks buying Rivians, etc have no idea how the resale value will play out so you’re always going to have to take a gamble
This article is missing at least the Mitsubishi Mirage - the 2024 model year still seems to be available for 17k in the base trim?
Isn't that the hydrogen fuel one? If so, that's the reason why it's only 17k..
> $20K still seems to be a high price for a car
Keep in mind this price is before the USA federal tax credit. So we're potentially talking about a $12,500 car. And consider inflation.
After federal tax credit, ergo $27K.
(Hat tip to @vaidhy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43794867)
Well dang.
That's with federal incentive and likely before they factored in the tariffs. Those 500 parts aren't all coming from US. I wouldn't expect any usable version of it to be below 30k once it's actually available.
> It's a $20k, street-legal, EV modding platform.
And it'll always be sold out.
I'm sure you can get on the waiting list (for a lead time of 3-40 years) or buy it from a reseller for $70k. Problem solved.
> buy it from a reseller for $70k.
Now there's the real price.
This is an $27k car, with $7.5k rebate, so much for the unfairly competing Chinese. The MG4 is £22500 in the UK before tax, which is about $30k in USD, and that's a full-featured 5 door car, with double the range.
I do applaud the philosphy of cheap and barebones, and easily moddable, but my two cents is that trim is not the thing that's making cars expensive to make.
Is it? They show speakers mounted in the front as a "soundbar". Will people figure out there is a reason cars with good sound systems have them mounted all around the vehicle?
I just want some power ports and good mounting points, then I can put whatever I want there, and upgrade it. I'd imagine that people will come up with a mountable radio kit, like the DIN format radios of old, but with less restrictions.
> I'd imagine that people will come up with a mountable radio kit, like the DIN format radios of old, but with less restrictions.
I am hoping like hell this ends up being the case. Give me power, a place to put my own stuff and some details on the CAN bus and leave me to it.
I do not want to pay a premium for your slow, locked down, buggy / seldom-updated touch screen.
DIN format radios are still around. My recent-ish corolla's infotainment display is just a well integrated double-DIN. I'm surprised this car doesn't as far as I can tell, have a DIN slot for one.
Yes, they have a nice storage bin right behind where you put the optional tablet mount, but the only option I've seen for that bin is a speaker kit. I don't want a tablet mount or speakers in the bin. I want the left side of the bin (above the controls) to be a double DIN mount.
So mount speakers all around the vehicle? The idea is: customize it yourself.
> Will people figure out there is a reason cars with good sound systems have them mounted all around the vehicle?
No, because they knew what they were getting into when they bought this truck. And I'm sure there will be a dozen DIY ways to add a more traditional sound system.
on long car trips, it seems like everyone in the car (except, me, the driver) has headphones on. no one will miss the lack of rear speakers.
Sounds very twenty-first century. No shared music recognition, no sing-alongs.
If passengers want to DJ, you can get one of those little FM transmitter thingies that plugs into a phone/table headphone port.
The interesting modern tools for passengers wanting to DJ are shared Spotify playlists and Apple SharePlay.
A lot of Bluetooth speakers today can fill a car with a sound wall better rear speakers used to. Apple says you just need two of their Bluetooth speakers to fill a room in a house with great stereo and reasonably good surround sound. The square footage of a car is generally smaller than the supported room size.
What phone still has a 3.5mm headphone jack? Sincere question, I'd like to buy one.
Samsung Galaxy A Series (A15 / A15 5G, A14 / A14 5G, A25) all have headphone jacks. These are their "lower-end" models, though. The higher-end ones don't. And of course, iPhones haven't for a long time, too. Alternatively, for other phones with just a USB-C port, you could get a USB-C to headphone jack adapter.
edit to add: if Slate is successful, I wouldn't be surprised if a decently sized ecosystem pops up around easily installed custom sound systems and the tablets (possibly with headphone jacks!) to control them.
Thank you! I'm not a huge Samsung fan, their Android flavor doesn't appeal to me much, but I'm glad that someone is still making phones with headphone jacks. USB-C adapters are mostly fine, but I like being able to charge and listen to music at the same time without a clunky adapter, it's yet another thing I'll lose.
The 2025 Moto G Stylus has one!
Good find, I currently have an aging Pixel 6a (with, regrettably, no headphone jack) but I like Motorola's hardware and their fairly vanilla Android. I may consider a Motorola device, if they provide updates for at least 5 years.
Man I wish this was the default in gym.
> a comprehensive active safety system that includes everything from automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection to automatic high beams
No stereo, but luckily they still found space for a few DNN accelerators that will slam on the brakes randomly when getting false detections. Likely still has a 4G uplink and all the modern car cancer to make sure they can datamine their clients as much as possible and offset the subsidized purchase cost.
Worst of both worlds?
Another comment said there is no cellular modem; updates come through the app using a phone.
That's exemplary if true, though it's a bit hard to believe.
I like it. My wife runs a riding academy and we use a Honda Fit the way some people would use a pickup truck: we can fit 10 bales of wood shavings in the back. [1] We’re dreading when it fails because they don’t make the fit anymore and compact hatchbacks seem to be on the way out. Recent experiences have made me a bit of a Buick enthusiast and I can see driving a 2005-ish sedan except that I won’t get those sawdust bales into the trunk. We are also thinking of fitting in EV into the fleet, so far the used Nissan Leaf has been the main contender but this is a pickup truck I could get into.
[1] We were profitable from day one because we didn’t buy a $80,000 pickup on day one the way everybody else does.
The Honda Fit is great. You can probably squeeze an extra decade out if you're willing to swap out the motor or transmission (used, 100k miles or so, if you shop around $2k-$3k should be doable), and if you're using it heavily then you have the advantage that most cara on the market take less abuse, so you can maybe grab a decade beyond that by picking up somebody else's used Fit when you're done repairing yours.
>You can probably squeeze an extra decade out if you're willing to swap out the motor or transmission
In many parts of the country (I'm Canadian, I assume the same for the US) the body and undercarriage are going to rot before the drivetrain goes.
This is the issue with mine here in Minnesota. Rust is the car killer.
If you stay on top of fluid filming or wool waxing you can largely avoid this. I've got 7 winters of WI slush and salt on my truck and just a few nickel sized spots of surface rust on the frame so far.
> used, 100k miles or so, if you shop around $2k-$3k should be doable
Where are you finding a 100k mile Honda Fit for $3k? Before I bought my current daily driver, Honda Fits were on my list to look out for and in the central NJ area I never saw one in decent condition around that mileage for less than $5k. Even looking now I see people trying to part out theirs for $2k or looking for $4k for a 200k mile one. I messaged someone on FB Marketplace that had a 2013 with 65k miles on it to try and bring down their $11k asking to $8k and just got ignored.
NJ is probably on the higher end of the market but the deviation can't be that big.
Sorry I wasn't clear. You can get a motor with 100k miles from a totaled car for $3k, including the labor to replace it.
To your actual question, I bought mine (2008, manual) in 2018 for $5k with 100k miles in The Bay, and it took about a month of waiting for a good deal to crop up. I've put another 100k on it without issue and plan to drive it a long time. Inflation and the chip shortage have roughly kept up with depreciation, so I'm currently seeing some good options in the $6k range and similarly expect that $5k is around the bottom of what you can pay for a nice vehicle with 100k miles on it.
Also, deviations can absolutely be that big. It's more prevalent at the top of the market, but there are big differences in Subarus and Civics, for example, in different parts of the country, even in the sub-$5k range. It's often worth a flight and driving back to purchase a car (if you value your time at $0 or have other things to do while you're there).
Damn, that's a great deal. And yea, $5k seems to be about the bottom of the barrel in terms of getting a decent car.
For my "daily" driver (I drive a few times a week and it's rarely more than 20 miles), I ended up buying an imported WRX on an auction site. Cost more than a used Honda Fit but it's a ton of fun to drive.
Don't forget, 2008 was before the "cash for clunkers" program that hit the used car market and drove prices up across the board.
Japanese cars, particularly cars that have been orphaned, keep their value at high mileage.
If I had to get a high mileage car in a hurry in upstate NY with some expectation that my acquisition + repair costs would be reason I'd go looking for a 2005 Buick. Maybe half of that is getting older, the other half is that my son drives a '96 Buick which has needed some creative maintenance but has been rock solid reliable after a flurry of work where we replaced aging parts.
Why a Buick? Which 2005 Buick? You can probably, find a simpler or less expensive doppelgänger if you look at the same car but with a Chevy or an Olds badge. I don’t mean this as a dig, simply curios.
Buick is gonna be less ragged out than an Impala or Olds of same age (you see the same with the Grand Marquis vs the Crown Vic). An 05ish one will come with a 3400 or 3800v6 which was pretty solid and cheap to own by then. The rest of the car is nothing special, just keep oil and coolant in it and drive it.
Basically he's picking a very well sorted platform of a vehicle and then choosing the brand that most correlates with buyers who'll keep it in good order.
When my son got his first job and needed a car in a hurry to commute I helped him get his first car and in the search we wound up looking at a lot of Buicks that we liked and were at a good price and in good condition, particularly circa 2005 though we wound up with a '96 Park Avenue. It was my first experience owning an American car (title in my name for the cheaper insurance) and my own experience plus what I read indicates I probably would have done well with one of the 2005s.
My take is that at that age you don't pay that much more for the upbadged car but you're likely to find it in good condition but you get to enjoy the bling (the '96 is ahead of its time with traction control) and Buicks of that vintage have one of the best engines GM ever made.
I also love this design and I'm happy that someone is doing it. I think it's unlike anything else on the market.
But, they won't necessarily be competing against other new things on the market. My wife also rides horses and we got a $5000 20 year old F250 which is very basic but has been bulletproof, and it can tow. I imagine old, basic trucks, either cheap domestic ones or kei trucks will be what this thing competes against.
I hope it does well. This is the kind of design thinking that the auto industry needs.
Also I'm increasingly convinced that the Honda fit is what peak performance looks like. But when it dies you do have options - maybe a Ford Transit Connect or a Metris.
All micro cargo van providers have stopped building them. The Transit Connect, Metris, Promaster City and NV200 are all now discontinued. The VW Caddy isn't sent to the states.
There are rumors that they will make a cargo van based on the Maverick but they make them in Mexico, and with the tariff situation I'm not sure if they will be going through with that anymore.
All of the perfect compacts and hatchbacks are slowly disappearing, and solid work trucks have been replaced with $60k+ fake trucks that will melt their gaskets with crappy turbos and can't even fit a piece of 2x4 in the back. There is an enormous category of consumers that just want an auto that's simple, affordable, safe, fuel efficient and reasonably sized. Almost nobody is serving them right now.
> All micro cargo van providers have stopped building them. The Transit Connect, Metris, Promaster City and NV200 are all now discontinued.
This is an entirely american problem, because the small van is largely dead in the US. They're doing fine elsewhere.
The Metris is still manufactured (as the Vito, or V260 in China), and is not the smallest model which is the Citan (based on the Kangoo, with its second gen based on kangoo III in 2021).
The Promaster City (Fiat Doblo) still exists, as a rebadged Berlingo since 2022.
The NV 200 was replaced by the NV 250 (a rebadged Kangoo II) in 2019, which was then replaced by the Townstar (a rebadged Kangoo III) in late 2021. There's also the Docker / Express below that (which descends from the Logan MCV / Van).
And the Transit Connect was replaced by the Caddy (rebadged), but Ford dropped its original plans of a US release.
> There is an enormous category of consumers that just want an auto that's simple, affordable, safe, fuel efficient and reasonably sized.
Apparently not sufficiently so (or with a consistent enough need) that they can be catered to. Or at least not so that you couldn't make more money selling them pavement princesses.
Ford have an even smaller van than the Transit Connect, the Transit Courier, I am considering an electric one for my next car.
Maybe Slate could offer a van version as well as the SUV.
To give credit where credit is due, the ~$25k Ford Maverick was a decent step towards "enough" vehicle for many people, while minimizing cost.
https://www.caranddriver.com/reviews/a64351746/2025-ford-mav...
And definitely went the other way from the industry.
Yeah, except dealers ruined it. I wanted to buy one but every single dealership had them at $10k over MSRP.
That's a supply:demand problem that will normalize in the long run though. Ford hedges their bets by not producing something risky at full-tilt; dealers maximize their profitability with an in demand model. (Especially since they're not making the absolute markup by selling full-loaded F150s at higher price points)
Ford’s pretty heavily discouraging that, and the supply/demand on the Maverick has pretty much equalized now. I put down a deposit for one recently under MSRP.
Too bad the "ecoboost" engines in them are total garbage.
The 2.0 doesn't have the problems that the 2.3 Ecoboost has. The '25 model has port injection added to deal with carbonization.
To be fair, a lot of farms need a big-ass pickup truck because they are always towing horses to go to shows or trailheads. We have 70 beautiful acres and a network of trails my wife built that were inspired by Het Vondelpark in Amsterdam. [1] If everything goes right we trailer in a horse once and never have to trailer it out although some horses don't fit in or have to go to the vet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vondelpark
The Fit, however, is really genius. It's got the utility of an SUV in the body of a compact. I can't believe Honda's excuse that it wasn't selling -- in my area it is a running gag that if you have a blue Fit somebody will park another blue Fit next to you at the supermarket or that it makes a great getaway car, if somebody catches you doing donuts in their lawn you can say it musta been somebody elese.
If the grocery store parking lot is any indication, farming is the number one profession in America. All farmers can have their big trucks and still regulate out the other 99% of the 22-foot monsters used to commute to offices.
I've found this to be very regional. There are parts of the country where there are a lot fewer trucks and most appear to actually see a meaningful amount of real-truck use. There are other parts where like 40% of the goddamn cars on the road are pristine, bloated modern trucks that are just used as commuter vehicles.
Comments like these are rooted in selection bias (willful or otherwise).
You're never gonna see trucks being used at the grocery store because people who are in the process of using said truck for truck stuff aren't usually stopping at the grocery store as they do it, and this is before you adjust for what kind of grocery stores HN shops at vs the kind that people who use the crap out of their trucks shop at. If you live the median "suburb to office and back" life you'll never see trucks doing anything. You need to be on the road and not in a cube during hours when "things" get done to see that. And the people who do things with their trucks mostly don't live and cross paths with the people who don't.
I could use the exact same faulty logic you're using here with slightly different parameters and come up with the conclusion that cars don't need a second row of seating.
And before anyone projects anything stupid at me, I own a minivan.
> You're never gonna see trucks being used at the grocery store because people who are in the process of using said truck for truck stuff aren't usually stopping at the grocery store as they do it,
I think you missed the point of the GP post. They were noting the presence of (a lot of) trucks at the grocery store parking lot. Whether they are towing/hauling isn't really the point.
There are trucks and then there are trucks. The Ford Maverick gets 42mpg in the city, 35mpg on the highway and is reasonably priced. If you value economy, ecology, efficiency and such that's right up there with a compact car. The F150 is a L size electric truck, an S size truck will appeal to people.
If you're towing a horse trailer you really want the biggest truck you can get or a GMC Suburban or something like that.
On the other hand in the suburbs of some New England towns that I'm sure are full of white collar workers you see nothing but trucks in the driveway and I laugh when I see a Ford F350 with a lift kit and commercial plates idling and see, a few minutes later, a few pencilneck geeks come out of a frat house and climb into it.
depending on the rurality of that part of new england, they might have a legitimate claim to need the ground clearance and 4wd in the winter.
sometimes backroads aren't plowed well. or they. are plowed well and you need to scale a giant snowbank to get into your driveway.
(although my personal preference would be for the industry to make more rally-inspired high-clearance AWD sedans/wagons to fit this niche)
Something I also only really appreciated after spending more time out plains-west in the US, it's dangerous to drive small vehicles because of the average distances and abundance of larger wildlife.
When you're regularly driving 2+ hours one way to a town and a random pronghorn appears in the middle of the road, at night, when you're doing 85 mph... you want to be in something that can take the impact.
If you’re not knowledgeable about cars, getting a 20 year-old truck is probably just not an option. Sometimes it’s totally fine, sometimes it craps out and needs a whole engine replaced!
My sister got a 2003 subaru last year for about $3,000. The oil leaked out while she was driving, and the whole engine sorta melted together and just totally died.
So I’d say for non car people, this Slate truck isn’t competing with old cars, if only on the basis of potential hidden catastrophes.
> Also I'm increasingly convinced that the Honda fit is what peak performance looks like
Close. A bit of work on the rear hatch dimensions so that you could get 4'x8' sheet goods in there, as was possible on the 1980s Honda Civic.
Also, just a teensy-weensy bit more power, please. Ours struggles even on moderate hills here on the edge of the Sangres de Cristo (southern Rockies).
Otherwise, all hail the Fit/Jazz, car of the future past.
They're both good in different ways. The advantage of the Fit is largely in cargo height (with the magic seats flipped up), but for some other objects the 80s Civic is better.
I'm also a Honda Fit fan. Technically, it is still made, just not sold in the North American market. It's had a new generation come out since they stopped selling it here, matching the new Civics' style.
The closest Honda offerings are probably the Civic Hatchback (lower roof, but the seats still fold down) and the HR-V, which is basically a Fit on stilts with more weight and slightly less room.
I went with a hatchback Civic Sport Touring to replace my Fit (which has 210K miles on it and is still reliable, though I'm passing it on to someone else) and my girlfriend is about to try the HR-V to replace her (newer) Fit that was just lost in an accident, since she needs more roof height for dog crates.
Would a used Metris cargo work? We have the passenger version and it’s excellent. True 1000kg load rating, and the cargo version can be had extremely cheaply.
We also have our eye on this truck, but with less urgency since our van does everything we could want.
The Telo MT1 also has us eyeing it…
I am going to drive my Honda Fit until the wheels fall off, then I'm going to put new wheels on and drive it some more. Best car in the world IMO.
The rear seat legroom is absurdly good for a car that size. It's been our only car for the past 10 years for a family of 2 adults and 2 kids. Zero issues outside of regular maintenance. Bought for $18k new in 2014 (2015 model). Good times.
The Fit is a wonderful car. I'd buy one if I could find one for a decent price, but 40k miles 2020 (last year for them in the US) still runs around $20k at dealers and Carvana! For five grand more, I can get a brand new Corolla Hatchback, which is what I'll likely do, but I'd pick up a Fit without thinking if I could find a good price.
Most small SUVs should be fine though. You switched between wood shavings and hay bales, but I reliably fit 7 hay bales in a 2005 Saturn Vue (wife always managed to get 9 in there), which means that 10 bales of shavings should not be a problem since they're much smaller.
