Slate Auto

[00:00:21] Hello everyone and welcome to Kilowatt, a podcast about electric vehicles, renewable energy, autonomous driving, and much, much more. My name is Bodhi and I am your host and today we are going to talk news. There's not a lot of news stories as of late that aren't politically, that aren't political in some way or another, or in some cases just, in my opinion, out and out unfair. So I have a few news stories. We're going to talk about Slate Auto, but before we do that, I want to take a look at the news story.

[00:00:51] I want to take a moment and thank Bart Bouchotts for becoming our latest patron over at patreon.com forward slash Kilowatt. Y'all know Bart, he hosts Let's Talk Apple, Let's Talk Photography. He and Allison Sheridan do the Security Bits segment on the NoCillaCast. So Bart's a sweetheart of a human being. I consider him a friend and it was really nice of him to sign up and support the show.

[00:01:19] Honestly, Bart contributes so much to the show outside of money. That's plenty, but thank you, Bart, for doing that. And I messaged him as well, just letting him know how much I appreciate his support. All right. Now, before we jump into our news segment, I do want to give a shout out again to James over at True North EVs because he is killing it with the interviews right now.

[00:01:46] On James's latest episode of True North EVs, he sat down with Robert McGregor, who is a broadcaster and currently a representative for Winnipeg Hyundai. James does a really good job in this interview, so please, please, please go check it out. I'll put a link in the show notes. You know what? Neither Bart or James asked me to plug their podcast on this episode, but I do like sharing what other people in our kilowatt community, I like sharing what they're doing.

[00:02:16] So if you are doing something that's EV, renewable energy related, and you'd like me to shout it out on one of the episodes, shoot me an email. As long as it's related and, you know, it's not illegal, I'm more than happy to do that, or moral or illegal. I'm more than happy to do that. So you can email me. It's Bodie, B-O-D-I-E at 918digital.com. All right, let's jump into our news. And again, I got three news stories for you here. It's not a lot of news today.

[00:02:46] First up, CATL, the battery maker from China, they have a new next generation battery that will allow you to recharge 323 miles back into your battery or 520 kilometers in about five minutes. Now, if you remember, we talked a couple of weeks ago where BYD had a new next gen battery that allowed you to put 250 miles in in five minutes.

[00:03:12] So CATL's 323 is pretty impressive. The battery is slated to be installed into 67 different EV models this year. So they're rolling this out quickly. CATL is also working on a sodium ion battery that will go into mass production this December. And the thing about sodium ion batteries is they're slightly less dense than the LFP batteries.

[00:03:40] They're cheaper to produce and they have a little bit more improved safety. So I like seeing all of that. I like seeing battery technology pushed forward. And this is definitely something cool. Right now, they have two battery sizes of the sodium ion batteries that they're planning on releasing. One, I don't remember what the sizes are, and maybe it wasn't even in the article because I didn't write it down. But one will get you about 200 kilometers or 124 miles.

[00:04:08] And that's specifically for hybrid vehicles. And the other one is for full battery electric vehicles, which will get you 500 kilometers or 310 miles. So pretty cool stuff what CATL is working on. And they announced some other things too, but these are the things that I think are most relevant to what's going on in the EV industry right now. Nothing too far out. All right. Let's get to our second.

[00:04:38] You know what? I'm going to skip down to our Tesla story and then I'll get to our main story. Okay. I've talked about this recently, I think. I think I talked about it on Tesla's earnings call where a California Tesla owner filed a lawsuit against Tesla, alleging that Tesla manipulated the odometer in his car to shorten his warranty. So this person bought a Model Y with a round. It was used 37,000 miles on it.

[00:05:06] Within six months, the car had over 50,000 miles. So that's a significant amount of driving. Most people only drive about 10,000 to 12,000 miles a year. So to put that many miles in your car in six months seems like a lot. The owner claims that he did not drive 13,000 miles in that time period. As a matter of fact, the owner got a new job or he got moved. Anyway, he had a longer commute than he had in the previous six months.

[00:05:35] And he put 800 miles, 800 fewer miles on the car during another six month period with the longer commute. So he's saying he's calling shenanigans. The suit seeks to include all California Tesla owners. So it's a class action lawsuit.

[00:05:56] If this were true, and I'm not saying it's not, but if this were true, it does seem to me like other people would be saying it before this guy did. Now, again, it is always possible. But to me, it seems like somebody else would have caught on to this, number one. Number two, engineers, you know, there's definitely, you know, engineers are human. There's probably some irreputable ones out there.

[00:06:25] But I don't think an engineer would, in good conscience, code something that was dishonest. You know, not to say that some wouldn't. I'm just saying Tesla has a large engineering team. And if somebody felt uncomfortable about that, it would probably get out that that was happening. And that leak would come from the engineering team. But having said that, I do think that these allegations should be investigated.

