June 25, 2026
Slate Auto set the price of its electric truck at $24,950 and opened preorders on Wednesday, roughly half the $49,000 the average new vehicle sells for today. That makes the two-seat pickup the cheapest electric vehicle on sale in the United States, and one of the cheapest new vehicles of any kind, in a pickup market where the average truck now clears $60,000.
$7,500 is the number that matters here, because it is gone. Slate spent 2025 promising a truck priced under $20,000, a figure that only worked with the federal EV tax credit subtracted first. That credit was eliminated in last year’s budget law, and every major automaker that pledged an affordable EV had leaned on the same subsidy. Slate lost it and still landed at $24,950, a sticker that needs no help from Washington to clear.
205 miles of range, up from the 150-mile target Slate floated at reservation stage, retires the most obvious objection to a cheap EV. The new figure rides on a 65-kilowatt-hour pack and a single 200-horsepower rear motor. 150 miles invites range anxiety; 205 covers the commuting and second-vehicle duty this truck is built for, which is the job most pickups in two-car driveways actually do.
How They Hit $24,950
Slate reached the price by deleting nearly everything optional. There is no central touchscreen, just a phone mount where one would sit; the windows crank by hand; the body panels are unpainted composite; the cabin runs on physical switches. The truck ships as a two-seater that owners can rebuild into a five-seat SUV themselves, a kit that starts at $29,950, and buyers add equipment back through an accessories catalog instead of paying for trim levels they never wanted. The feature race that pushed the average EV past $50,000 is the thing Slate treats as the defect.
The Conversion Test
More than 180,000 people put down reservations to hold a place in line, and they have about 30 days to turn those holds into firm preorders. That conversion is a number nobody in this segment has ever measured. A reservation is cheap enthusiasm; a preorder at a real price is demand. Whether a meaningful share of 180,000 holders commits at $24,950 will say more about the floor of the EV market than any analyst forecast has.
Twice the industry’s incentive rate is what the EVs that did reach showrooms needed to move this spring, the discount math that has defined the year. Every legacy maker promised a cheap electric model and missed, and the electric trucks that did launch, Tesla’s Cybertruck among them, arrived at more than twice Slate’s price. Slate’s wager is that the segment’s problem was never desire but price, and that a buyer offered a genuine $24,950 truck will tolerate crank windows to get it. The 2026 market has punished the opposite wager, the expensive electric flagship, in every monthly print.
The first drives published June 25, and they were kind. The Autopian called it the most soulful new vehicle an American can buy for $25,000 and said it would not be close. Slate’s CEO told CNBC the truck will be profitable and that the company is targeting positive cash flow next year, a bold claim for a startup that has not shipped a single unit. Good reviews and a profitability promise are the easy part, the part that comes before a factory has to hit a number. The conversion window is still the test that matters.
Jeff Bezos sits among the backers behind the roughly $1.4 billion Slate has raised, and the company plans to build the truck in Indiana with first deliveries before the end of 2026. The money and the factory settle whether Slate can build it. The 30-day preorder window settles the harder question, which is whether Americans will buy a deliberately basic electric truck once the price is real and the credit is not coming back.