TBH, I think a minivan would make it even easier.
I run a Honda Pilot for this reason. With the seats folded I can haul 8’ lumber or 10’ PVC pipe inside the vehicle, no tie down needed. If I need to tow, I have a 5,000LB tow rating so most anything around the property is possible with a good trailer for a couple thousand extra.
I bought reasonably used, spent about 30k instead of 50k+ for a comparable pickup truck which lacks the ability to haul 7-8 passengers when needed.
Also has the benefit of being one of the most “Made in America” vehicles out there, #3 IIRC.
I use a 2018 Subaru Forester to move stuff like this, with the seats folded flat the cargo space is decent. You can add some cargo boxes on the back trailer hitch as well.
The dream is a Pacifica minivan - they make a hybrid version.
The Pacifica and Sienna (and probably Odyssey as well) are absolute garbage for hauling crap. If that is what you are looking for, get a used one from the prior generation.
The Chevy Bolt is very similar shape and size to the fit. Supposedly there is going to be a 2026 model. People have thrown after market tow hitches and towed (small) trailers pretty far even. Check out the BoltEV subreddit.
Love my Honda fit - had to replace the transmission at 160k km (in-warranty!) only thing I wish is it had AWD and just a little more clearance for the snow
A Mazda 5 might be a good option in the future. I used to run esports events and could get 20(!) 6’ tables in the back, with some rope to keep the back door down.
A used Chevy Bolt might make a good replacement. You can find them for less than $15K these days.
how do you haul hoss though? i would imagine you then outsource to professional hauling services? what do you do for vet visits, when it's not a farm call?
Just pay somebody. In a rural area there are a lot of farmers with a big truck and a trailer and it costs less than the monthly payment on a big truck.
i'll be honest, if the rest of your profile wasn't at least somewhat corraborative, i'd say you're larping, but what you're saying is at least irresponsible. most farmers in rural area have livestock trailers, not horse trailers, hauling for hire (including if you're hauling for students at your barn or whatever) requires CDL and a bunch of other documentation, which you're not typically going to have as a farmer, and more documentation if you're hauling interstate (my vet is across a border), but would i even trust random joe dirt to haul for me? i've hired professionals to transport horses, and i have a handful of people who could haul in a bind and unlicensed but i wouldn't rely on them to be available in an emergency. last year i had to haul an old mare, she was colic, she laid down in the field, covered in sweet, and had to be put down at the vet, but overall it was less than an hour from load to vet. if i had to rely on "farmers", that would prolong her agony. now i just train, so i don't usually have freak accidents, but at riding barns, with students, on trail, something happens from time to time. riding barns i work with tell me horror stories all the time. i'll give you a benefit of the doubt, maybe your wife knows the details, and ithaca being horse country, maybe she's got a friendly neighbor on speed dial, but then you're at best outsourcing your responsibilities to someone else. what other things you can save on to make your operation profitable, at the expense of safety and well being of hoss?
Often these "farmers" are horse traders or people I know with a CDL who have the right equipment and also do other work for me like cut my hay. One of them is "retired" but he waved to me driving a dump truck when I was photographing a sign for my Uni that had a field of daffodils in front of it this morning.
The farmers I associate with care a lot about their animals and I expect them to take the same care with mine. As a rural person I judge people based on relationships and reputation and not on how much insurance they have. I'd trust any of these people to haul a horse in a big-ass trailer than I would trust myself or my wife.
And for a horse that's not used to loading, a livestock trailer is often much easier because they're more comfortable getting into it than, e.g., a 2-horse slant.
Judging by the number of horses my wife hauls, most horse owners don't have their own truck/trailer. Which makes sense: for most people, the trailer won't be used very often, and hay is usually delivered by the farmer, so don't need a truck for that.
How did we get so far OT?
you're limited to one horse at a time with livestock trailer, and if load is a problem, you can use a straight load and i guess remove center divider in a straight load. because i train rather than haul, i'd opt for taking time with load of course.
personal farms don't need to haul, there's no disagreement about that, but op suggested that you can run a horse business this way. it took me a while to realize that he has a vanity farm that's funded by his tech money, so you know he can gradually grow, he doesn't need to board, or train, or any of those other things people in the business diversify their income sources with.
i don't think we're OT at all. in horse business and generally farming you have two types of vehicles relevant to this conversation, trucks and gators. you absolutely need both. your truck can act as a gator, but your gator can't act a truck. you can use pretty much anything as a gator, i've got an old cherokee, an atv with a hitch and an actual gator doing the gator business. op uses a ford focus. the electric pickup from original post is probably a solid gator. kei trucks can be used as gators. but none of this stuff replaces a truck, which you still have to pay shit ton of money for.
usually in conversations like this it's horse people who come in and say "nah we need a truck to haul", but this time op suggested that you can in fact run a horse business with a gator, which prompted some questions from me
you're not a rural person, c'mon, you're a wealthy cornell tech with a vanity farm. ithaca is dollar horse country, everyone knows that, so yeah i totally buy that in your fairly unique circumtances running a horse business off a back of a ford focus works. i read you as suggesting that the rest of the industry is silly for buying trucks, and you've got it figured out, but you simply punted on the hauling problem.
Most farmers have a semi and thus a full class A license. Though often haul my horse is done as a labor trade - I'll haul your horse in the off season for me if you help me in my busy season, no money changes hands.
Wat. Horses are easy to haul. This happens all the time.
My family background on one side was poor-rural and yeah, being surprised at this reads like a class difference to me.
this whole subthread started with some cornell guy saying that you can run a horse business off a back of a gator, because your neighbors can haul for you, which is pretty much as cloud people as it goes. i'll venture that there's not a single horse farm in u.s. no matter how poor that is not subsidized with tech money that outsources its hauling. we're talking about running a business here, not hauling daisy to county fairgrounds three times a season.
We don't even have a gator. My wife does the material handling herself. Our bill for horse moving is probably less than $400 a year in a bad year, a payment on a big-ass truck is upwards of $800 a month. For that matter, in bad years my wife's business subsidized my tech activities and not the other way around.
In my experience, most people who live in rural areas already have access to a suitable vehicle - because a 30-year-old pickup is the cheapest vehicle to own in those circumstances, long-term.
As a car audio enthusiast, the biggest obstacle to putting a system into a new high-tech car is bypassing the deeply-embedded infotainment system while retaining decent aesthetics and steering wheel controls. The idea of getting an electric drivetrain and new-car safety with a 90's-style blank canvas for audio is amazing.
I hope that the noise isolation and intended speaker mounting locations are good!
feature, not a bug, they want you to buy their $4000 BOSE upgrade which is actually $500 of equipment.
Do you have any proof or even a hint of a reason that this will be the case? Or is this just nonsense?
Their FAQs even state: > Built-in infotainment systems raise a car’s price, and they become outdated quickly and have high failure rates.
It seems unlikely that a company saying this will throw in a $4,000 infotainment system in a $20,000 vehicle.
I read this as the parent complaining about other car manufacturers selling you crappy default stereos so that you'll upgrade, not that Slate is excluding a stereo on this truck to upsell you.
In fact, I would be rather surprised if you could buy $4,000 worth of stereo equipment for this car, given their promo materials seem to include a $100 bluetooth speaker below an iPhone.
The parent comment was about the general trend for car manufacturers to do this, not the manufacturer in question.
Its a cool car, but forgive me for not getting Lucy-Footballed again by an electric car startup claiming to be able to "change the game" while never actually getting any cars sold.
Yeah, the completely unrealistic timeline, price point, and the fact that the company is only now looking to hire engineers sets off my "fun looking product that will never be available for sale" alarms. I don't think they even have a prototype built yet, everything you see is just a render. They have not even started planning how to start building the factory.
The price point is assuming the R&D is already paid off, the factory is built, the supply lines are optimized, and they're building a million of these things every year. History has shown that you can't start off with a cheap mass produced car as your only product because mass production requires way too much startup capital. The success stories started with hand built extremely expensive cars that were used to pay down R&D costs and keep the company afloat while they built the factory for the mass production model.
About the only way I see this happening is if Bezos goes all in and dumps an outrageous amount of money into getting the production line running knowing that he won't see a return for at least a decade or more, and I don't think he's quite that generous. Also this assumes that cheap lightweight powerful batteries become widely available in the next couple of years.
>I don't think they even have a prototype built yet
https://insideevs.com/news/757237/slate-ev-spotted-los-angel...
https://insideevs.com/news/757649/slate-auto-truck-suv-revea...
In rebuttal:
- "This doesn't seem to be a working vehicle. The Autopian's David Tracy climbed underneath and didn't see any powertrain or proper suspension components, indicating this is a non-functional show car."
At Thursday’s reveal, seven beta prototype vehicles can be seen driven under their own power.
https://youtu.be/jKVwEg4ZToI&t=25m45s
> The Autopian's David Tracy climbed underneath and didn't see any powertrain or proper suspension components, indicating this is a non-functional show car.
Source: own a small electric car company
My take: with financing this timeline (end of 2026 for first deliveries) is totally doable. The truck is extremely simple. Extremely. There is nothing exotic about the drivetrain or suspension; probably the hardest part was getting the plastic body panel stuff set up.
Second hardest part was designing for simplicity. At some point that part of the process will stop and they will ship.
Price: Probably too low. Manufacturing capacity: who knows? Deliverable: for sure. This is totally deliverable with today’s engineers and today’s parts.
Not to mention that it's actually more like a $30,000 vehicle because the headline is pre-pricing in rebates.
If they could produce 100,000 of these instantaneously and sell at a 20K price point they'd sell all of them before the end of tomorrow and they'd immediately go out of business because they would be about a billion dollars in the hole, at a minimum.
Absolutely love this. Love brands taking the SLC (simple, lovable, complete: https://longform.asmartbear.com/slc/) approach - minimalism is an absolute delight in a world where everything is crammed with unnecessary/unused feature bloat.
(That said, I'd love a stereo - even if it was just a built in bluetooth speaker/aux-in, which feels like a perfect compromise!)
I like this comment because it both argues for "SLC" design and contains the reason why we don't get it: "Sure this thing looks great if only it had <FEATURE>" where <FEATURE> is different for every buyer.
Good news, it can be added.
> A Bluetooth speaker holder that fits under the climate knobs is available, but there is also a soundbar that can be installed in the dashboard storage compartment.
https://americancarsandracing.com/2025/04/25/best-accessorie...
Technically you could zip tie or duct tape an Amazon Basics Bluetooth speaker to just anything even a lawnmower. This looks like just one step above that.
It’s a shame they didn’t add a DIN head unit slot and throw a plastic cover over it, preinstall install speaker wires. Anyone could then DIY a real stereo for less than they are probably selling the Bluetooth speaker/soundbar.
Or even just conduit between all the common places we would need to run cables.
or just pre-installed dashboard speakers with an AUX input and single volume+power knob. very cheap off the shelf parts. would save customers from weird bluetooth speaker setups, and would support a wide variety of devices – from iPods to tablets to pocket radios.
no speakers and low range are the only two things I'd quibble about. and maybe the price, seems too high for what you're getting.
I loved the Saturn plastic doors. The salesdroids were conditioned to call them "polymer panels" and I got corrected when I bought my SL2 back in the day, but I was sold when in their own showroom he kicked the door in, it visibly dented, and then popped itself right back out with no damage to either the paint or the pla, uh, polymer.
That SL2 went from California to Maine, down to Georgia and back to California. It never had any dings and had only a few scratches in the paint. My Civics seem to get dinged if you look at them wrong.
I wish I could have said the same about the Saturn's stickshift, though. That actually fractured when I was in Gilroy. I mean, the shaft literally snapped.
My first car was a Saturn, they performed that same trick in the salesroom as well. They didn't keep that trend up forever though, in the late 2000s my father went to go purchase another Saturn, and he was reeling up to give it a kick before the salesman had to hurriedly tell him they didn't make them like that anymore.
That was probably by the time they had become a glorified Opel rebadge shop. I was probably going to buy another Saturn and I might have settled for an Ion, but the Astra was, to borrow from Dan Neil, "hewn from solid blocks of mediocrity." So now I drive Hondas again.
Yeah, the problem with Saturn was the general level of QA of GM cars of that era. I could make the "check engine" light come on by pressing the accelerator with a small amount of force in my SL2. And it didn't handle very well.
They did have a tendency to shatter in the norther climates though during cold weather.
Many of those Saturns in Canada driving around with cracked body panels from stray rocks or errant doors in parking lots.
I put down $50 to reserve one. I grew up with an old car that I tinkered with endlessly. Mostly because it was simple enough for me to get my head around! This car reminds me of that time.
I'm hoping that they go with a lot of "off-the-shelf" electronics and mechanical parts. Standards are a blessing.
It feels like they're going with a different business model to traditional car manufacturers. AFAIK most manufacturers make a lot of their money via servicing. I'd love to take a look at what their long-term business strategy is.
You could buy an old Volkswagen bug (not the new models) for cheap. They are dead simple too with tons of parts available.
Depending on where you live you can almost build certain older cars from new parts. For the UK I believe you can get every single part of an Morris Mini either brand new or at least refurbished. For France you can probably built a Citroen 2CV for parts, including an EV version.
A friend is doing exactly that with a defender 130 . New galvanized frame, every panel new, new axles, new brakes, new transmission, transfer case and engine. New seats, new interior, new doors. Cool project.
how did you find their website? all i get are articles about the car but no links
https://www.slate.auto/en
The configurator is fun:
https://www.slate.auto/en/personalization
Thanks for the link. I see they sell portable bluetooth speakers we can mount under the dash. I like the idea of DIY wrapping both the interior and exterior; I can imagine anime fan boys like my son coming up with very wild art for these wraps. I had also forgotten cars used to have hand cranks to roll up the windows.
Very exciting! Electric vehicles have the ability to be very simple, much simpler than an ICE.
Although electric can't be 100% analog, I miss the old days when a car has no software updates, no telemetry, no privacy issues, no mandatory subscription for features.
I don't mind too much if there's still microcontrollers in the car, but I'd really rather they didn't have internet connectivity. The only antenna should be for AM/FM radio.
AM is on its way out with EVs though. there's no reason that a car that has all of that internet connectivity cannot have the same features just without sending the telemetry. upgrades do not need to be OTA, and be upgraded through a USB or even bluetooth from a device. the only reason for it is that there's money to be made from that telemetry.
> The only antenna should be for AM/FM radio.
And TPMS. And key-fob remote lock/unlock. And BTLE for BYO music / calls.
> but I'd really rather they didn't have internet connectivity.
This is the one big thing that has me leaning towards "used, 2015 or older" for my next car. With an EV, you really do want a way to specify how much power / when should be used for charging though; some "discounted" electric utility plans require being able to shed / schedule big loads on demand, too.
If this vehicle doesn't have any screen, you need to use a phone or similar to configure all this. Yes, schedule data can be done over BTLE, but something big like an OTA update can not be (at least, practically).
There's also a lot of value (for some people) in being able to change/monitor charge capacity from distances further away than what BTLE would support.
If the modem could be toggled and there was a USB port for software updates, I'd be _thrilled_.
I've a petrol car so I don't really know, but what's stopping the power/timing controls from being buttons on the charger wall unit? Even a local network app I'd have no issue with, but I really don't want my car or charging unit on the internet.
Yep, this can absolutely be done. Home wall chargers are just a fancy switch[1], you just need a way to enable/disable it. Could be a feature of the charger, but in the worst case you could add your own secondary contactor that removes power from the entire charger when you don't want the car to be charging.
[1]: They also have control pins to tell the car the maximum amperage they're allowed to draw, but that's not relevant to the feature of "disable the charger when I don't want it charging"
> but what's stopping the power/timing controls from being buttons on the charger wall unit?
The car makes all the decisions about how much power to draw and when to do it. Excluding the DC super/fast chargers, the hardware on the wall is pretty "dumb".
It's been pointed out elsewhere, but remote notifications are useful so you know it's time to get out of the public charger and let somebody else in (or to go back out and check on why it's suddenly stopped charging)
You’d be bringing your own FM radio antenna in this case, the car doesn’t have a sound system
While the processing is practically necessarily digital it is possible to build an analog of an analog system - which is to say a digital device that acts in very much the same way that an analog device would. I think many people are underestimating the mini revolution still going on in the quality and price of electronic components.
Are they making any 100% analog ICE vehicles currently? This is just a consumer products issue. Sadly.
What do you mean by "analog?" It's not possible to make an "analog" vehicle of any kind due to regulation:
* It would be impossible to pass modern car emissions standards without electronic engine control.
* Backup cameras are mandatory, so you need an electronic pixel display somewhere.
* Lane keeping is required in Europe as of 2022, so that's a suite of sensors and computer-steering as a requirement.
* AEB will be required as of 2029 in the US, so that's a full electronic braking system (some form of pressure accumulator/source, solenoids/valves) and forward looking sensors (radar, lidar, visual, etc.).
>Backup cameras are mandatory, so you need an electronic pixel display somewhere.
The vast vast majority of backup cameras ARE analog, including all the little one inch cubes you see poorly mounted on the back of sedans, and including the ones VW/Audi uses.
You could in fact plug their signal into a tube TV from the 50s. You might lose some overlay features.
If you want any one of:
Smooth running. Reliable start. Smooth Throttle application and resistance to all the problems we had with carbs. Airbags. Automatic management of cold weather performance.
Then you REQUIRE electronic actuators, sensors, and microcontrollers.
How many people know what a "Choke" is anymore?
> The vast vast majority of backup cameras ARE analog
The camera<->head unit signal modulation is analog but unless the display is a CRT, both ends of the system are digital.
This is basically why I was asking “what do you mean, analog” - I suspect the OP really wanted either no touchscreen or no telematics, which are totally unrelated to whether the systems are analog or digital.
There was a whole generation of very cool analog computer fuel injection (K-jetronic for example) that avoided most carb problems for end users without going full computer - but, there wasn’t a chance these kinds of system could continue to pass modern emissions standards.
> Backup cameras are mandatory, so you need an electronic pixel display somewhere.
I wonder if regulations would allow for a sort of periscope system.
(Not that it would be practical.)
The specific regulation is here:
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-49/part-571/section-571.1...
Nor practical but an analog system could probably meet the standard.
---
Rearview image means a visual image, detected by means of a single source, of the area directly behind a vehicle that is provided in a single location to the vehicle operator and by means of indirect vision.
Rear visibility system means the set of devices or components which together perform the function of producing the rearview image as required under this standard.
---
5.5 just says it needs to meet certain testing standards, start displaying within 2 seconds of backing up, and stop displaying when driving forward.