[00:06:54] And, you know, if Tesla's innocent, then they're innocent. And if they're not, then they are, let's just say it doesn't go, it doesn't help their brand image, if this is true. That leads us to our final story. I know this is going really fast. There's a new EV startup that we talked about a few weeks ago called Slate Auto. And they just showed off their Slate pickup truck. And I believe it's just called the model is just truck.

[00:07:24] They showed it off a few hours ago. Well, a few hours ago when I wrote these notes. That's so stupid. I shouldn't have said that. Anyway, this looks to me like a 1990s Ford Ranger pickup truck. If the Ranger was modular. And if you're a real nerd, think of the Framework laptop, which is a modular laptop that you can just kind of swap out parts. And you don't have to upgrade the whole laptop if you want to just upgrade the hard drive. It's super easy. You just swap that out, right?

[00:07:54] Same thing. The whole idea of the Slate is that it is a blank slate. You can customize it however you want, right down to the AC controls. If you want to turn it into an SUV with a bench seat in the back, no problem. You can do that. Actually, on Friday, last Friday, I was on Daily Tech News Show Briefing and I was talking to Tom Merritt about this.

[00:08:18] And the example that I used is if you're, let's say, you graduate college, you buy yourself a new slate pickup truck. And then you meet somebody, you fall in love and you decide to have a baby, right? The slate pickup truck is only a two-seater, right? That's not very practical if you have a family. But what you can do is you can convert that truck to an SUV.

[00:08:47] So you can mount the seats yourself. You can put the cover over the back of the pickup truck yourself. All the slate EV is designed for you to replace all these parts. As a matter of fact, it's also designed so if there are warranty repairs that need to be done, it's easy enough for you to just swap that part out and plug in the new one. So it's a really cool concept.

[00:09:12] Now, the slate comes in this, like, plain slate gray body. It's a composite body. It looks like it's similar to the old Saturn cars, if you remember Saturns. I had a Saturn. I love that car. But instead of painting it, right, they are using these pre-cut wraps that you can get from the company. So you can either have the company wrap your truck before you get it or you can install the wrap yourself.

[00:09:42] And slate says that they make it super easy for you to wrap the pickup truck. So that's really cool. So if you're going through a purple phase, you can have a purple truck. And then the next year you go through an orange phase, all you got to do is take that wrap off, put the new wrap on. It's super easy. So I love that about the slate. I mentioned the warranty repairs. The interior is sparse.

[00:10:08] You know, there's no built-in infotainment screen, right? You have the speedometer controls, which is digital behind the steering wheel. So you have the instrument panel. But then there's no infotainment stuff. So you can use your iPhone, your iPad, I guess your phone, I shouldn't say iPhone, your phone or a tablet that you can mount in the truck. And you can tap into the truck's system that way.

[00:10:38] But there's nothing. It doesn't come with anything. There are mounting brackets you can buy. And that's it. Like if you want it, great. If you don't, great. You don't have to have it. It also doesn't have any speakers. So you can mount, there's a very, very, there's various ways for you to mount like a Bluetooth speaker in there. And it looks like Slate is going to be selling that as well.

[00:11:02] So, again, this is just a, this is a great car for somebody who is just starting out, right? And they need an affordable vehicle that they can upgrade over time and kind of customize the way they want it. But this is also a great car for anybody who loves modding and just kind of tinkering with their vehicle. So the customization choices are pretty vast. Like you can go to slate.auto, which is their website, and they have a configurator. And there is a lot of different ways to configure this vehicle.

[00:11:32] Now let's get to the specs. There's no, as you can imagine, the no frills pickup truck. There's no autonomous driving features for this vehicle. You basically have cruise control. You have a four by five foot bed. So it's about the same size as the Rivian R1T. You have a frunk. That's actually a really good size frunk. It fits two carry-on bags.

[00:11:56] And the reason why you have this nice, big, deep frunk is because it's rear wheel drive only. So there's no motor up in the front, only in the back. So you get this nice, deep frunk. If all wheel drive or front wheel drive is important to you, this isn't the vehicle for you. Something that I found interesting, and I actually held off on reporting this. Like I thought about doing a show on Friday to talk about the truck, but I figured we'd get some more details. And we did.

[00:12:25] Not a lot more, but I figured we'd get a little bit more details about the vehicle. There are two battery options. Both are using nickel, manganese, cobalt battery chemistries. The reason why is because their supplier, SKON, manufactures these cells in the United States, which allows them to qualify for the federal tax credit. And the NMC cells are actually more energy dense.

[00:12:51] Now, a representative from Slate did say that the 52.7 kilowatt hour battery could pretty easily be done with the LFP cells, which gives you about 150 miles of range. But the larger battery pack of 84.3 kilowatt hours gets you around 240 miles of range. Now, I think those numbers are a little low based on the size of the battery packs, right?

