“We took out everything that isn't a car”. Those are the words of Chris Barman, Slate Auto’s CEO, from their debut video commercial.
You can be passionate about cars, design and mechanics. And you can also be concerned about climate, sustainability. You might’ve been reading Morgan Housel in an effort to optimize your financial habits, but mostly, you’ve just come to a moment in life where spending money on things that don't gain value, are ridiculously expensive, depreciate, and are containers of digital and technology waste is almost painful.
Full disclosure: I have an almost DNA-programed passion for cars-specifically, high-manufacture cars-but today, that passion is fading. It remains alive within the classic car spectrum, because those are the ones that make your heart race, those gain value over time, those are beautiful, simple, analogue and long lasting if used frequently.
Today’s cars have doubled in price in the last decade and are also less reliable and more expensive to maintain due to electronics, plastic dependency and “technology”. This is interesting as a consumerism phenomenon, as a colateral effect from the smartphone dependency era. We’ve been asking for smartphones on wheels, apparently, and the market has delivered. It’s also a red flag in the measurement of activity and movement, cognitive demand (that is less). We’ve become dependent on traffic apps, self-parking aids, heated seats, dual AC, power-steering, cameras, sensors and automatic everything.
Like in running-sorry, I had to-the running shoe industry uses technology as a way of endlessly updating and selling their products. More and newer cushion technology, more stability and comfort, more responsiveness and bounciness is sold as faster and safer. But the truth is that by doing so, people have stopped questioning how the biomechanics of the feet, legs and body work. They’ve become dependent on the cushioning technology and carbon fiber inserts instead of making their natural springs and coils strong (tendons, calves, quads). Instead of cultivating a strong body, core and legs, the running shoe industry sells more technology and less thinking. They even convince you to have your toes squashed (less area of support) and to be neurologically disconnected from the ground.
A similar thing has happened with cars: an epic confusion. The idea of electrification in mobility somehow inherently and inseparably brought digital, automatic driving aids and an overflow of features and gadgets with it. We didn’t questioned or demand that the powertrain has nothing to do with the overall package. Prices skyrocketed. We paid.
Enter Slate Auto.
Genius. This is the first word it came to mind while watching the first video that popped out in my well-trained YouTube algorithm. I’m not going to deep dive into the car’s features because there’s plenty and better specialized information and reviews out there, but more into the ethos of the company.
Nowadays is not that frequent to be surprised like this. Remember I started mentioning design, mechanical and sustainable mindsets? Well, this has it all-but on demand. Yes, this is sort of a Lego project, a Vitsoe bookshelf (a shelving system by Dieter Rams) or a Vivobarefoot shoe. You start with Less; they charge you for the basic, minimal, utilitarian and they offer you More on demand, over time, as your finances change and your family or needs grow. They don’t even paint the car. It’s a clean slate (pun-intended); it’s designed for you to wrap it with whatever color or theme you want, you can design and 3D-print your signs, trims, headlight covers (everything is open-source), you can change the configuration from a truck to an SUV or a fastback.
The design is clean and simple. It is not perfect like any VW-Group standard, but it is sufficiently good-looking and, most importantly, unpretentious-something that most electric car manufactures are not, as if it were the repository of all your futuristic dreams cramped in one. It has a sort of classic Braun utilitarian aesthetic; it’s more German than American in that way.
The C-level team is ex-Amazon, ex-Stellantis. The company is backed by Jeff Bezos’s Family Office. Yes, I know-quite a contrast from one of Trump’s supporting tech billionaire car enterprise to another.
This entrepreneurial new automotive company is all-American, they say. The plant will be located in Indiana and it promises to continue “the commitment” of returning and growing manufacture in America (that is the USA, not the whole continent). I really recommend the latest episode of DOAC to understand that better. I personally think it’s great to have an all-national entrepreneurship, but If there’s a place and people who are highly skilled in car manufacturing today, it’s down the road. I bet this all-American company will highly rely on Mexican labour and skill, but that’s great as well.
Slate Auto is, hopefully, how the future should be-how companies and entrepreneurs should approach their projects. Slate claims they have sustainability in mind by deciding not to invest millions on a painting facility and other components, making the car less expensive by subtracting intrinsic manufacturing costs which in the end also contribute to pollution by toxic waste and chemicals. I guess all the plastics in the car can be recyclable as well, but I don’t recall reading about that.
So let it be, Slate Auto. Hopefully, many will copy your responsible-consumist approach to an over-inflated, over-spec’d, overpriced industry, and many families, business owners, car and design enthusiasts can enjoy a $20,000 USD car that doesn’t break your economy.