FMVSS does in the US, but it'd have to be very steampunk to meet all the requirements.
A lot of delivery vehicles used to have convex mirror behind to give an idea where the bumper is.
In many countries around the world you can buy a brand new 70 series Land Cruiser with a mechanical injection diesel fuel pump, crank windows, no screen, etc. No computer.
NGOs and UN buy them in the thousands for Africa and the Middle East.
Don't want or need analog: Just don't enshittify the digital! CAN bus is a great system; don't IoT it or use dark patterns.
God no, CAN is horrible and the horrors people working around its limitations have brought into the world are even worse.
CAN is really great for what it is. It is one of the simplest ways to get N devices to talk to each other. Really simple and easily debuggable.
Obviously it is too limiting for modern cars so it will get mostly dropped. It clearly is a great protocol though.
What limitations specifically are you referring to?
The packet size is a major one. The lack of larger packets leads to nonsense like the "freshness manager" in things like AUTOSAR's SecOC, or the addressing scheme. Every subsequent CAN extension has tried to rectify both of these in different ways and inevitably failed, which leads to the next layer up the networking stack reinventing the wheel badly. Eventually you end up with UDS.
Yea, that 64-byte frame size. In practice, I've always seen it abstracted away into a layer on top, but if you're working low-level (e.g. implementing that layer), it's a pain. So, a given packet may be represented by multiple frames.
I hold a patent on the design of a hardware offload engine to hide the handling of multiple frames from a main CPU.
I doubt CAN bus will be around that much longer, I know several EV manufacturers are actively phasing it out. Yes, it was revolutionary in it's time but it's a 40 year old standard that doesn't have enough bandwidth for the requirements of modern cars, and it was designed before security was even a thought. It's also unnecessarily complex wiring that adds weight to the car. Even the updated FD standard is only 8 mbps, so it's barely enough for video from a backup camera.
It's a tool that's more than sufficient for most things. Video isn't one of those, and it's a 2-wire bus, so I don't see what the wiring concern is!
As I understand it, newer systems like LVCS and Ethernet use less wire and smaller connectors. Apparently it can save up to 30% of the weight in a wiring harness which would be about 100 lbs. There was a thread on it on HN not long ago.
Video for a backup camera is mandatory on new cars in the US and Europe, so it makes sense to use the same bus.
I love it.
However I wonder about the overlap between people that need a truck and this particular truck. I have only owned trucks when I needed to go out in the middle of bumfuck nowhere with a payload, in places with poor access to electricity. If I need to go in bumfuck nowhere without payload then there is no need for the truck, and if I need a payload in the city it's just way way cheaper to have it delivered when you factor in depreciation of even a cheap truck.
Would really love to see something like this with a simple 4 cylinder motor. Like the old s-10 / ranger. Until then the solution I have found is to just tag a trailer on small passenger vehicle, since it is now impossible to find a compact gas truck.
I think that you're looking at extremes exclusively when it comes to your assessment. I live in a "city" in WV and need my truck all the time to get to rural areas, but that doesn't mean that I don't have reasonable access to electricity. Furthermore delivery around my city really isn't affordable or available in a lot of cases.
That being said, I really wish we had a small ICE truck in the USA, or an equivalent to the s-10/ranger. Even the ford maverick is exceptionally tall and it doesn't come with a bed that is big enough to conveniently move building materials. The maverick bed is only 54" or 4.5ft and older model rangers and S10s can be had with up to a 6ft bed.
https://www.motor1.com/news/698055/toyota-13000-dollar-hilux...
I bought a Maverick and it wasn't noticeably larger than my extended bed ranger, I actually feel like it is smaller, especially considering modern A pillars and such are very thick and rigid compared to the death trap of the old ranger.
I have had no issues moving construction materials with the Maverick. I've moved around 12ft boards and stacks of drywall. The only real difference I noticed is I can't lazily hang things off the tailgate, which tailgate latches aren't specced to do anyways.
Not sure which ranger you're talking about - but if you mean the 6ft one, 18 inches of bed length is definitely noticeable.
It's also definitely possible to haul all those things with almost any truck. Hell, you could even buy a rack for a maverick that makes full 8ft by 4ft sheets of drywall/plywood super easy to carry around, but being able to really easily load up stuff and not have to do some complicated strapping/securing of the payload is a big win with a bigger bed. I personally haul motorcycles a lot, and being able to have two motorcycles in the bed with tailgate up is a huge plus for me.
edit: misunderstood your first comment. What year Ranger are you talking about? The difference between an 80's/90's small truck and an early 2000s can be very considerable.
There's a whole different conversation and argument about the general size of vehicles in the US that is essentially circular and leads to bigger and bigger vehicles in the name of "safety".
Yeah, with the exception of the bed size, the Maverick is only ~4in longer and wider than the 2000s era Ranger. It's a pretty close match.
https://www.mavericktruckclub.com/forum/threads/2022-maveric...
A Maverick is within spitting distance of a single cab short bed Ranger. You get a little less bed but an extra row to make up for it.
There's plenty of pictures of them parked side by side.
The Maverick is also kind of dumb because of the choice to do unibody instead of body on frame. I'm sure there's some weight savings or whatever, but at least on a body on frame truck, I can opt to change the bed out even on a short bed truck and add a flatbed when it makes sense. When someone using it like a truck inevitably beer cans the bed, they're going to be really sad that it's not a relatively quick and simple thing to fix (by just going and getting another bed).
> I live in a "city" in WV and need my truck all the time to get to rural areas
How rural are these areas? No roads?
Yes. I want this truck...but with a 4 cylinder ice engine. Nothing fancy. No needed stereo or seat warmers or complicated anything. I want a small, simple, and affordable truck with good reliability. Before anyone asks, I can't drive the tiny Japanese trucks in my state. They are cool, but look too small when people are driving what are essentially container ships with wheels these days.
Any company that made that would be penalized by CAFE: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43795946
Kind of sounds like the Toyota IMV, but we'll probably never see that truck ever in the US, unfortunately.
The base model Ford Maverick XL exists and is the truck that 95% of most people need.
No thanks. More expensive with garbage infotainment system that violates the user's privacy. Also I'd bet the engine won't hold up well in the long term
FWIW, the Maverick works pretty much as expected if you pull the wires for the telematics control unit. (i.e. the infotainment system works minus the connectivity.)
As far as the engine, I’d bet on the hybrid engine holding up better than the ecoboost long-term.
Rural areas tend to not have gas close. 10 miles or so. I know farmers who get gas delivery just because some cars never go to town, just field to field. Charge an ev at home and they avoid a lot of fuel headaches.
I remember in the '70s in central California many farmers did a similar thing, except with propane instead of electricity. They already had large propane tanks and regular propane delivery because they used propane for heating and cooking, so converting a truck to run on propane brought the same kind of convenience that an EV brings today.
LOL. I live in a rural area, and I think a gas station 10 miles away is close.
In my experience "bumfuck nowhere" has better access to electricity than the city. Every farmer has a welder plugged into a handy accessible high amperage socket.
My experience of rural areas is that few are actual farmers. After all, farming has largely consolidated and become automated. Most country people just don't want a city lifestyle. They might have some of the accoutrements of a farmer and have added lifestyle (enjoyable/fulfilling) overhead and significant attitude (independence & sometimes xenophobia) for themselves, but it's a lifestyle choice. Therefore most don't have a welder (though they probably know someone who has one).
That's rural but not "bumfuck nowhere". Within ~100 miles of a city there are a lot of rural non-farmers, but only farmers will live 200 miles away from the closest city.
Very few people live over 200 miles from a city in the lower-48 states of the US.
To give you an idea: It's 413 miles between Colorado Springs and Wichita[1], leaving a very narrow area to be over 200 miles from either. Grand Island, Nebraska is 402 miles from Denver.
Pretty much all the land is over 200 miles away from a city of at least 50k population is in the great basin. To give you an idea, there are 3 cities in North Dakota (a 200x200 mile rectangle) that have a population of at least 50k, and with Bismarck relatively near the center, that rules out much of the state alone.
1: Dodge City is technically a city, but at much less than 50k population I'll omit it. If you allow anything called a city to count you could probably fit the list of people on a single piece of paper. Using the 50k cutoff you still have 3 cities in North Dakota, a 300x200 mile rectangle.
My definition of bumfuck nowhere is where I grew up. almost 200 miles to each of Regina Saskatchewan, Brandon Manitoba and Minot North Dakota.
Remember in the lower 48 it’s physically impossible to be further than 100 miles from a McDonalds.
I’ve always figured that virtually always includes a gas station, parts store, etc.
http://www.datapointed.net/2009/09/distance-to-nearest-mcdon...
I don't think that's true, but can't quickly find evidence. Ultimately it can't be depended on and is something an EV buyer would want to verify for their region.
Definitely depends. Most my neighbors in the country have 100 amp service and they are sucking that dry already now that they have heated water and electric HVAC. Many more run solar only since it can cost $30K+ for a half mile extension.
It sounds like the truck is very modular so maybe they’ll offer a generator option for gasoline-powered charging. Otherwise you could throw a normal generator in the bed.
I'm living in a suburb but been thinking about a pick up
Some uses are, impulse Craigslist and local furniture purchases, outdoor sports equipment, home garden projects.
My sedan is trashed from ocean related stuff I'm always putting in it. I was in a rush the other day, accidently left something wet in the car all day and have a mildew smell now to deal with. Dumb stuff like that seems avoidable.
Keep a desiccant pack in the car, it'll go a long way towards avoiding damp-related issues. The reusable silica gel ones market for gun safes come in a metal can that's easy to handle & recharge in the oven at low temperature. We have muddy gear in/out of our cars constantly and this has worked for us.
A 9x8 trailer is a cheap alternative. Although, living in a suburb it might be hard to find a place to put it.
> Some uses are, impulse Craigslist and local furniture purchases, outdoor sports equipment, home garden projects.
Why would you buy a pickup for any of these activities? It'd be quite terrible? A van is a perfect solution.
I definitely worry about the ability of this thing to drive through a couple feet of water safely.
Due to it being electric or due to the specific design? EVs are generally much easier to design for water crossings. I actually drove an electric motorcycle across a river fully submerged, which it wasn't even designed for (had to do a thorough check afterwards but it was completely fine). This is not even remotely possible with the bike I normally ride (Africa Twin).
Due to it being electric. That's really interesting. What prevents shorts?
Proper sealing, mostly. The bike I was riding is a custom-built enduro, the electric part is fully sealed up to the handlebars but the river turned out to be a bit deeper, as it often happens. Electric drivetrains are much simpler. They aren't running as hot as ICE, don't need outside air, have less vibration and fewer moving parts... you can make it a proper submarine if you desire. In fact, certain 2WD electric mopeds are rated for underwater riding.
It's possible to use a normal motorcycle fully submerged as well [1], but designing for that is way harder due to the exposed engine, you need a ton of things and not just a snorkel.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEPzyZTDDTI
This Rivian still worked perfectly fine after being submerged in and carried away by a flood: https://insideevs.com/news/735934/rivian-r1t-flood-hurrican-...
it doesn't need air intakes and exhaust like an ICE, so you can just seal everything up.
I mean... the same should be said for pretty much every vehicle. The F150 maxes out at the bottom of the hubs.
"Safe" is relative, but I've taken older Honda civics through water part-way up the doors. When you're in the middle of nowhere it's nice to have options. Do you run the risk of major electrical faults if you run this through water?
>The rather extreme omission of any kind of media system in the car is jarring, but it, too, has secondary benefits.
>“Seventy percent of repeat warranty claims are based on infotainment currently because there’s so much tech in the car that it’s created a very unstable environment in the vehicle,” Snyder says.
I'm totally cool with them not having an infotainment screen or even a stereo itself. But speaker management might be a pain.
I really hope they decide to either include speakers to which you connect to your own infotainment system or at the very least, have the space or brackets where you can bring your own speakers and install them without cutting.
Having a bluetooth speaker take care of all the sound is just too bulky and cumbersome for those of us who need to live with constant music in the car. Plus, I don't want to leave a $150 bluetooth speaker in my car all the time and encourage break-ins.
There is a video going around showing Slate’s answer is an optional, removable Bluetooth speaker. It looked similar to a JBL. There’s a bracket to mount it on the dash.
I'd rather have my Bluetooth speaker stolen than an installed stereo stolen where they just gut parts of the car and rip things up. But it will be a bigger target since it's easier to resell.
> But it will be a bigger target since it's easier to resell.
Indeed: https://www.reddit.com/r/Toyota/comments/1bt8ck8/loved_dropp...
Looks like the dash and door cards are pretty much just flat plas- er, reinforced polymer. Aftermarket stereos and speakers come with mounting brackets and bezels to cover the holes you’ll need to cut.
just place 4 bluetooth speakers connected to eachother in a mesh or something
> It only seats two yet has a bed big enough to hold a sheet of plywood.
Not really the point of the article, but, does it? This[0] says the bed is 60 inches long and 43 wide, and plywood is 96x48 inches. Is it like, any vehicle fits plywood if you cut it to the size of the truck or stack it on top?
[0] https://www.thedrive.com/news/the-slate-truck-is-two-feet-sh...
Tailgate down, plywood lying with one edge on the bed and the other on the side?
But I agree, I would expect it to be able to fully contain a standard sheet of plywood if it made that claim.
Perhaps .. but then try the same thing with drywall
That appears to be the bed width between the wheel wells. I assume it would fit width wise on top of the wheels, which is still in the bed. As to the length, not even most full size trucks are long enough to fit the whole sheet. I guess the main point is that you wouldn't have any trouble getting the sheet of plywood home.
In my old Ranger there were a couple of spots in the bed where you could put a couple of 2x8 beams across it and have a place to stack 4x8 sheets. You did have to lower the tailgate, but they didn't stick out past the end of the lowered tailgate so there was no special requirements (flags etc...) for hauling them. It was very convenient. I would hope this truck has a similar feature, since it's almost free to add and increases the utility greatly.
8 foot beds do exist. They're very rare nowadays with nearly every truck being a super-extra-mega cab 4 door.
You generally have to find someone willing to sell you a fleet vehicle if you want a full 8 foot bed. Modern trucks are more like minivans with a vestigial bed sticking out of the back.
I have on old fleet truck: four full doors and an eight-foot bed. I love it, it’s getting quite old, and I have no idea how I’m ever going to replace it
Yeah, it's interesting that their FAQ [1] just says it can fit "full size sheets of plywood" and their specs page [2] also does not list the actual dimensions, only the volume. A 60"x43" bed would technically fit a 96"x48" sheet, but you would have to lean one edge against the side of the bed.
That said, the article you linked appears to list the bed width at the wheel wells. They say the Maverick's bed is 42.6" wide but above the wheel wells it 53" wide or so. You can find plenty of pictures of people hauling plywood with one. I suspect the Slate is similar.
[1]: https://www.slate.auto/en/faq
[2]: https://www.slate.auto/en/specs
I'm quite excited about this. Ticks all my boxes for "low" tech, simple, moddable, useful, and cheap. I'm hoping my aging Pontiac Vibe holds out long enough to upgrade to one of these, if they succeed. I put in a preregistration!
The problem is, the kind of person who cares about those things, as valid as they are, buys 0-1 cars per 20 years, and the market is driven (ha ha) by people who buy 2-3 cars every 2 years.
Very true. This truck appeals to me very much. My wife and I have a 2010 Accord and a 2014 CR-V. We could afford newer and/or fancier cars, but we just don't care about those things.
We're thinking of buying a newer car at some point, but between interest rates and, now, tariffs, we're not in any hurry.
Hah. Fair point. I'm around 210k miles and aiming to squeeze as many more out of it as I can.
Vibe solidarity! I have a 2009 with manual everything - even the old crank windows and manual door locks. This truck seems right up my alley.
Hell yeah Pontiac Vibe! My 2008 is at 308k! I’ll drive into the ground
My 30-year-old daughter is still driving the Toyota version, the Matrix, also 2008, that we bought in about 2013. She loves the thing. If she didn't have it, I'm sure I would still be driving it.
I find it hilarious that it's a limited-edition M Theory model. It has a badge glued to the dash that says "1926 of 5000." For a Toyota econobox.
Niice, giving me hope! My '06 is showing its age, but I hope it's got another 100k in her!
Looks like the biggest thing isn’t even mentioned: no telematics control unit to track your behavior.
https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/personal-informa...
> Looks like the biggest thing isn’t even mentioned: no telematics control unit to track your behavior.
Is that confirmed? I would buy one *today* if this was known to be true... but I am 80% sure that they don't have any in production; all I see are renders.
There will almost certainly be a WiFi radio (for at home OTA updates) but there will likely be a modem, too, for people that like to remotely manage charge. The modem may be an optional extra and the WiFi traffic is something I can block/inspect as needed.
> There will almost certainly be a WiFi radio (for at home OTA updates) but there will likely be a modem, too, for people that like to remotely manage charge.
My 2024 EV doesnt have WiFi or Cellular radios.
> My 2024 EV doesnt have WiFi or Cellular radios.
Which car is that?
Which EV is that?
It's too late big car got to them
150 miles of range is pretty terrible, especially when it's winter and you have a load in the back. Suddenly that's 70 miles of range.
I get that it's a bargain price, so that's the tradeoff. But a pretty bad one.
There are tons of golf carts on the road where I live so there appears to be a spectrum of use cases and ranges that people will tolerate.
I expect an extra battery option will be a thing.
From the ars article:
The truck will come with a choice of two battery packs: a 57.2 kWh battery pack with rear-wheel drive and a target range of 150 miles and an 84.3 kWh battery pack with a target of 240 miles (386 km).
Perfect. Instant buy for me if they can deliver on their promises. No other car in recent memory has spoken to my minimalist frugal engineering mind like this one. Hope my 2000 4runner lasts until the Slate gets delivered to my door!
This should really be mainstream car manufacturing. I can't wait for the day when we have choice of cheap cars, with DiY upgrades and no fucking tracking mechanisms built in and something that works without a phone. I wish them all the success and for the first time in my adult life, I'm excited about technology in cars again!
> The simplification goes simpler still. Slate will make just one vehicle, in just one trim, in just one color, with everything from bigger battery packs to SUV upgrade kits added on later.
Makes me wonder if, once "normal" features are added, cost and reliability will be a problem?
In contrast, I could see this really helping the dealer model work because dealers could compete with different customizations.
That being said: At least when it comes to the battery, efficiencies come from a single large battery instead of a modular battery. I suspect they'll need to offer a larger battery at the factory.