[00:13:21] I have a Model Y long range. And, you know, my official range is about 318 miles. My reality is I'm closer to 250 miles with a full charge, 230 without. I think that's pretty close. And what may be happening here is Slate maybe just be like, you know what?

[00:13:49] We're going to report actual range instead of this very strange. Yeah, you could get 320 miles, but you don't ever really get that. But so, yeah, it's an interesting tactic. They're being honest, I guess. The vehicle is going to come with an NACS port, which is great because we should be able to use the supercharger network. Charging speed, though, not so great. It's 120 kilowatts max charging speed.

[00:14:18] So that'll get you around 10 or 15 percent to 80 percent in about 30 minutes. And then level two charging, it's five hours and 20 minutes to go from a low percentage. I can't remember what the percentage was to full. As far as payload, this vehicle has a payload of 1400 pounds. It'll tow a thousand pounds, zero to 60 in eight seconds. And the top speed is 90 miles an hour. Estimated starting price for this vehicle. And this is just the truck.

[00:14:48] No additional stuff. And Slate doesn't have any pricing as of right now for all of the accessories that you can buy for this truck. But right now we're looking at $25,000. But it does qualify for the $7,500 federal tax credit here in the U.S., which drops that price under $20,000. Production is expected to start in 2026. You can reserve one for as little as $50. Like I said, Slate has the configurator up on their website, which is slate.auto.

[00:15:18] And there are a lot of different options. Here's the thing that concerns me about Slate. And it isn't the fact that they're an EV startup because it's rumored that Jeff Bezos is an investor. There's a bunch of Amazon employees that work there. There's a bunch of employees who are auto veterans that work there. So the company itself seems solid. You know, I don't know how much money they have, but they don't seem like they're...

[00:15:47] It doesn't seem like they're going to waste away. Like they're not making some bizarre $180,000 car that only a few people are going to be interested in. And, you know, they're going to sell three of them in a year. That's not what they're doing here. They're going to make an easy-to-build mass production. A lot of the parts for the vehicle are off-the-shelf parts. It's not even customized stuff. So, yeah. And you know what? Here's the other thing.

[00:16:14] If this vehicle is, in fact, if Jeff Bezos did, in fact, invest in this vehicle, I would not be surprised if you... When you bought the vehicle, because Amazon has their car initiative, right? Car sales. And I'm just thinking of this right now. Amazon has their car sales on their website. They also have auto parts. So, it makes sense that you could buy the car on Amazon, if this is true. Buy the car on Amazon.

[00:16:44] Buy all of the accessories that you need also on Amazon. And have it to your house in a few days. Now that I'm thinking about this, I mean, they have distribution through the Amazon warehouse. Yeah. You wouldn't even have to... Like, you might even just be able to have somebody from Amazon drive it to your house. Anyway. That... That is interesting. I don't know if it's going to be true. But here's the thing that concerns me.

[00:17:11] And it's concerning me less now that I'm thinking about it. You have to manufacture all of these customizable parts, these accessories, right? Like, if you want to wrap the rear of the truck, right? The rear quarter panel on the right side is going to have, like, a part number. And you get the wrap specifically for that part number. So it's a very... These are very specific to this truck. It can't be used for something else or someone else.

[00:17:41] So you have to buy those. You have to store them. And you have to pay for them to be manufactured and then ship them. But now that I'm thinking about this Amazon thing, maybe it's not that big of a deal. Well, I'll have to... I'm going to have to rethink my whole thing. I had a whole paragraph full of notes on this. But if it's... If Amazon's distributing your parts, that becomes a lot less of a burden. Anyway. I'm going to think about this. But... Anyway.

[00:18:11] Just like any new EV startup, there's a chance that it will go away. You know, we have Canoe, who had an interesting idea. Fisker, who had an interesting idea and an amazing product. Nikola, the semi-truck company. They had a lot. You know, they kind of shifted focus a couple of different times. And, you know, their CEO and founder, Trevor Melton, didn't help them out in the early days.

[00:18:38] But I think there's a really good chance that Slate is going to do something cool here. And I'm looking forward to seeing what they get up to. All right, everybody. That is it for me on this episode. Things are lightening up for me, folks. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. I thought the end of the tunnel was Sunday, last Sunday. But the end of the tunnel ends up being March 4th. So I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

[00:19:06] I'm looking forward to getting back to doing shows regularly. Again, thanks, everybody, for all of your assistance. Thanks again to Bart for becoming a Patreon supporter. And you know what? Go listen to James's podcast, True North EVs. Again, I'll put links in the show notes for that. All right, everybody. That is it for me today. I hate to say that I'll talk to you on Friday because goodness only knows if I'm going to or not.

[00:19:36] But I'm going to do my best to talk to you on Friday. I hope you all had a really good weekend. And I will talk to you soon.