Swing and a miss, Run for your life, Taking another leap
Last night I had to come back to the office to meet a vendor to install a new internet circuit. Things did not go well and they were unable to complete the work because of some poor planning, from what I could ascertain. I brought Elsa with as she loves going to the office. She gave the installer a thorough sniff down. Elsa was also involved in a funny incident when I got home.
I normally take her for her walk as soon as I walk in the door. At the end of the walk when we are right across the street from my house I will let her off the leash so she can run back into the garage which I did once again last night. Well there was an Amazon truck out front making a delivery. At that time it seemed like the driver was still in the back of the truck. So the guy, a young Haitian kid emerges from the van as Elsa is in the garage. Elsa sees the guy and turns around and barks once. An instant look of fear flashes onto his face and he RUNS back to his truck. I assured him she is harmless and I tell her to go inside. I can only assume he has had too many run ins with dogs whose bite is as bad as their bark.
The other day a friend of mine sent me a link regarding the launch of another electric car company, Slate. Well to be accurate it’s an electric TRUCK company. Slate is taking a very different approach to building a vehicle. Instead of ballooning costs by including all sorts of tech and features into their truck they make ONE model and then offer a TON of ways you can tweak it as desired. All of the pictures you see are the same truck just with different accessories added.
It’s base form is a two door pickup truck but you can actually convert it to a 5 person small SUV if that better suits your needs. The best part is if you are somewhat handy you can do all of these things yourself. The truck is designed to be user maintained which is almost non-existent nowadays. This concept is cool of course but the most attention getting thing is the potential price. If federal EV incentives remain in place the cost of the vehicle would be just under $20,000, an absolute bargain in today’s market where the average new vehicle price is 50K.
The truck is intentionally no frills, manual roll up windows are standard equipment. But all the basics you need are there and you can dress it up right up front or down the road if you want to. I LOVE the concept. However I have been down this road before. You may recall I was an early Elio supporter, plunking down $100 to reserve one over a decade ago. That was a three wheeled vehicle that looked like a great commuter at the time. That company lead people on for years and never came to market despite repeated promises to be right around the corner.
I also plunked down a deposit on the Cybertruck when it was first announced. At the time I was caught up in the excitement, ignoring the reality that it’s design made a lot of basic truck things inconvenient. When it finally came to market 62% higher than it’s initial projected price I had no problem saying no thanks.
The Slate is projected to begin production 4th quarter 2026. As good as it looks I know the reality is launching a new vehicle company is extremely difficult and there is a good chance it could fail. Despite this knowledge I plunked down a $50 deposit to put myself in line, a small price to roll the dice IMO. I am pulling for Slate to come to reality, I like their middle finger approach to conventional auto makers that love to inflate prices any way they can. During the Slate presentation they said since 2000 the average price of new cars has doubled. It would be nice to be able to step back in time and get a new electric truck with pricing from 25 years ago. We will see.