I could imagine this being popular for company and fleet trucks, but I can't imagine it being popular for personal vehicles with the general public. The people I know who drive personal pickup trucks want the absolute biggest one they can find and have zero interest in actually doing any truck activities with it. They drive their Raptors and 2500s to work and to burger king and that's it. If they do any customization, they might take it to a shop and pay them to put a louder muffler on it.
Ars did a good write up on this as well: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/04/amazon-backed-startup-w...
Definitely something I would consider if they can make it happen.
So basically they are doing the simple "BEV can be cheap if you don't try to size the battery for long distance driving" but leave out lots of other things that don't meaningfully contribute to the lower price, as a distraction.
That might be just the thing that had been missing for bootstrapping the market of short haul electric (think of all those trips that are done in a car because they are almost but not quite walkable/bikeable!). Reminds me of how the Tesla roadster and then S bootstrapped the market of luxury electric.
If this can’t compete head to head (no tariffs or other import restrictions) with BYD and the like, then I don’t know why one would get excited. Feels like an expensive consolation prize with tons of compromises. I want competition.
You can't really compete in a any real sense when the labor price differential is so massive and the companies and supply chains are directly subsidized. The price does not reflect the product, but all its inputs.
The $20K from the article is after a $7500 subsidy.
I never said that I’d expect that a US automaker would “win”. I want the best car at the cheapest price to be made available. And for that to be done within a level playing field with regards to safety / workforce / environmental / labor regulations. My expectation is that US automakers do not win, even with subsidies. But I do think keeping an industrial base in the US would be worth that compromise.
Historically, tariffs guarantee the local market will not win.
Tariffs (the "chicken tax") are directly responsible for US trucks being so expensive. They have no foreign competition in the US.
Environmental regulation loopholes cause US trucks to be so big, which is a related problem.
It's probably possible for US manufacturing to compete directly with foreign manufacturers, but they have no incentive to do so now that Trump extended the chicken-tax to all imported cars.
It's not a loophole if you explicitly state: "This is what we are going to focus on." The CAFE regulations also regulate pickup trucks, just less stringently.
>CAFE has separate standards for "passenger cars" and "light trucks" even if the majority of "light trucks" are being used as passenger vehicles. The market share of "light trucks" grew steadily from 9.7% in 1979 to 47% in 2001, remained in 50% numbers up to 2011.[7] More than 500,000 vehicles in the 1999 model year exceeded the 8,500 lb (3,900 kg) GVWR cutoff and were thus omitted from CAFE calculations.[10] More recently, coverage of medium duty trucks has been added to the CAFE regulations starting in 2012, and heavy duty commercial trucks starting in 2014.
>"If this can’t compete head to head (no tariffs or other import restrictions) with BYD and the like, then I don’t know why one would get excited."
Would you prefer our roads flooded with cheap Chinese EVs that are the automotive equivalent of Shein hauls? Protectionism has its place in certain areas, and I would say building a thriving domestic EV industry that isn't beholden to a single weirdo is one of them.
> cheap Chinese EVs that are the automotive equivalent of Shein hauls?
Your perception of Chinese auto manufacturing is very out of date. This makes as much sense as calling Japanese or Korean cars cheap and low quality.
I’m pretty sure there are more possible outcomes than “this one truck or cheap, dangerous Chinese EVs.” False choice fallacy.
A lack of import restrictions in no way prevents safety regulations. You could also subsidize the domestic automobile industry without having tariffs, so that we protect our domestic industrial base. These things take no imagination.
By most accounts the Chinese EVs are decent quality. What makes you think they aren’t?
NHSTA standards
European standards are tighter, and many Chinese vehicles are homolgated in Europe.
This. US auto safety standards are infamously inane.
I can’t find any evidence that the NHTSA has ever evaluated Chinese EVs negatively. The ones not available in the US meet high standards in other places like Europe and Australia.
Do you have any evidence to support your claim?
Do you think that the rest of the world needs to protect itself from Tesla then and slap tariffs on any Tesla cars exported?
>"Do you think that the rest of the world needs to protect itself from Tesla then and slap tariffs on any Tesla cars exported?"
If it were a stated policy goal of said country to develop their own indigenous EV production at scale, then yes. The same the US did for 30 years after WWII to develop its own auto industry.
The era of dumping mass amounts of cheap "good enough" products on the global market, made entirely possible by the ignored and externalized costs of dumping trillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere via oceanic shipping, is coming to a close.
Do Chinese Evs break down a lot or aren't repairable?
I drive a Polestar 2, which is a Chinese manufactured EV, and it's better quality than most North American vehicles.
The Munroe Live episode on it should disavow people of these biases. He ends it with a strong warning about people's weird biases about Chinese manufacturing.
Completely anecdotally from a friend who has BYD Atto3 - he had couple of issues with cameras. Plus some early rust (which is not unheard of in forums). So did his sister.
My impression of driving it - materials are nice, but overall experience (interior looks and software, aka what you use the most) was quite terrible in the context I own Tesla Model Y. I'm sure going from 15 year old Nissan you'd be ecstatic.
I mean, I’d certainly feel safer driving in a sea of cheap Chinese EVs than I feel in a sea of giant trucks and SUVs.
It's a pickup for US market because it has no plans to remotely compete with BYD.
I think most Americans would go for a 15k Toyota Hilux Champ with similar design ethos, but chickentax.
I would buy 3 at that price, good grief.
The issue with this is they claim the cost savings came from not having a screen and other silly features, but that’s not where money is spent.
The real cost savings came a tiny, 150 mile battery. It could easily be <100 miles loaded up after a few years of use, which means there are very few use cases for this truck, and it certainly doesn’t make sense without the tax credit. Cool idea, but there’s no getting around the price of batteries
There are plenty of use cases for a ~100 mile truck.
Right, but it needs to be competitive with ICE cars that travel several hundred miles per tank and fill up in minutes. Literally 0 of my friends have been willing to transition to electric due primarily to range anxiety, and that's for vehicles that achieve over 200 miles per charge. I drive an EV and even I would simply never, ever consider this vehicle based on the range.
I’d want one of these for in-town stuff, which is 90% of my driving.
I'm just saying, many people aren't going to buy an EV until they see it as a strict upgrade over the ICE alternative.
As the owner of a 2014 Nissan leaf with ~70 miles of range left, this statement makes no sense... ~100 miles (after years of use and loaded down) sounds amazing. I use my leaf CONSTANTLY and only resort to my 2000 Chevy S10 for things like dump runs, home projects, helping friends move, etc.
Maybe if it was the only EV in town I'd change my tune. I am willing to pay extra for a battery that will take me 200 miles because I make one-way 100m trips often enough. Keep in mind, where I live there is some decent charging availability, but the places I would visit don't have much. I've also had a couple of experiences where I get to the charging place and it doesn't work for some reason. I have some range anxiety for sure.
I drive 20 miles a day and fill my tank once a month.
Or I could plug in my car every night in my garage. Where I already park and exit my car every day.
There's no competition to be had here. It's a choice between going to the gas station occasionally or not at all.
The 100 mile EV doesn't go beyond 100 miles, but that's not what it's for and not why I need it. I need a puddle jumper to get beat up and rode hard in big city traffic for 20-40 minutes a day and that's it.
There are plenty of use cases in the narrow band that it can operate, but it is a pretty narrow band. Around town commuter in climate that doesn't need AWD/4WD, like great for shopping, commuting, or for small contractors doing jobs. Two people in the vehicle plus luggage, it will be interesting to see what happens to range. Love the concept.
That “narrow” band is the vast majority of American driving. People drastically overestimate their needs in this regard.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/07/07/...
> According to data from the U.S. Department of Transportation, 95.1 percent of trips taken in personal vehicles are less than 31 miles; almost 60 percent of all trips are less than 6 miles. In total, the average U.S. driver only covers about 37 miles per day.
> In a study published in 2016, researchers at MIT found that a car with a 73-mile range (like an early version of the Nissan Leaf), charged only at night, could satisfy 87 percent of all driving days in the United States.
I would buy a 160km truck to drive to and from work.
I'm curious what kind of workplace you go to regularly that a truck is a good option for?
This truck is compact/low-cost enough that you could commute to a city job, and its competitors for that are basically the Leaf, Bolt, Fiat 500e, Kia Niro and Hyundai Kona.
The bed is pointless for commuting, but so are the back seats in any of those other cars.
I commute in a Fiesta, and it’s been years since anybody has sat in the back seats.
You can get a lot of Uber rides for $20k.
2 years worth according to my math using ride.guru and that's in advance. That also means I don't have a truck and I have to coordinate trips twice a day. And that strictly commuting, not accounting for all the other uses I have for a car...
That jives pretty well with the total cost of ownership of a vehicle. There are plenty of reasons why one would want to buy, but unless one of those reasons is specifically “to be a frugal driver with a Civic/Prius/Corolla”, Uber at least seems cost-competitive for in-city use.
I’m a two-car household with my partner, but I’ve assumed that if one car is out of commission, we’d be fine with Uber+one car for at least several months while we take the time to thoroughly research/negotiate/etc. options.
Of course, my remark was more on if the sole purpose was to drive to and from work. It seems absurd to be ok with spending $20k if that is the primary feature. I'd expect a few more use cases, especially to buy new vs. used. But I've gone years with a used $800 car and my current vehicle was acquired in 2011, was only 5 years old at the time, for around $8k and has been going fine since.
$50-100 a day goes quicker than you’d think.
Let me introduce you to a concept we call "the city"
Yes, exactly. And a 150 mile battery is still not that tiny in terms of size and weight, and still probably costs more than 20k alone, (unless you source it from China.)
The plastic frame probably helps by making it super light. And that + the lack of paint definitely helps cut manufacturing costs
The fact that it’s so bare bones (no stereo, etc. unless you put one in) makes me really hope that it doesn’t phone home with a firehose of telemetry like pretty much every other new car. If so, they’ve got my interest
I've seen that it doesn't have the ability to phone home on it's own but that OTA updates and other connectivity relies on you using their optional phone app and your phones internet connection.
That's the killer feature for me, if this actually comes out the after market mods are going to be amazing, having a test bed for creating your own self driving rigs is going to be a complete game changer.
It's so hackable (in a good way) that this platform could foster a whole knew segment of the population getting into EV manufacturing and dramatically increase the talent pool the same way the VW beetle and the Lisa Computer did, hobbyist hackers are the greatest pool for technical founders.
Not to mention replacing the exterior panels with custom displays and other amazing "Art Car" opportunities.
Excellent question. Isn't that required by law in the US now?
What gave you that impression?
We've detected that you're not driving towards the bug store to collect your bug rations. Correcting route.
I see this and I don't see it as an every day, driving-on-my-commute style vehicle. As someone who (previously) drove a 2014 honda civic, cheaper cars leave a lot of comfort for longer drives. I can't imagine this barebones vehicle being fun to drive for any extended period of time, or any extended distance, unless you'd spent considerable time customizing it to those needs (at which point, you've probably spent more than buying something off the shelf).
I do see this being great for short utility trips (think running errands, picking something up, etc), and as a utility vehicle (would be nice to be able to have an 8ft bed).
It would be really interesting to me to see a fleet of vehicles like this that are ultra-rentable; think a Bird/Lime scooter, but a utility truck.
> I do see this being great for short utility trips (think running errands, picking something up, etc), and as a utility vehicle (would be nice to be able to have an 8ft bed).
Japan and the rest of the world figured this out decades ago. They're called kei trucks. You can buy pre-2000 imported ones in the US from like $5-15k depending on the miles/condition/year/transmission. I have a 1990 Suzuki Carry that is solely used for trips to Home Depot and picking up random furniture from FB Marketplace that I got for $6k.
Aren't there issues with states randomly revoking registration for imported kei vehicles because of emissions/safety/whatever?
I'm in NJ so as long as it's 30 years or older there's no emissions required. If you're in a state that doesn't allow registration of kei trucks then there are companies that make it pretty straightforward to get them titled and registered in states that have very lax laws like Montana.
Not going to say it's right, but for a vehicle that is occassionally used to drive between your home and the hardware store, I'm sure that a ton of these types of vehicles are just not registered. Even if you get caught without registration, the inconvenience is relatively minor (when compared to a daily-driver not being registered)
> Japan and the rest of the world figured this out decades ago.
And it's great that the US is (seemingly, somewhat) catching up.
If the timing weren't so off (I just bought a compact electric car), then this would have been a real possibility for me: 150 miles is about 1 weeks worth of driving for me, it's usually just me (or occasionally +1), and we have my wife's car for driving the whole family long distances. Of course I'm skeptical that it will come in under $27,500 (implied by the "Under $20k after federal incentives), and if it's much more than that it will start to get squeezed by other options.
Completely agree. It has to end up cheap enough to be a "tool", rather than a "vehicle". If there isn't a clear price-based market segmentation between the two, this will get crushed.
~$30k for a manual-window, slow-charging truck? Will anybody in the US actually want one?
It's a cool concept... looks good to my eye, small trucks are neat, etc. But, I'd want push-button windows, up-to-date charge controller/battery tech, and the normal EV integrated app. Maybe if it was really a $20k truck (they're advertising the price after incentives, many of which are either going away or vanish for higher income earners).
>I'd want push-button windows, up-to-date charge controller/battery tech, and the normal EV integrated app.
Don't they already have Cybertrucks for that ;)
>It's a cool concept... looks good to my eye, small trucks are neat
And it's barely a truck, 1000-lb towing capacity. A VW Golf can tow twice as much.
Makes you wonder if they picked that form factor to appeal to a certain market segment that's current underserved?
I love the concept, but at $20.000USD it's to much. My guess is that they'd need to hit 15.000USD for the extend range version. Two minor thing I would chance, as others pointed out: Bench seat, and the second: Just make the holes/mounting options for an after market stereo.
Hopefully this is successful and will push other manufacturers to create similar options. I saw an old Morris parked outside the gym the other day, it took up maybe 2/3 of a parking space, it was perfectly size for my grandparents, it perfectly sized for my needs. I get that the car grows a bit in size, once all the modern safety features are added, but I don't see why that would amount to much more than the size of say an Opel Kadett D or E, or a Volvo for the 1980s.
>at $20.000USD it's to much.
Tell me you haven't purchased a vehicle in the current millennium, without telling me?
>15.000USD for the extend range version
Buy a used one in 2035 with 80k miles?
I bought a new car (EV) 3 years ago. $20K is too much for a 150m range truck, though I probably still wouldn't buy a 150m truck for $15K.
Nissan is still selling 2,300 LEAFs in the U.S. per quarter, with a much worse charging story.
https://usa.nissannews.com/en-US/releases/nissan-group-repor...
Thing is, it's not even really a $20k truck. It's a ~$30k truck, with some federal rebates available to some buyers.
If it was a legit $20k truck/SUV, it would make a fine replacement for my wife's current car (at least by usage requirements, but not even close by style/luxury demands).
> Tell me you haven't purchased a vehicle in the current millennium, without telling me?
I have, and I think they are way to expensive for the use I get. My issue is that $20.000 quickly becomes $30.000 once my government is done with adding taxes. I drive a 12 year old car, original price was ~25.000USD. It's going to be around 30.000USD to replace it, once it dies. The price difference between getting an extremely bare bones car vs. one from a known brand, in colour, with better range going to be negligible I fear.
Anyone? Sure. If this was available 2 months ago, I may have bought one instead of a used Polestar. The Polestar is wildly faster, more luxurious, better range, but I'd have liked a truck, and if I got the $7500 tax credit, I'd have paid about $9k less for this. (Used, 20k miles, $29k.)
Lots of people? Much harder to say. Has to be either "first car" kind of thing for someone young, or "second car" in a family where it's OK to have a 2-seater with limited range be used for commuting/errands. (Or "third car" for people with money to spare.)
There's a 5-seat SUV version, so that expands the market a bit. I'm still not convinced it'll sell without beefing up the specs a bit while maintaining the price.
"third car" for people with money to spare.
Yeah, but the same ~$20k - $30k buys you a heck of a lot more ICE. A new Maverick XLT starts in that range. Or a Lariat trim at $34k. And if this is just a toy, that same money gets you in a new base or very high-spec used Miata.
>(Or "third car" for people with money to spare.)
...or have a spouse and many driving age children. I'm currently in the market for car for the fifth driver in the family.
Why slow-charging? I didn't see anything about that in the article?
120kW charging system, so ~30 minute 20-80% (on a relatively small battery), was what I saw. It's not "wall plug" slow, but it's nowhere near state-of-the-art. The small battery and slow(-ish) charging means it's mostly a run-about and less (relatively) suitable for roadtrips. The American market loves to buy on the most intense use, not the average or minimal - giant pickup trucks because somebody might go to Home Depot once a season or tow a small boat at the beginning/end of lake season. Etc.
120kW charging isnt slow by any reasonable standard, especially for a vehicle with a <60kWh battery.
I'm looking for a vehicle which doesn't track my location, and doesn't have complex software controlling vehicle functions which could kill me. Maybe this is for me.
>and doesn't have complex software controlling vehicle functions
Nobody should be allowed to buy a car without these functions. You aren't a good enough driver.
Not when they're constantly failing. I've a 2020 Honda Civic with a lane assist that has quite a few times tried to spontaneously squeeze me into the wrong lane. I was better off without it.
I have said this and will reiterate - building an 'afforable' EV is impossible with the current level of technology - by which I mean a vehicle that competes on price with affordable ICE vehicles, and doesn't make compromises that would make it impractical to own as the only car.
There are $20k cars with infotainment, bodypaint and probably a lot more creature comforts than this thing. Also this thing has a 150 mile range (less probably IRL), which is not practical.
Looking at the basic shape, the drag looks horrible, and probably the efficiencys bad too, considering they only manage 150k with an 52kWh battery.
Euros have already tried this, they put out abominable shitboxes where they tried to save money everywhere but the battery and charger, and the result were poverty cars which barely cost less than a Model 3.
Once you spend the money on a 400 mile battery and a fast enough charger to be practical, you're most of the way in terms of BOM to a 300HP electric upmarket road monster. Tesla understood this, and are dominating the market.
BYD also knows this, and there's a reason their C-segment EVs cost more than their D-segment plug-ins, despite the latter having tons of electric range.
Also doesn't cost $20k from the factory, it costs $20k with tax credit.
Why is this? We've been told that the cost of batteries is in freefall for years now. Why aren't they competitive yet with ICE, even if they are heavier?
It’s a process happening over time. Why the grandparent’s comment will age horribly in only five years.
I remember similar comments about digital cameras shortly after Y2k. A dozen years later it was already hard to use anything else.
Read the innovator’s dilemma for a full understanding of the process.
Not a truck guy, but I like it. What I like the most is that it's not batshit fucking insane.
I recently visited America after a couple of years away, and spent a couple of weeks in California, driving from SF to LA. The thing which I found the most striking was the sheer insanity of the pickup trucks that were absolutely everywhere. These things were true Idiocracy-class monster trucks, which are clearly lethal to operate in any environment which includes pedestrians. In some cases, my five-year-old's head barely reached the bumper, and my wife's head didn't clear the hood. And these were highly-polished, un-dented behemoths that had clearly never seen a dirt road in their lives. The whole thing is clearly all about aesthetics and identity politics. Absolutely revolting.
(If you haven't visited the US recently, I think it's almost impossible to appreciate how obscene the phenomena is. 10 years ago, trucks were far more restrained, but could still do everything they needed to do. 30 years ago, trucks were fully half the size, but could still carry the same-size loads and do honest work. There's honestly no possible justification for their corpulent growth.)
Anyhow, this thing looks like it can do honest work without killing everyone who crosses its path. I really appreciate that. I hope it starts a trend.
I mostly agree with you, but I will note that the big trucks now have much higher load capacities than regular trucks 30 years ago.
A stock F-150 now has about double the towing capacity of one from 30 years ago, despite most of them never being used to tow anything.
This is really useful. It's an upgraded kei truck. All the modern safety features - airbags, ABS, rear view camera, anti-collision braking. None of the frills - infotainment, connectivity, etc.
Does it have air conditioning?
A video linked says yes.
Price seems to be creeping up. Car and Driver says $28K.[1] That may be related to "incentives".
This could be very popular with companies that need small fleets of pickup trucks. The ones that have company logos on the side.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVeYjxQPdz4
Yea, incentives are currently about 7-8k depending on state so that sounds about right.
I love this. We have a Fiat 500 EV that we got for $8k used that’s a fantastic city / small hauling car, and this beats it in many qualities in a way that’s still minimalist, reasonably affordable, and low maintenance (if as promised). We also have a 1986 4WD VW camper van which gets the big jobs done but is still manageable in the city. This truck is like the DIY marriage of the two.
This is amazing. I hope it succeeds. If I had any use for a truck I'd be lining up to buy one. They make one in a compact sedan or hatchback form factor and I am in. Heck, even better a subcompact.
I compared the dimensions of the Slate with my '06 Pontiac Vibe hatchback, and it's only a few inches longer. I suspect the Slate + Fastback kit will be pretty close to a hatchback in size and function.
I would love to have such a simple car, here in the uk.
Something tells me though, that if such a company got successful, it wouldn't be long before the features started creeping back in, to justify an increase in price.
This looks great. But isn't there a long history of new car companies over the last few decades that have an impressive car, take pre-orders and never deliver? Something about production hell?
Slate is financially backed by Bezos [1] and Eric Schmidt [2] so it's not like they're going to run out of money unless they choose to do so. And it's staffed by a bunch of Detroit automotive engineers, so it's not like they're going to be surprised to learn that building and selling automobiles is harder than launching a CRUD app or SAAS.
I do expect a steep price jump when they realize that all this customization (especially post-purchase) makes crash testing really difficult and expensive, $20k is not going to happen but hopefully it will be under $30k MSRP and under $40k with typical options, at least targeting a different market than Rivian.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/08/inside-the-ev-startup-secr...
[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/91322801/bezos-backed-slate-auto...
Why would post-purchase customization be crash-tested at all? It’s not currently. If I buy an F-150 and jack it up, it’s not Ford’s responsibility to crash-test my work. Even if I use genuine Ford parts I buy from Ford.
"Slate is financially backed by Bezos"
This is too bad. I'm not buying anything from people who showed up January 20th. It hasn't been difficult. And luckily there is plenty of competition in the electric car space.
If they get somebody else at the helm (not Elon), I'll root for them like crazy.
Being backed by Bezos and the appearance of infinite funding isn't necessarily a good thing. You need someone at the helm that is driven and in control. Don't know who's running the company or if they have the proper mentality to get through production issues, but it's certainly not Bezos.
Either way, I'm rooting for their success. The low end car market is pretty much non-existent. I've heard people blame the cash for clunkers program that got rid of a ton of low end supply in 2009, but haven't looked into it too much.
talk is cheap, show me the vehicle I can purchase that works well
By the way, THIS is how we stop inflation. We make new things that cost less and are innovative. People on here are so scared of "deflation" but the reality is, if you don't have deflation your not innovating enough!
I wish there were an all-wheel or four-wheel drive option. This would make it the perfect shorter-range adventuremobile for snowsports and remote backwoods climbing and hiking access.
Don't get me wrong, I absolutely adore this truck. But I feel the same way about this truck that I do about the Framework Laptop (having owned one)—cool idea, cool product, but will Slate be around in 5 years to keep making parts and offering support for it?
This is a fair concern, I imagine. If it is highly user serviceable, maybe that isn't a concern.
That said, I think you raise a bigger issue - I'd like to see MORE things like Framework, Fairphone or Slate - user serviceable, customizable - maybe low initial cost.
To me, this feels futuristic, exciting, optimistic and positive.. we need more like this, so how can we make these kinds of businesses more likely to succeed, resilient, etc?
5 years later, we’re still around and more successful than ever, both from a mission achievement and a business fundamentals standpoint.
> Meet the Slate Truck, a sub-$20,000 (after federal incentives) electric vehicle that enters production next year.
Then it isn't < $20000. It is a pitch.
I'm very positive, however note that when they mention "injection molded polypropylene composite material" - this (i think) is the same material used for Seadoo Spark jetskis. I owned one and had a minor crash, and because this material cannot be repaired, the entire hull needed replacing, it was an insurance write-off. I hope they've thought about how to make this car repairable and not 'disposable' after the first inevitable minor crash. Of course this may not be a fair comparison because jetski hulls are exposed, whereas car chassis' have panels and bumpers.
Does this strategy even make sense? You can charge $20k for a car. Why wouldn’t you add options that cost you nearly nothing but some amount of buyers will opt in for a meaningful revenue increase.
Charge $1k for paint. Even if 95% of people don’t do that, 5% of orders just increased their revenue by 5%. Paint doesn’t take engineering time.. just spend $500 and let some other company do it. This is why trims exist, having a single low price point means people who want to spend more either produce lower revenue than possible, or are disappointed.
IMO this one trim, one price is almost certainly a prelaunch marketing gimmick as from a business perspective there is literally no benefit.
> Paint doesn’t take engineering time.. just spend $500 and let some other company do it.
Are you sure you read the article? The is explicitly addressed.
DIY wrap kit I guess is a form of options, but again seems like a missed revenue opportunity. Some of your market wants DIY customization, but realistically some anmount of (or almost every) consumer would rather pay +$1000 for a nice colored than $400 for a wrap kit.
The moment you say "just", you've lost the argument.
In the YT video (linked in another comment), it claims they save $350M by not building painting facilities.
I think it better if they just give options for easy modding. You take it to a garage for a mechanic to spray it, or to hollow out radio nook, or add a phone charger outlet.
The big thing I would want from this is no call-home/telemetry. I want privacy so I want a vehicle that gets me from a to b.
This is like a car version of the Framework laptop. Love it.
This is amazing. More car manufacturers should get out of the infotainment business. tablet tethered to a cellphone for reception, and a connection to OBD2 for car data is all you need and allows for easy upgrades/replacements when things fail.
I do think they should keep in mind that people will want to do this and at least design the dash to easily accept a tablet mount (vesa standard), amp mount (plug and play Pyle 120v?), speaker wire, and speakers (6x9 or 6.5”). That’s an easy hour install if everything is standardized, accessible, and doesn’t require drilling.
Would also love seating for 5.
https://www.slate.auto/en
Not sure if the article covers it (I read Ars Technica's, not Verge) but the Slate site shows that they do have support for tablets, bluetooth speaker mounts, 3-seat back row, etc.)
While speaker wiring might be nice... I sense that's less likely to be readily supported. Mounts + wireless + USB port for charging is probably the limit there.
Of course, used truck buyers tend to be happy to run some wiring for things like CB, radar, extra lighting, etc. Doesn't matter if the wiring is showing!
If Slate succeeds, it would be the total inversion of Tesla's original masterplan strategy of starting with a supercar and then slowly working their way down the value chain. And what's really astonishing is that, not only is this the cheapest electric car in the country, it's one of the cheapest new cars in the country, period.
https://www.cars.com/articles/here-are-the-10-cheapest-new-c...
It's a very different market today than when Tesla started. Tesla's strategy of starting at the high end was necessary to build electric cars from scratch. New competitors can start with existing supply chains and a base of engineering expertise.
I do think Tesla has lost sight of their original plan, though. They should have kept going through one more generation of significant cost reduction/increased volume after Model 3/Y. They are intentionally leaving this part of the market to competitors as they focus on self driving, and I think it's a mistake that will cost them in the near term.
I think Tesla looked at what is selling in the U.S. market and pivoted to the Cybertruck. Small, cheap sedans and wagons just don’t sell that well at retail anymore—in part because people don’t like them, in part because of safety concerns, and in part because there is a huge backlog of cheap used vehicles.
I think the Cybertruck is a prestige project, like the Roadster. It will never compete with the F-150 in the US in its current form, it won't work in the global market either, and probably won't ever be material to Tesla's financial results unless it gets a complete redesign to make it cheaper and less ostentatious.
Slate’s plan is only possible because they have the benefit of almost 2 decades of advancements (read incredible price drop) in batteries and EV related components.
Exact same car 2 decades ago would have cost a hell of a lot more. At which point the lack of bells and whistles would have been a huge problem.
> If Slate succeeds, it would be the total inversion of Tesla's original masterplan strategy
Slate is an anagram of Tesla. Coincidence?
>If Slate succeeds
Obviously a very big "if" making it at that price point will be extremely challenging.
It would be great if they published an SDK for canbus communication and interfacing, that would really enable aftermarket and add-ons.
At $20k it is actually comparable in cost to a GEM el Xd pickup [1] which can only go up to 35 mph, has 78 mile range, and costs $18k [2]. Totally different class of vehicle, of course.
[1] https://www.gemcar.com/gem-el-xd/
[2] https://electriccarsalesandservice.com/products/2024-gem-el-...
I do wish we'd all just call this a $27.5K USD truck. If it ends up allowing some people to get a tax credit, awesome. But that's not the price they are targeting for selling this truck. And that tax credit is far from a guarantee come late 2026 / early 2027.
(That's before any "later adjustments" to the price, not to mention the effects of uncertain tariff policy.)
150 mile range makes it close to useless. As soon as you take it on a highway, the range will likely drop by half. Which means you can only do a round trip of 37 miles before you have to charge.
Even a very aerodynamic Model 3 loses half of range at highway speeds.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/vkz0SOnR45Gved9B-q9n...
If I'm reading the chart properly it looks like the M3LR gets a smidge better than the advertised range at 65mph?
It really depends on how they define their mileage rating. If it is an inflated number like some EV manufacturers, then yeah. If it is a conservative rating, then it's a useful amount of range for an "in town" vehicle.
It's not about "inflating" it. It's more that the energy needed to move your car a certain distance is quadratically related to the speed, due to aerodynamic drag.
Efficient vehicles spend less energy on other stuff besides moving the car (e.g. by having heat pumps, induction motors that can be turned off without any drag, etc), so tests conducted at a lower speed will appear to have a better range than tests at a higher speed. Meanwhile, less efficient vehicles that waste energy at low speeds will appear to have more similar range at both low and high speeds.
The range figure is determined by a test regulated by the EPA and actually does account for a variety of driving conditions, specifically including highway driving. The graphic you linked to actually shows that the advertised range is very close to the range at all highway speeds.
The article does talk of it being a relatively simple proposition to embiggen the range with an bigger battery kit if that helps. But yeah, it's not a ton of range.
EVs dont lose 50% of their range at highway speeds. Even if they did, I'm not sure why you think you could only go 37 miles between charges (I think you meant 75 mi?).
Round trip, you can go somewhere up to ~37 miles away and drive home to recharge on a single charge. You're both saying the same thing:)
> EVs dont lose 50% of their range at highway speeds.
Yes, they do, compared to 25 mph. I even gave you the chart.
Tesla does not quote a 550 mile range for the Model 3, any more than an ICE car’s range is stated as what a hypermiler could get.
As the chart shows, the reverse would be true: if they’re advertising a 150 mile range you would be able to beat that considerably if you drove at 30mph.
> if they’re advertising a 150 mile range you would be able to beat that considerably if you drove at 30mph.
Yes, because it's true. But who drives at 30 mph? Grandmas maybe. Not exactly target audience for a truck.
The peak efficiency is actually at 25 mph, not 30.
People who buy trucks because they need a tool to do a job? The guys who buy one instead of getting hair plugs are commuting to work at 85mph but people who actually haul things tend not to want their cargo getting damaged. This isn’t the vehicle for someone doing long distance towing but it’s a great choice for someone who wants to carry cargo around a farm, supplies and tools around their local job radius, carry bikes or surfboards, etc. and the modest size means they’re not only saving a ton of money up front but also paying less over time since it’s cheaper than gas and they can charge without a special trip.
The guy who mows my lawn drives under 100 miles a day, doesn’t need a huge cargo capacity, and certainly doesn’t want to overpay for a work truck. I’d bet there’s a sizable market of people like that.
Interesting.
No mention of crash testing or crash-worthiness/safety. Airbags? ABS braking? Collision avoidance (brakes engage based on distance and speed to cars or objects ahead), etc.
Before the hounds say "it is refreshing..." remember that lots of safety features are there because so many people died before they were instituted.
How safe is this plastic body from lateral impact by an F150 or SUV?
One of the reasons for which I do not like or buy old vehicles is the lack of safety features that are common today. All it takes is to land a loved one in the hospital (or worse) to quickly regret the choice to buy a cheap car or an old unsafe car. Years ago my father was t-boned by a full size SUV at a neighborhood intersection, launching his car diagonally across the intersection and onto the front yard of the corner house...through a couple of trees. He walked away from that one because the safety engineering of the vehicle he was driving save his life.
Another note: To me, while this is interesting, it is also a sad commentary on the state of manufacturing in the US. The ONLY WAY to make a $20K car in the US is to strip it down to bare metal...err...not even use metal...or paint...or electronics...or comfortable seats...and have HALF the range of other EV's...and even take out the speakers, etc. And then, you sell not having all those things as a FEATURE! Yup. Brilliant. What's the least we can do to build a car and get away with it?
My prediction is that this thing will die a pretty rapid death or they will have to pivot into making real cars for this market. There's a reason nearly three million conventional trucks were sold in the US last year. Plastic bodies, 150 mile range and barren interiors did not fit the description of a single one of them.
It has a base range of 150 miles [0], which won't resolve range anxiety worries as the average American travels 42 miles a day [1] and only has 2 seats. I think it will do well for hobbyists and EV enthusiasts, but it would be hard to compete with a slightly pricier Tacoma. When people buy a pickup truck, they often use it as a daily commuter as well.
> Got a road trip planned? These trips are all doable on a single charge of our standard battery. If you want to go even farther, our extended range battery increases the range to a projected 240 miles from a projected 150 miles. [0]
[0] - https://www.slate.auto/en/charging
[1] - https://www.axios.com/2024/03/24/average-commute-distance-us...
Edit: The average pickup truck purchaser's has a household income of around $110,000 and 75% live outside cities [0]. When they are purchasing a pickup, it is meant to be both a daily driver and an errand vehicle.
Spending $20,000 on a 2 seater bench pickup with 150mi range is ludicrous when you can buy a used 5 seater Honda Fit or Toyota Tacoma for $0-7k more.
This is most likely targeted at fleet usecases like a factory or local deliveries, but this won't make a dent in the primary demographic that purchases pickups, and being overly defensive is doing no favors in thinking about HOW to build a true killer app EV for the American market.
All true but totally irrelevant. I wouldn't get this to make a cross-country trip, but I would absolutely, 100% get this to have an errand vehicle that never leaves the metro area.
> All true but totally irrelevant
Not really. The average pickup truck purchaser's has a household income of around $110,000 and 75% live outside cities [0]. When they are purchasing a pickup, it is meant to be both a daily driver and an errand vehicle.
Not have 4 seats AND having a lower range makes it a niche vehicle from a consumer sales perspective.
This is most likely being targeted at fleets, which tend to have a local presence and don't have the consumer usecase attached.
> I would absolutely, 100% get this to have an errand vehicle that never leaves the metro area.
You're a software engineer in the Bay Area. You were never the target demographic for pickup truck sales, but you would in fact be a target demo for a product like a Slate Truck.
[0] - https://www.americantrucks.com/pickup-truck-owner-demographi...
>> All true but totally irrelevant
> Not really.
The person you're replying to shares their perspective about why they think your complaints are irrelevant to them. You can't "not really" someone's lived experience. Well you can, but it sounds smug and out of touch.
> Not have 4 seats AND having a lower range makes it a niche vehicle from a consumer sales perspective.
The base model only has two seats. The article explicitly states there will be an SUV conversion kit that you can purchase and install at home. There will also be an extended battery available. It's a very customizable vehicle.
> Not have 4 seats AND having a lower range makes it a niche vehicle from a consumer sales perspective.
In the Bay Area alone, that's huge. A cheap electric 2-seater that can get you into the HOV lanes? Yes please! Who cares if it happens to be truck-shaped. Squint and pretend it's an Electric Camino.
> You're a software engineer in the Bay Area.
...who grew up in the Midwest, learned to drive in a 1970 Chevy Custom with 3-on-the-tree, spent many adult years on the Great Plains, and who happens to live in the Bay Area now.
I am no stranger to trucks.
There are a million things I could use a pickup for today, especially for that price.
> It has a base range of 150 miles [0], which won't resolve range anxiety worries as the average American travels 42 miles a day [1]
What am I missing here? Charge at home and you’ll easily do those 42 miles every day surely?
Especially since your other point said these would be aimed at those outside of cities and those people will presumably have parking/charging at their home.
Disagree. I would buy this as a secondary vehicle for in-city needs, not for road trips. I've been thinking about getting a second car to complement our Kia EV6, but don't want to spend a ton.
Average need not beethe target. There are large niches that don't need as much. Many work trucks never go on road trips. Are those niches big enough is a question.
The thing about range: it’s always reducing (as the batteries age). And then it also reduces based on factors like temperature. The anxiety is solely from the not knowing.
Yep, and it's something that Slate's marketing doesn't directly address. Before Tesla's brand perception meltdown due to Elon, a major reason why Tesla was much more popular than other brands was because of the Supercharger network, which helped reduce range anxiety worries in the West Coast.
> a major reason why Tesla was much more popular than other brands was because of the Supercharger network, which helped reduce range anxiety worries in the West Coast.
Can't basically every other brand use those now? Between the compatible Tesla chargers and all the other ones through Charge America and charging overnight at home, there is no concern from a daily driving, or even moderately ranged trip, standpoint. The downside to long trips is the 30+ minute wait at each charging stop, not the lack of chargers.
While there are enough charges to make the trip they are not as common as gas stations and often not in visible locations. You can't just drive until the light goes on and then stop at the next exit like a gas car.
>While there are enough charges to make the trip they are not as common as gas stations and often not in visible locations.
Sure but everyone with an EV has an app that tells them where they are and helps with route planning.
>You can't just drive until the light goes on and then stop at the next exit like a gas car.
You nearly can. Most ICE cars turn the light on at 50 miles. Other than maybe the middle of the desert, there is going to be a charger within 50 miles.
Using an app while driving is dangerious. Most places illegal as well. The charger will be within 50 miles but you won't find it without the app which means annoying. And if you forgot your phone you are in trouble.
you're making silly arguments. it's not anymore dangerious/illegal than using the gps for google/apple maps.
This is obviously not intended to compete with F-150s and Tacomas. And Honda doesn’t make the Fit anymore. See here for a current Fit owner’s take:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43794437
New Tacoma's are like $40k for a pretty basic model these days.
>New Tacoma's are like $40k for a pretty basic model these days.
I thought so too, but apparently they make an extended cab one that is like 31k for the base model.
> "and the only way to listen to music while driving is if you bring along your phone and a Bluetooth speaker"
Why not make a physical connection (power/network) and define a form factor for entertainment system with or without screen and speakers and let other companies design something to fit the space available. I don't understand why no one does this instead of selling cars full of crappy software that can't be upgraded.
Double DIN already exists with fairly standard plugs in the back
This is not plug and play. I want plug and play. You could even make an entertainment system which just runs using a phone connected using usb or bt.. which would make it just like android auto but without needing the car to support anything from google.
That's what cars always used to have. Made them easily stealable though.
This can be fixed by locking the device to a specific car .. by the user.
This makes a lot of sense for a run around town and short commute car. It specializes for that use case perfectly. I can see a world where families have one decent gas/hybrid car and one cheap EV. That set up could save a lot of gas money over time while meeting the needs of the household.
Also, when is the last time an economy car/truck looked this good? The slate is beautiful.
I think it has a real shot if it arrives as promised, but we know how these things go.
This is just beautiful. A small, functional, electric truck. Not a luxury SUV with a tiny truck bed for cowboy cosplayers, or a cyberpunk glue heap.
I hope they sell millions.
What’s the price without incentives though?
It is mentioned in the article - $27,500.
[Edit: Got that number not from the original article, but from the Ars article another person posted in this thread.]
Of course this assumes the Trump administration doesn't shitcan the $7,500 tax credit, which is not something I'd bet a new company on.
I like the idea, but I think a hybrid version would be the better first product. A 150 mile range is going to limit the people who will purchase this truck.
I'm wondering why the hood is so big, given that it doesn't need to contain an engine? Is that where the batteries are located? Or is it just mostly empty space in the form of a frunk serving as a crumple zone to meet crash testing standards? I hope it's not just a strictly aesthetic thing, because you could reduce that distance and end up with an even more practical truck.
It has a 7 cubic foot frunk in there.
I love the look and the idea, but I wonder if it will go the way of the small/budget phone?
Will folks revealed preference continue to be big and expensive?
One advantage they might have is that there isn't much on the market for low priced pickup trucks in general. I'd probably rather have a gas pickup than an electric but I don't want to pay the inflated prices that go along with them.
Agreed. The U.S. market had a very long run of both large expensive and small cheap pickup trucks, and people consistently have bought the big luxury pickups. It is why all the small trucks were axed to begin with. Even back in their prime, I saw many more F-150s than Rangers. Its an easy up-sell as I'm sure any car salesman will say: well for only a few more thousand you get into a full-size, and from there, add some options and its over.
>Even back in their prime, I saw many more F-150s than Rangers.
I think you're misremembering. The streets were flooded with Rangers and S10s back in the day. Full sized pickups have been the most popular class of vehicle for decades but that number is grossly inflated by the amount that are bought as fleet vehicles or work vehicles.
It doesn't matter why the number is inflated. If full sized trucks are most popular, then that's what you'll see more of. In any case, there are many people for whom a full-size pickup is their daily driver and not used for work. HN is constantly complaining about it, just not today apparently.
Looking at the Ranger, it sold 5.6M units between 1985-2005, its highest selling years.
F series Fords definitely outsold it, but is also a larger product line.
“It is why all the small trucks were axed to begin with.”
No, it is because emissions regulations. A small truck can’t be built on our emissions policies, not that there isn’t a market for one.
How is that? Aerodynamics due to the bed?
The economy (checks 401k) has changed though.
It sounds just like the goals of Ford's Model T.
I'd be very interested in buying one of these as my first EV.
That's what I want. That's almost exactly what I want.
If it were 4x4 it would be literally exactly what I want.
In Colorado, I need 4x4 sometimes. Slate is just RWD. I'd love to see a minimalistic 4x4 model like this.
RWD on an electric truck, lol. What a joke.
> RWD on an electric truck, lol. What a joke.
My ignorance is going to shine through here, but isn't the rear axle the one you'd want driven if you had to choose?
Sure, both is "better" but if I need cheap, rear is the better choice?
Depends. rear wheel drives can get stuck on pavement if it is raining and they are trying to go uphill. Snow and ice make it worse. But put some load on and you get enough weight over the axel to be fine. Of course betteries may be under the bed thus providing good weight distribution.
I had an old Nissan XE truck for a few years. I loved it, the thing was simplicity itself.
I assume there's still a lot of vaporware here, but if they can make it reliable and avoid the teething issues of new cars, I'd probably impulse-purchase one. I would also love to see options for AWD and a full-length bed.
Damn, this might finally get me to retire my 83 Mazda b2200. I've king thought this size trick is about perfect, and the old Perkins engine in my truck is getting really tired. Mostly commenting so I have this in my history to refer to later
I couldn't be more excited about this vehicle (I put $50 down to reserve one), but god damn, that customizer tool is bad. I'm someone who goes to a lot of auto manufacturer websites and makes imaginary builds, so I think I've spent time using the majority of builder apps that are out there, and this is one of the worst. On a laptop, with a shorter screen and a touchpad, it's really hard to use. Which is too bad, since customization is their whole deal.
I wonder if I could write my own software for this car? Like auto-sensing rain-wipers with an Arduino or something, and if the CAN BUS protocol isn't super hard to use. This would be a car hacking dream.
I love this concept and will probably buy one for that reason alone. 150 miles is too low though, I already struggle with the 180 I get out of my current electric car. Really cool to see more ideas in this space, congrats to the founders getting this far!
Seems like they're offering a battery upgrade package, the 150 is the "MVP" battery
I'm really intrigued to see how this does. Kudos to Slate for trying something new and building it in Detroit at a great price point.
I see a ton of discussion on social media from people who want to buy simpler vehicles with less features at a better price point (e.g. the Japanese Kei trucks). I'm not convinced Americans will actually buy such a vehicle because we are used to our modern conveniences in new vehicles. You can even see that trend in this thread where people are asking for more features, or things that were phased out decades ago due to safety (e.g. bench seats). Perhaps Slate has figured that out with their options packaging? I'm rooting for them regardless.
> I'm not convinced Americans will actually buy such a vehicle because we are used to our modern conveniences
My town is FULL of workers doing hauling, painting, gardening, construction, etc., and they're all driving old worn rusting pickups that barely seem held together. There's definitely a market for minimal trucks designed to just get the job done without the "modern conveniences".
I also see this truck appealing to city/college/corp. campus fleets.
If I undersand the article right, it sounds like they make it with no features but that you add yourself afterwards
"We moved all the complicated parts outside the factory"
What does that really mean? You can paint it yourself, well ok, people may like that. Making it easy to service is great.
If I want electric windows is that adaptable? (It may come with electric windows) When I want to put in a stereo A navigation system? AC? (Might come with it)
It would be cool if the car was a abit "framework" so it has an open well thought out way to add and integrate features a person may want.
THe compnay and 3rd parties could offer up all sorts of cool stuff.
I LOVE this idea. I’ve specifically been looking to buy a tiny truck or van, “can hold sheets of plywood” being a major criteria. I love the idea of that being a simple electric I can charge at home. Beautiful!
Man this is so awesome. I do really think they need to consider the fold down bed sides like the kei trucks have.
The bed being plastic doesn’t give me much confidence either. The payload may be similar to a mini truck, but a mini truck’s metal bed will take a significant beating over plastic.
This is very, very close to what I want, but I worry that those two things may prevent me from actually pulling the trigger. While all of the modular features are cool and neat, I don’t really consider them very useful for what I would actually use this truck for.
The purpose of this seems to be a fleet or Personal utility truck, but I still feel like I would be leaning towards a used old Ford Ranger or similar.
"Awesome" is understating it.
"Tisha Johnson, head of design at Slate and who formerly spent a decade at Volvo."
Ye. This is a Volvo station wagon, that Volvo themself discontinued in 2016 becouse it was too popular.
If Slate can actually pull this off then this might be the first automobile I buy new. It's almost exactly what I've been begging for.
Main question I have is whether the "blank slate" can be gradually upgraded. Article mentions a battery upgrade, but for example if I did eventually want to install a head unit or whatever, would I be able to do that after driving the truck off the lot? How open will this thing be to aftermarket upgrades?
Looks like a concept that will never actually reach the market.
And if it does and I'm completely wrong, this concept is probably doomed anyways, as it is swinging far too far to the other side away from fancy tech and right into uselessly bare. I'm sure a few people are excited by this, but realistically it will have a tiny real market. Nearly no one wants manual windows and leaving them out isn't saving huge amount of money.
Make it comparable to a decent conventional vehicle, but electric, and you may do well. This though is more useless and non-functional than my old Jeep, which has a trip computer and bluetooth as the biggest "tech features".
It seems performative. They remove a bunch of stuff nobody ever complained about, like paint or radio. Meanwhile it still has an app and it's still electric with pitiful range. The goal isn't to actually fix the car market, but provide a sort of self-flagellation experience so people can feel good about suffering with no radio, no ac, no auto windows... And I doubt they will reach that goal, sounds more like some kind of investor scam. With all these controversial design decisions they can brag to investors it's "making waves on popular platforms like hn".
I have dreamt of some entity trying to do this. A completely stripped down vehicle sold for a (hopefully) sustainable profit. I wish them as well as possible, and they will have my interest in purchasing one.
I put down a deposit for one.
An EV that's designed to be user-serviceable, has modular upgrades, and isn't full of surveillance technology? This checks all the boxes for me. Can't wait to play with it.
Good trend. Other companies should follow suit. Simplify the car enough. And make it cheap. Sometimes I feel like Chevys are just like this. Real cheap machines. Or those white ford vans made for industrial use.
I wish those Ford Transit vans were made at a cheaper price point. There's not one in stock in my metro area for less than $50,000.
Me, showing this to my wife: Oh, they made a car for you!
She's not wrong, though I'm not at a point where I want THIS much minimalism (or lack of range). What a great product though.
Now, the Ineos Grenadier? That thing speaks right to my soul.
https://www.autoscout24.com/offers/isuzu-npr-npr-77-35q-li-d...
1/3 of the price including tax credit. Too maximalist?
"...but is this extreme simplification too much for American consumers?"
Not this one. It's the premiumization that drove me away from every EV product out there.
Plus, load up the back with more batteries and you've got great range!
I think one of the most amazing things about this new company is that its run by women who held prominent roles in the Big 3. Its an intriguing vehicle but a Ford Maverick pickup offers far more value for the same price.
Sad to say but if the thing was made in Mexico and was priced at $15,000 it would be a huge hit. By the time you accounted for the $7500 federal tax credit it would be priced at around a quarter the price of a gas 4 cylinder powered pickup. An entire industry of add-ons and wraps would spring up around it.
Not following why it’s women run has any real bearing. Let’s judge people by their accomplishments not their sex and race.
Do you think women have had equal opportunities leading to this moment?
I don't read it as saying run by *women*, I think it's just saying "run by women" in the same mode as "run by guys from".
Actually I meant it in a good way. To my knowledge there has never been a car company anywhere that was started by a female team.
Just checked with ChatGPT and it confirmed while there have been women involved with EV and battery startups there hasn't ever been an all female founder led car company. Now that Mary Barra became the CEO of GM it was wildly heralded that there was no longer a glass ceiling in the auto world. But I'd posit actually starting a company, raising money from investors like Jeff Bezos is taking it to another level.
The good news is that I don't think its the last new car company that will get started. I personally know of a guy in Ohio who wants to manufacture a car he built using a diesel engine that gets over 100 mpg and can beat both a Dodge Viper and a Tesla Model 3 to 60 mph.
As far as I can tell, it's "$20K" the same way Cybertruck was "$39K". It's not available for purchase yet, and when it is, it'll be twice as much, because Bezos also likes money.
I feel like this is the perfect first car for a teen or college student Gets them from A to B. optimally 5 star crash test rating. Cheap.
If they deliver i would absolutely buy one for when my oldest starts driving in 3 years.
Where I live, a cheap truck was often a Young person's first purchase.
There were a bunch of minimal 2 seaters that were affordable.
And young people move residences a lot. Having a small truck that can hold a mattress was ideal.
The modern luxury behemoth truck is an abomination...
With a 1000lb towing capacity and 150m range (let’s call that 120 when you don’t charge 100%) this eliminates too many use cases.
It’s the anti-cybertruck but aimed at people who actually could get by with a nice trailer.
Just about anyone who doesn't mind the slight inconvenience and has space for a trailer... would be better off with a trailer than a truck.
But this could easily handle a mild commute and nearby errand running. Most "truck" stuff is like buying 5 bags of mulch from the Home Depot that's 10 minutes away. This will handle that perfectly well.
But yes, 20-80% battery usage makes the base model daily range 90 miles, unladen.
>this eliminates too many use cases
Such as? Seems like it meets a lot of use cases.
You could get a used non-truck EV, add a tow hitch and you'd be able to move more weight in the trunk and in the trailer than this thing can.
Of course, it's a truck, so it can move light + bulky stuff, like appliances and furniture.
Personally, I'd want to pay another $5-10K and get one that can also handle heavy loads. This, but for $30K ($37.5K pre incentives) with no truck-related caveats would be amazing. I'm guessing it wouldn't cost $10K for them to upgrade the suspension + drivetrain.
I'm not sure I understand your point, obviously it's not a replacement for a larger ICE vehicle with 4-5x towing capacity, but it's not designed or meant to be.
But what is it designed for? I understand it's appealingly different, but it doesn't do anything that a trailer doesn't do. And not much that any SUV can't do.
I have a homemade trailer with greater bed capacity than this pick-up that I got for $800 and use it for a myriad of things – from hauling lumber to launching small boats. I've driven it hundreds of miles to the closest Ikea.
When I'm not using it, it's not attached to my low-end SUV. But with the seats down, there isn't a whole lot my low-end SUV can't do as well as this toy pick-up, without range anxiety.
>But what is it designed for? I understand it's appealingly different
So you understand what it is designed for and are pretending otherwise.
You didn’t answer my question, but I think the answer is “designed for people who want to pretend they need a pickup, have the EV bug, but don’t want to pay for an F-150 Lightning”.
This Truck is gonna be a big Hit with consumers!
But once it starts selling like hotcakes they'll jack up the price to "Whatever the Market will Bear" relative to how many they're able to produce.
With most people struggling to get by nowadays (economically) we'll love the "less gadgetry" option because all that advanced technology stuff (and I do mean even power windows!) is, as my father always said, "Just something else that's going to eventually break, and was designed so it must be replaced not repaired."
This has much the same design philosophy as the original Land Rover: tough, reliable, simple and maintainable. It was originally developed as the UK answer to the Jeep, but rapidly became the standard utility vehicle for anyone with an outdoor off road job. Especially farmers. Something like two thirds of all Land Rovers ever made are still in use.
This might well go the same way.
>This has much the same design philosophy as the original Land Rover: tough, reliable, simple and maintainable
Where do you get any of this from? Especially EVs are not something you can easily tinker with as the risk of killing yourself is pretty high. In general they are also more integrated and less maintainable and it seems unlikely that this won't be the case here. Maintainability costs money and to make a 20k car happen every cent needs to be saved.
As for reliability it is obviously one of the first things to sacrifice to make low costs happen. We have seen nothing of this car, I doubt the engineering is even far along.
Looks up my alley. I already went backwards and got a low mileage 2013 specifically to shed all the technology crap. I’d much rather have something newer and nicer
Really interesting stuff. Reminds me of Ox (https://www.oxdelivers.com/).
Kind of a big light phone [0]. China has had these for a bit, I’d guess there’s a decent market for them, though hesitant to buy the first production model of any car, given how dependent we seem to be on warranties and market forces to ensure manufacturing quality and the poor survival rates for new car companies. Interested in v2 for sure.
[0]: https://www.thelightphone.com/
1. $50 for a reservation
2. No guarantee of delivery date
3. No right to purchase
4. No guarantee of purchase price
5. No assignment of purchase to other parties
I've got some lunar real estate to sell you if you think this product will ever exist
Remember when cybertruck was supposed to be cheap minimalistic truck? No paint, spartan interior, simple materials and straight shapes. $39k price tag. Yeah…
From the Wikipedia page:
> Unlike most vehicles sold in the United States, the Slate Truck is not expected to have any Internet connectivity
Well that's certainly a sentence. It wasn't true just 20 years ago. It makes me wonder about the world we've grown into with deeply intertwined apps becoming not only the norm but expected.
The idea is there but I'm wondering about the execution. Here's hoping it takes off.
if the truck becomes popular enough post-market modifications will probably be sold as an extra.
If this thing really comes out in a couple years by the time it's ready for mass production to hit consumer hands there will probably be 2 or 3 self driving kits designed for it. The mods for this thing would be amazing.
A buddy of mine who creates shaped interactive art panels with oleds for disney and other groups interactive events texted me about this, installing video panels on this is going to be a breeze.
I'm more excited about this as a platform than even as a car, this is going to be like browser JS, the Lisa and VW Bug for creating an EV tech skill pipeline.
I like the idea of this as a Framework-style vehicle. If they really leaned into the mod community and were making deliberate decisions to support this, it could offer a lot of traction. Shame there's no AWD version of this. That, the larger battery option, in truck mode with a rack and tonneau cover would be great for contractors as an around-town job vehicle.
It took me a few articles to even find it mentioned, so I'll repeat it here in case anyone else was wondering: it's rear wheel drive only.
Darn, with removable doors and top, I thought this could be a Jeep killer. But no 4WD makes that a non-starter.
The rest makes sense, but no stereo? Why not?
What a gross looking vehicle, and at that price? I just want the old ranger design. I've been using a 2006 ranger for quite a while and it's served me well, I'd like to upgrade it to a ranger XL for that little extra cab room for crap, along with 4WD and power windows and AC, but people rightfully guard them and when they do show up at dealerships they're typically pretty expensive too.
I've thought about importing a Kei, but I don't think it's for me. When I think "American kei truck" I at least think something in the ballpark range cost of a Kei, which is quite a bit less, at least half as expensive for the best options like 4WD, even less if you can compromise. It also has charm unlike this. The range is just ridiculous, too. My little ranger isn't exactly great, I don't push it much more than 300 miles on a tank, but having half that (new! let alone after a few years) is such a deal breaker. Last time I took my truck camping it was around 60 miles each way, and that was a nearby spot.
There's a configurator now.[1] Lots of factory options. The trouble is that it turns into a $30,000 and up vehicle.
[1] https://www.slate.auto/en/personalization
This'll seem a like an odd question given the obvious bare-bones approach, but still: Is or could be instrumented for self-driving? I can't imagine us humans driving forever. Otherwise this looks like a dream truck to me. Easy DIY repair, electric, fewer distractions, meant for work not showing off.
Looks interesting. Are there any real-life non-marketing photos of it?
Reminds me of Bollinger prototypes. Whatever happened to those?
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/04/amazon-backed-startup-w...
Scroll down. The launch event photos look like real prototypes. A bit closer than the marketing photos.
I was thinking; hey, these remind me of Bollingers, which is the only electric vehicle I'm interested in, not for its features, but for the absence of them.
This will be a couple hundred k more attainable.
They pivoted.
It is an interesting idea, but there is obviously a lot which can go wrong here.
Can you actually build an EV like that, conforming to all regulations, with significant cost reduction? VW is currently trying to build a 20k EV, which seem extremely difficult in Europe and US labor costs are probably higher. The Dacia EVs (which seem closest in concept to a pickup) suffer from many downsides, to make low prices happen.
Do people actually want less screens or do they just say that?
Is customization a road to profitability? VWs ID.1 concept has a similar idea to lower entry price, by making several upgrades user installable, so they can be bought over time.
This is obviously a US only car and the US is very lacking in EV adoption. Will this sell in significant numbers?
Can you actually make it cheaply? Rivian is notoriously unprofitable and making cheap cars is, far, far harder than making expensive cars.
The discourse around this thing is hilarious. For years people have been saying “I just want a small, simple truck with no frills and a reasonable price.”
Now, one is finally available, and all the commentary is “Oh, I’m in the target market for this, but I just need them to add:”
- more room for passengers - more payload - an infotainment screen for nav - more room in the bed - more towing capacity - screens in the seats for kids - an app to “manage” it
Guess what! This is why the best-selling vehicles are large trucks, because they give the most people what they want.
Everyone wants a small and cheap and simple car with all the comforts of big and expensive cars. Reality doesn’t work that way!
It's the Microsoft Office paradigm in automotive form. Nobody uses more than 20% of the features in Word or Excel, but nobody uses the same 20%, so it's basically a useless observation. You can't just chop 80% of the features out and still end up with a widely-used product.
They can't sell a vehicle in the US market without a screen, in any case, due to the need for a backup camera.
No infotainment is great. We're all dying for a car with no infotainment.
But no stereo at all is not something that anyone wants. A simple radio is as much a basic expectation as "windows that go down".
Aside, why a pickup body? Aren't sedans wildly more popular?
> Aside, why a pickup body? Aren't sedans wildly more popular?
No, roughly SUVs are 55%, trucks 20% sedans/hatchbacks/station wagons 20%, vans 5%.
With SUV kit, this covers 75% of market from a body-style perspective.
For comparison, this is a $16k car in China:
https://carnewschina.com/2025/03/25/byd-sealion-05-ev-launhe...
It’s like if you could buy an old Nokia for $200, or a new Android smartphone for $160. The old Nokia certainly has nostalgic qualities and some concrete practical benefits like all-week battery life, but overall it’s not a great deal.
And this is why you have >100% tariffs on Chinese cars — American manufacturers know they can’t compete.
Those cars are priced for the budgets of domestic Chinese consumers. BYD exports to Europe are priced similarly to car models sold there. For the same reason, this Slate truck is very unlikely to cost just $20k when it reaches the mass production stage.
There’s a 27% tariff on BYD cars in Europe, designed to bring the price more in line with European manufacturers.
it is extremely important that you read this comment: a company called edison motors out of canada is making a conversion kit that can turn any pickup into a hybrid using a drop-in motor and a really powerful generator. imagine something that costs less than this truck, has a range of many hundreds of miles, and can be used to tow more than ten thousand pounds. and you never have to turn on the generator if you dont need to. groceries on all electric. they are posting videos on youtube about this, its real. i personally believe that these work trucks will be the best in history. the most reliable, the most utility, the best cost.
I am, and I say this without hesitation, absolutely the target demographic for this truck.
These are going to be backlogged for years. The US market is absolutely dying for this truck (and even moreso the SUV variant), exactly as specified. The big guys have refused to provide it, so there is a literal gold mine awaiting anyone that can.
While I like this concept, for my next car, I need the safety features like 360 view, blind spot warning, lidar etc.
Also, though I think using tablets and detachable speakers is cost effective, it may promote car break-ins?
I hope they separate the BMS from the battery, unlike Tesla and others, which force you to replace the entire battery if the BMS fails. What a concept, allowing people to personalize and repair their own vehicles.
Oh HELL yes!! This is almost exactly the kind of thing truck owners have been clamoring for for years now. The only way this could be more exciting is if Ford flipped out and rebooted the Econoline on this concept.
From the related Ars article[1]:
> Rather than relying on a built-in infotainment system, you'll use your phone plugged into a USB outlet or a dedicated tablet inside the cabin for your entertainment and navigation needs.
How is a "dedicated tablet" different than an infotainment system, other than not having vehicle telematics and controls? Also, a regular tablet UX would be dangerous while driving, and typically they don't have their own mobile data connections.
1. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/04/amazon-backed-startup-w...
It's exactly what I think a lot of techies want.
Highly technical people tend to come in two varieties when it comes to electronics in their personal life:
1. Absolutely nothing smart that's not under their direct (or highly configurable) control.
2. Sure just take all my data I don't care. I'll pay subscriptions fees too.
Modern cars mostly do #2... to the point we potentially faced a subscription being required to enable seat warmers [0]. There's basically no cars on the market that do #1 anymore.
And with #2, you're bound by what the vehicle manufacturer decides. They are ending up like forced cable boxes - minimum viable product quality. They can be slow to change pages/views and finicky in touch responses... which I think are actually more dangerous... but this is our only option if this is the car we pick... and almost no one decides on a car for it's infotainment, so it's not a feature that gets much love or attention.
Additionally, technology moves too fast. My first car had a tape deck. The next one had a CD Player.. then I had to get an mp3-player-to-radio dongle, then I replaced my infotainment system with a bluetooth supporting one... and so on.. Even Android Auto (early versions) integrated directly into the infotainment system and needed potentially proprietary cables (USB-to-proprietary connector), and the systems did not look designed to be upgraded/replaced.
This model here allows you to upgrade your infotainment system every time you upgrade your phone (or dedicated tablet)... or simply by changing apps.
Also, Android Auto has mostly solved that UX issue (It's the same UX on a tablet as on an equivalent built-in infotainment system).. Though iPads probably (?) don't have a similar feature.
So I think the 'bring your own infotainment' idea is awesome.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23718101
It's not clear what they mean by "dedicated tablet". If it's an integrated add-on provided by the company that just does Android-Auto/CarPlay, then that seems OK. If it's just a holster for a tablet, not so much.
> It's exactly what I think a lot of techies want.
> Highly technical people tend to come in two varieties when it comes to electronics in their personal life:
I get it, I'm one of them. But using a tablet while driving is fundamentally dangerous to other people on the road, drivers or pedestrians. Android Auto and CarPlay are barely constrained enough to allow for distraction free driving.
I've lost hope that we're going back to days of people actually paying attention to the task of driving (even I take phone calls and play media while driving), but normalizing distraction by encouraging use of a tablet or phone seems like a public safety mistake, even if it appeals to the techie crowd.
option 3 might be go to cartoys and put whatever you want.
which would suit me just fine.
Not being built-in is significant. Infotainment systems tend to get outdated, and are also a common point of failure that can be expensive to fix, so not having the tablet hardwired in allows for people to choose their own setup and is also more future-proof.
> Infotainment systems tend to get outdated, and are also a common point of failure that can be expensive to fix
Android Auto and CarPlay solve that problem for navigation/communication/entertainment. The automakers aren't going to provide an open API to the vehicle control systems, for both competitive and safety reasons.
What would be nice is the old fashioned DIN interface, where you could install an aftermarket AA/CarPlay unit like this:
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/pioneer-10-1-hd-screen-luminous...
> Android Auto and CarPlay solve that problem for navigation/communication/entertainment.
I can definitely see a day where Apple or Google decide to discontinue support on vehicles older than 201x that lack some new hardware specification.
> Also, a regular tablet UX would be dangerous while driving, and typically they don't have their own mobile data connections.
I think it's still possible to run the Android Auto app (with its purpose-built interface) on a regular tablet.
Android Auto for Phones has been dead for a few years. That would be the app you'd use on an Android tablet.
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/android-auto-for-phones-i...
Also, these days AA can connect to the car's systems to do range estimations for its route suggestions and suggest charging on the routes. I'd hope whatever connectivity they do here includes sharing that data with the device in the cabin.
> Also, a regular tablet UX would be dangerous while driving
A passenger could operate it.
A passenger can do that today with just a tablet in their lap. Why attach it to the dashboard?
Oh, I maybe misread it - thought it meant you could plug your own tablet into the speaker system.
You can do that in any car today. Nor is there a lack of devices available for physically attaching a regular tablet to your dashboard.
The question is whether a car maker should be encouraging or enabling a generic touch screen tablet to be installed on the dashboard versus an infotainment device with constrained functionality like AA/CP designed to minimize driver distraction.
I would be happy with a built-in screen that did nothing but AA/CP while the car was driving, and then reverted to a normal tablet interface when the car is parked.
Climate control, etc should be physical knobs and buttons. Anything critical to driving should be on or near the steering wheel.
This sounds great. There are not any pictures of the interior but I hope it is also very simple and not full of difficult to reach nooks and crannies that are impossible to clean.
Love this! Would like to see a (manual) split rear window- super helpful for hauling longer things in a smaller truck. I put 10' conduit in my Ridgeline all the time.
Will this be street legal? Will it have airbags? If most of the car in injected molded plastics, what happens when it gets int a crash with a regular car?
It's embarrassing when people buy a truck and don't use it for work, towing or payload. So you bought a fuel-inefficient non-aerodynamic vehicle whose storage area is open to the air and unusable for passengers, and it's not big enough to carry or tow large items? What a smart choice.
However, with the SUV package and lift kit, this is actually useful. It's basically the same size (and payload and towing capacity) of the 2nd gen Scion xB. A boxy, roomy, small, cheap car. Absolutely useful and great. (Unlike a tiny truck.)
This is cool, but you can buy a 3 year old used model 3 right now for close to $25k that has 300+ mile range. The model 3 also has, wait for it, a/c and speakers…
How long is the bed of that pickup?
You mean this?
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-first-pickup-truck-is-a-diy-...
I don't want to drive Führer wagon.
wonder who is going to service that mod 3 if T. folds?
I'm not sure why I read this as a $20k guitar pickup...
I can't imagine the DIY minimalist crowd is terribly popular, or profitable... I wonder how long they will actually be able to stay in business.
I wonder if it would make financial sense to offer the "skeleton" of the car for sale and let design studios integrate all the pieces.
All those photos look fake / rendered. And they didn't even bother rendering an inside shot for a car that's all about the inside design choices.
Good point. Is this article designed to feel for demand of a possible product?
there is an interior rendering in the image slider in the article https://platform.theverge.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/202...
There are some photos that look real at the bottom of the Ars article.
go the next step, and offer box and wheel/tire deleet, lots of people will have or can get wheels/tires that will fit, if they use one of the popular size combos, and many would opt for a flat deck, or custom purpose box see if it can be squeezed down to 20k, taxes in delivered with no box, they can be stacked, piggy back, just the way commercial heavy trucks are stacked for delivery.....more per load, less trips
People say they, and many other Americans, want a cheap and simple truck. They're lying.
I know you don't believe me but it's true.
Automotive sales numbers are public information. Every single time a VIN is stamped into some metal, that record is public. The gradual decline in the sale of small, simple, cheap trucks is well documented.
People want full-sized trucks.
People say they love manual transmissions, too. They walk right past the manual Tacomas and Jeeps and buy an automatic.
People say they love station wagons. Then they go to the Volvo dealership and walk right past the V60 and buy an XC60.
People say they want a cheap car. Then they walk right past the base model Corolla and throw down $50k on a Rav4 Limited.
Only enthusiasts and weirdos like me will buy one of these.
A company whose audience is enthusiasts and weirdos must charge a shit-ton to stay in business. $20k isn't a shit-ton and if their strategy is to make up the difference on upgrades, they're not selling cheap trucks anymore.
I know what Americans, in aggregate, want. They want a big-ass SUV with heated and cooled seats with a screen that stretches across the entire god damned dash, 360 degree cameras, RGB mood lighting, 47 speakers, and second-row captain's chairs that make getting to the third row easy.
I own 3 cars, a Fiat 124 (MANUAL) Spider, a Volvo V70, and an Alfa Romeo Giulia.
But I am a weirdo, and because of this those companies are about to go extinct (in the US, at least).
I'm the guy that ran OS/2 and BeOS until the bitter end. I prefer writing software in Ada. I had a Saab.
I am literally and actually a subject matter expert on this shit.
I know what normal people want, and this ain't it. I know this because I want it.
When is the last time a car this cheap looked this good? Irresistible to weirdos like us.
> if their strategy is to make up the difference on upgrades, they're not selling cheap trucks anymore.
They are very explicit about not offering upgrades, and the benefit that has on simplifying manufacturing.
are you sure that people want "trucks" the size of tanks or is it that the US is now in an arms race focused on vehicle size? Could it be that reasonably sized vehicles are just not available?
The auto companies' argument about what consumers "want" is mostly nonsense.
Video review:
https://youtu.be/iVeYjxQPdz4?si=RU4gWmJk5WJHiac5
My prediction: this will cost $15K-$25K more before you ever have it in your driveway. Even with tariff and market uncertainties.
Please make a washing machine like that
I love the idea. Simple and elegant. Hopefully someone will make something similar in Europe
Okay, but is (was) this assuming on putting in Chinese batteries? If not, where are you going to get the cells and pack for that money?
Interesting, the options for customization is endless.
Oh good, an EV technical
A very rare thing with many kinds of hardware these days. Refreshing.
i hate trucks because they're big and trash up my neighborhood with their noise and size, just don't belong in the city. but since some neighbors have started driving electric (rivian, cybertruck), I tolerate them so so so much more. it's amazing how just making them electric has changed (and I hope, continues to change) the gestalt of my block.
It's a shame reasonably sized and reasonably priced imports are illegal. We could have much better vehicles for this price now.
All about the chicken
https://www.autoblog.com/news/why-the-chicken-tax-still-cont...
I think this is going to cater very well to contractors who do a lot of run-around in small area.
Electric cars make personalization so much easier, glad someone's doing this.
And it's a pickup truck that is an actual pickup truck.
> that is an actual pickup truck.
Which is its ultimate downfall, unfortunately. It being an actual pickup truck means that for all practical purposes you will also need a car, with all the additional headaches of owning more wheels to go along with it, and at its price point plus the price of a car you may as well buy one car with some truck-like features (i.e. the pretend pickup trucks that have become so popular).
I want exactly this, but with a hybrid engine, RWD, and a manual transmission. I would buy it new for $28k, no frills.
Seems a bit like a spiritual successor to the Jeep Cherokee XJ, which also has a very strong DIY community around it.
How much before incentives?
TFW just want cheap Hilux Champ.
> Instead of steel or aluminum, the Slate Truck’s body panels are molded of plastic.
Deal breaker. Plastic gets brittle with age.
depends on the plastic. Some do much better than others.
Replace it then?
That's really expensive, I'm actually in the process of replacing the plastic front and rear bumpers on my 1999 W210 Benz and just the plastic parts add up to over $1k before paint. Having a shop do the whole thing would probably cost $5k or more. I'd rather pay up front whatever it costs to have steel body panels than deal with plastic.
I thought the Verge only covered “what’s in the box.” This vehicle will not be $20k in the end.
If they make a sedan I would buy it in a heartbeat at those prices. A pickup or suv doesn’t work for me.
Ars Technica is also running something on this today as well. They must be paying their publicist a fair bit.
Yes, it is too much for consumers... Farmers might have no choice though if they want a new truck
Looks good. If it never beeps or dings or makes interior noises, I'm in.
I'd buy this immediately and just paint it myself. This care looks perfect for modding.
Aren't backup cameras mandated in the US now? How do you have a background camera with no screen?
Edit I see the issue. The actual title say no touch screen. The OP altered the title to just say screen for some unexplainable reason.
Maybe this title should be fixed?
Answer's in the article. There is a screen behind the wheel for the speedometer, odometer, etc. The backup cam displays there.
Right, I edited my comment. The OP just posted a pretty misleading title saying there was no screen at all.
Feels kinda like an American kei truck, maybe it'll catch on.
So incredibly refreshing after the abomination that is the telos was announced
They are targeting 5-stars safety rating, but we don't know if they manage to achieve it.
They could get the price down to $18.5k by omitting the steering assemblage.
Who is going to pay 20K for an oversized RC car? Youtubers?
Seems genius, hope this catches on
This is not real.
This will be real when you can go to some place, pay $20k and drive out with such thing.
If you're into car CGI, this is a much more enjoyable resource [1]!
1: https://www.behance.net/search/projects/Car%20Render
Cybertruck was such a miss.
> a sub-$20,000 (after federal incentives) electric vehicle
Buried the lede, didn't we?
No stereo is a bridge too far.
yeah I agree, afraid it doesn't have a/c either
should cost like nothing to add simple stereo system with a couple speakers
All the images look like renderings. Is the car actually in production?
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/04/amazon-backed-startup-w...
This has launch event photos that claim to be of prototypes.
I hope they succeed, this is a great idea. I’d love something like this.
people when a tesla doesnt have a knob: “outrageous. there couldnt be any benefit to that!” people when this car has no paint or speakers: “… take my money.”
Hand crank windows is a weird choice, are the locks manual as well?
In a 2-door vehicle, you can just lean over and roll up the window and toggle the lock on the other door. If you've ever had an old car then you'll know the annoyance of a broken electrical motor.
Never mind the additional range anxiety: rolling your windows up or down with a motor might shave a mile or so off your range.
I've never had an issue with electric windows, or even know anyone who has
Was that more of a problem on older cars?
This is a plus, in my book. The fewer crappy electrical gizmos the better. I had the same question, hope the locks are manual with no keyless entry or hackable key fob.
Why the downvotes on this comment? If you're not sufficiently curmudgeonly to sympathize with this sentiment, there's lots of other cars for you. I'm sure you can find a subaru outback with a built in purple hair dyer or whatever you want.
Wouldn't it significantly increase the cost (think wiring, motor, assembly, etc) to have "power windows"?
Power window "regulators" (the unit that holds and raises/lowers the window) are usually similar in price and weight to cranked manual window assemblies, and can be cheaper. A small motor is not at all expensive and is a less specialized item than a window crank handle and gear unit.
What could save money is not needing to run any wiring whatsoever into the door - if the doors can be made with no speakers, lighting, crash sensors, switches, power locks, or power windows, then the assembly becomes significantly simpler and therefore cheaper since there's no wiring harness to fish (usually a manual production step), no holes and grommets, etc.
But if power windows are going to be an option, I'm not sure how this plays out. Do the power windows come with a wiring harness that requires the user disassemble the interior and fish the wiring? If it comes pre-wired, then the choice for manual windows is actually quite strange and possibly more expensive.
That's why I'm wondering if locks are manual as well. If there's no wiring at all going into the doors then presumably the doors will be cheap. But if they have power going in for locks already, power windows shouldn't be a costly addon.
I think automatic door locks are a US requirement for crash safety.
Lots of trucks are still for work, but they have gotten so expensive more people than ever are considering them as luxury purchases.
Electric windows have been a luxury item for generations.
Traditionally, with an F-150, they were just much slower, prone to failure and expensive to replace.
Especially if you often go in & out from a gated area where you have to roll your window down every time and use your pass or talk to the guard :\
Or roll them all down whenever it has been parked in the hot sun, to quickly let out the overheated air before the air conditioner can become very effective. If you have A/C, or even use it at all :)
Window motors may not last much longer than a set of tires then, and cost as much to replace, often without warning. You're supposed to be able to afford it anyway.
However in the late 1990's the manual knob was moved to a stupid place, and it became impossible to lower the window in one quick second any more.
I can only imagine that the automotive engineers were constantly being bathed in the luxury of their environment and never even put enough test vehicles having no options through any kind of ergonomic comparison.
For the longest time these kind of things were built to provide an extreme amount of comfort for someone having a similar stature to Henry Ford. Almost lasted the entire 20th century before there was such great discontinuity.
Engineers probably didn't test drive any having manual seat adjustment, on long trips either. Otherwise they would have done better than to have an adjustment bar blocking the entire area under the driver's seat in such a way that about 25% of the footroom was lost, which was formerly available as you occasionally adjust your posture for endurance.
It was like expensive sportscar people started designing trucks. You don't sit upright in a sports car so the space is not wasted there. No more twin I-beam front suspension either, you didn't really want a truck that tough any more in the 21st century did you?
They didn't know any better. At least they once did.
And who doesn't like luxury?
Automatic locks is another one, once very seldom seen except in things like Cadillacs. That's why people envied them so much for decades, and when they finally came within reach of the mainstream they flew off the shelf.
The things like window buttons, remote keyfobs or radio units will have higher margin when sold individually, allowing to lower the base model price.
please, god, let this thing make it to production in the US!
Make it a combustion engine and I'm sold
The question is... how many farmers / ranchers need these pickups? There seems to be like an absolutely crazy competition for vehicles for a very narrow group of people.
Who will be buying all of these pickup trucks?
Anybody know the safety of these vs typical trucks?
too many comments here to read them all
but, MMW, i think they will sell every single unit made
basic truck + freedom of customization will be very popular in the USA
Can we do this for combustion cars too please!
What are downsides of "no paint"?
Love this. Definitely getting on the list.
Is there anything like this in EU?
> "Extremely affordable"
> $20,000
I want this with an ice engine.
These are going to rust out fast in higher latitudes. You'd think Michiganders would know better.
No electronics in an EV, nahhhh
Isn't this sort of thing illegal as a new vehicle in US markets because of those backup camera laws?
it has a backup camera.
A mandatory part of today’s safety features is a digital rear-view camera. Typically, this view pops up on a modern car’s central infotainment screen, but the Slate doesn’t have one of those. It makes do with just a small display behind the steering wheel as a gauge cluster, which is where that rearview camera will feed.
I missed that, thank you.
Hold on, isn't backup cameras mandated for vehicles sold after May 2018?
The $20K is after incentives, so it's actually $27,500. That still compares favorably to Ford's closest offering, the F-150 PRO, which is $54,999 (pre incentives):
https://www.fordpro.com/en-us/fleet-vehicles/f150-lightning/
The Ford comes standard with the same range as the upgraded Slate, though. The slate can tow 1000lbs, and hold 1,433 lbs, vs the Ford's standard 5000 / 2235, respectively (you can upgrade the range and towing capacity on the ford):
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a64564869/2027-slate-truck...
Not including a bluetooth capable am/fm radio / speakerphone on a fleet vehicle seems dumb. This cut what, $100?
I can easily see Ford cutting $10K off the cost of the Pro. It looks like it has power windows, and it definitely has an infotainment system. Also, the two row cab adds lots of weight + cost and makes the bed smaller.
Anyway, competition is good. Hopefully slate will make something with an upgraded suspension / power train for $10K more, and maybe eventually a larger one with ford-compatible conversion mounts (for custom work trucks, etc.)
It's meaningless to compare a small city truck to something like a full-sized truck, they are totally different classes of vehicle. I get that ford doesn't make a small electric vehicle, but that doesn't make the lightning the "closest offering".
A more reasonable comparison is probably the hybrid Maverick, which appears to be popular (at least around here), has 4 doors and actual features, and starts at around $25k.
>and starts at around $25k
I don't think you can actually buy one for that. They were tacking on an extra 10k as soon as they came out and eventually just moved the price up by like $5k and they still generally sell for higher than that.
Is there another EV offering that's closer and available in the US?
>Is there another EV offering that's closer and available in the US?
No, that's the point, it's filling a niche that basically nothing else does right now. The closest alternative would be a small electric car paired with a small utility trailer. Something like a Nissan Leaf and one of those $500 trailers from harbor freight. Which added up and with discounts probably costs fairly similar to this.
this is cool but does it meet strong safety standards?
"strong safety standards" are what got us to the point of 5000lb pickup trucks and A-pillars that are so wide they arguably kill more people (predominantly pedestrians & cyclists) than their constituent airbags save.
It is cartoon villain tier to compromise the visual range of the driver at the safety expense of everyone outside the vehicle, who is not shielded by 2 tons of mass.
Much of what is wrong with automobiles is a severe inability to think in higher order terms.
I wish them the absolute best. Make trucks trucks again.
Great concept. Bring back real small trucks. My grandpa ran a farm with a truck this size.
Disappointed in towing capacity of 1000 pounds ish. I can already do 1700lb on my hybrid rav4
I love it, now give me a gas engine so I can take it on weeklong off-road camping trips
I want a generator hookup in the bed. A 5kw generator will get me all day and then when I'm done for the day charge the battery and provide me other generator benefits.
this seems so funny to me like "hey you want to buy something worse"
I'm talking specifically about the no stereo/screen
"but is this extreme simplification too much for American consumers?"
No, it's not. This American consumer says bring on the simplicity. Also like that this is not some monster sized thing.
I think many consumers want a simpler "dumb" car, just look at sales of the 5th generation 4Runner. That car came out originally in 2010 and they sold it through 2023 with barely any upgrades and their best sales years were all in the 2020's.
Lots of people say it's because offroading got popular but I think it's also because that car was "dumb" compared to more recent offerings. And personally as an owner of a 4th generation 4Runner, one of the things I like most about is that it's "dumb".
I want one.
so, an actual cybertruck
I hate this, I need a screen and stereo in my car.
Seriously, who wants to be in a modern car without music, and who wants to travel without Google maps.
Use your mobile device.
Will believe it when I see it unfortunately looks like very early stages
Do youngs know how to use manual windows? LOL
They show off that fancy feature to their friends. the first kids I saw doing this are now getting their phd.
OK now do a small hatchback.
And the worst thing is that Elon could've been a living legend by building/funding colleges and schools focused on the tech his companies need, software development, robotics etc. Or even given out million dollar scholarships for the very top students.
And he still would've been worth over 250 billion easily.
Instead he chose to buy the president and start "optimising" the government with AI.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43801711 and marked it offtopic (because it turned into a generic thread that has nothing to do with the topic that was being discussed in the parent comments).
There's a question about his actual goals in government.
He's an ambitious person. And AI enables a degree of surveillance state that we find it difficult to even begin to imagine. All the logistical difficulties of something like Orwell's 1984, of the Stasi having 1/3 of Berlin on the books as informants against the other 2/3, go away completely. We have more cameras than ever. Every person gets to enjoy the kind of focus that went into tracking down Luigi. DOGE has exfiltrated all our sensitive databases to servers that they control; Every 'Chinese Wall' intended to ensure some kind of separation of concerns has been broken down, almost certainly including various formally classified intelligence-gathering campaigns. You can't necessarily stuff that genie back in the bottle. If somebody wanted to be... not president, but authoritarian leader of a post-democracy, Musk would be well positioned technologically.
It wouldn't be inconceivable to set up an AI to do all the same sort of fraud & identity theft attacks against an individual that for-profit blackhats do, or that a Kiwifarms harassment campaign can do, without much of any actual staffing. Only DOGE starts out with your social security number, your tax records, your drivers' license, license plate reader records, web history, everything. That individual could be a Wall Street Journal editor who wrote something Musk dislikes, or ten thousand Redditors who are making fun of Teslas.
If somebody wanted to be... not president, but authoritarian leader of a post-democracy, Musk would be well positioned technologically.
of course, that was his very explicit goal. Thiel backed Curtis Yarvin, who came up for the plan for this and called it RAGE. google it, it's all written down. they hoped to put in Bezos or Zuckerberg and have a more efficiently-run dictatorship replacing our democracy. because they didn't understand politics, they got the ketamine addict instead, who renamed RAGE to DOGE so he could also use it to power a crypto pump-and-dump.
*edit: and because it was never a realistic plan. because they didn't understand politics
> And the worst thing is that Elon could've been a living legend by building/funding colleges and schools focused on the tech his companies need, software development, robotics etc.
Could he, though?
I mean, he might have the cash, but if you look at his history you don't see that much interest or respect for basic academic principles, or even any basic academic achievement whatsoever.
He conveys an image of someone who is mentally trapped in prepubescence, and who repeatedly does things that a prepubescent kid does to try to gather admiration. I meant who desperately tries to pass themselves off as elite gamers? How long will it take until he moves on to DJing? That's not someone who has any interest in founding education institutions.
The man does have an army of terminally online sycophants, which I now wonder whether they are astroturfed.
I think the point is he could if he was a different person.
> I think the point is he could if he was a different person.
That statement is pointless. The critical factor is not money, it's willingness. You do not even need to be the world's richest man to put together a school. There are pro athletes with a fraction of the wealth that already do meaningful investments in education.
He has two degrees. BA in Physics and BSc in Economics
> He has two degrees. BA in Physics and BSc in Economics
You should verify your claims
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/musk-physics-degree/
From the article:
> Musk's past statements about his educational background, however, have been, at best, imprecise. He has claimed on several occasions to have received a physics degree in 1995 — a claim that was never fully true but which may have aided Musk's early business career.
The Snopes article confirms the comment you're replying to. The sentence you left out, before your quote:
> The University of Pennsylvania considers Musk to be a graduate of both the economics department and the physics department.
And right above that, from the University of Pennsylvania:
> Elon Musk earned a B.A. in physics and a B.S. in economics (concentrations: finance and entrepreneurial management) from the University of Pennsylvania. The degrees were awarded on May 19, 1997.
>Does Elon Musk Have an Undergraduate Degree in Physics?
>Rating: True
>Musk has on previous occasions claimed he received this degree in 1995, but the University of Pennsylvania says it was awarded in 1997.
What was the point of your comment?
Elon has proven to truly be the dumbest smart guy ever. He alienated Tesla’s core customers; tree hugging liberals, and anyone who cares about sustainability. The GOP nor their voters care and never will. I called this Tesla stock crash months ago; did not act on it though.
One interesting thing is that he seems completely unaware that he is the problem. Stepping back from DOGE to focus on Tesla again. He thinks that him getting closer to Tesla will help save the brand, when it's exactly his association with it that caused the damage in the first place.
The best thing he could do for Tesla would be to step aside.
> I called this Tesla stock crash months ago
TSLA is currently up 5% MoM despite really, really horrible earnings and outlook. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent sometimes.
I don't think stock prices matter as much to him (everybody knows there are lots of expectations baked in the price).
Nor do I, I'm sure he's aware it's propped up on nothing but fumes and vibes. I was just commenting on OP wishing they had shorted TSLA months ago. Easy to say in hindsight, is all.
I think less people care about it politically than you think. Most people I know who have Teslas stand by the product even through Elon’s dumb shit.
I think people care more about their own convenience. There’s nothing else in our market that’s even comparable. People talk a lot of shit and it wasn’t great to start but FSD is on a different level now, especially on newer cars like the new Model Y. Having a car that mostly drives itself is the best purchase I’ve ever made.
It doesn’t seem to be slowing down sales in Seattle. New Model Ys are everywhere here.
Tesla once again tells its own CEO Elon Musk to knock it off with the politics - https://electrek.co/2025/04/22/tesla-once-again-tells-ceo-el... - April 22nd, 2025
67% of Americans would not consider buying a Tesla, new poll says - https://electrek.co/2025/03/28/most-americans-would-not-cons... - March 28th, 2025
Tesla sales fall by 49% in Europe even as the electric vehicle market grows - https://apnews.com/article/tesla-sales-recall-trump-byd-b6f5... - March 25, 2025
Tesla is done in Germany: 94% say they won’t buy a Tesla car - https://electrek.co/2025/03/14/tesla-is-done-in-germany-94-s... - March 14th, 2025
Australian Tesla sales plummet as owners rush to distance themselves from Elon Musk -https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/06/australia... - March 6th, 2025
(own several Teslas, won't buy another)
Having a car that mostly drives itself is the best purchase I’ve ever made.
ok, you can get that with a Hyundai though.
higher-quality, too, yet the Tesla costs more.
This anecdote doesn’t match the data.
It is definitely slowing demand. You can see it in the Q1 numbers and the discounts on vehicles.
You can ask anyone who buys used EVs in Seattle. There is a glut of Tesla sellers and not many buyers.
Like it or not, your car says a lot about you. People bought Teslas because they liked what they said and now they are avoiding them because they don’t like it.
[flagged]
Please don't comment like this on Hacker News. It breaks the guidelines badly. Please review them and keep to them in future:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Apologies for my shitty comment; too much doom scrolling and too much crappy 30 year old hiphop. And apologies for writing something that sparked more than a dozen child comments full of divisive crap. Looking back i wasn't really doing the HN comment vibe I'd like to see myself, indeed...
Many thanks for the reply.
He was smart. Then he started using drugs. Since then, he's made a lot of mistakes. It's pretty simple.
The fact that so many "climate activists" and environmentalists turned on him confirms my suspicion that they didn't think so highly about the earth or climate change in the first place. They care about partisan politics and their tribe more than the planet.
Be wary of confirmation bias. I don’t find it unlikely at all that Tesla owners have sincere environmental goals that could be overshadowed by other concerns. Let’s afford each other the grace of being rational expected utility maximizers.
He spent hundreds of millions to get Trump elected, so that now the EPA is gutted, the closing of coal plants has been halted, and federal lands are set to be drilled and mined into oblivion. This is what climate activists correctly opposed and continue to oppose in opposing Musk.
He made cars that people actually like, that don't emit any CO2. But he doesn't signal from the right tribe, so everything he's done is worthless.
Sorry if you cure someone of cancer, then shoot them in the head, you lose credit for the first part
I think we would’ve lived in a different world if Elon didn’t use twitter. We might have actually landed on Mars already.
Twitter board should have allowed him to back out of the deal when he asked.
what is the point of this?
a used car for 10k does more, costs less, and has a lower carbon footprint.
Customization, no previous owner that you have no idea how they took care of the vehicle, less chance of complications and expensive fixes, warranty, it's a new pickup that doesn't cost $50k+, etc.
> and has a lower carbon footprint
No it doesn't. An electric vehicle takes < 18 months to become carbon negative. Nobody buys a used car expecting it to last than 18 months. If it does, replacing your car every 18 months is not carbon friendly.
With all those missing of basic features why is it still 20k and not 10k?
>With all those missing of basic features why is it still 20k and not 10k?
Because you can't sell a car for 10k in the US without losing money.
I never bought a car for more than 10k. Seems like a huge waste of money.
We're talking about new cars not used ones. Wait a few years and you'll be able to get one of these for 10k too. It makes no sense to discuss used car prices when talking about how much a new one costs.
... are you complaining that the price of a new vehicle is higher than the price of a used vehicle?
I like it but minimalism always fails for complex products because everyone wants a different 80% of the features cut. You can already see it in the comments haha.
I don't know what laws need to change, or what needs to happen, but for the people in the southern united states, nearly every one of us would be a reasonably priced gas truck. There are no options. I had to buy a grossly overpriced F150 for double what I think it's worth because there's no other option. These fuel economy laws in the USA make no sense. While this truck is neat I guess, there's 0 use case for it for people who really need trucks in the USA.