I want to be clear that I am excited for the new, $20,000-after-incentive electric pickup from Slate Auto.
We’re in an affordability crisis in America right now, and a cheap, practical electric vehicle is a good thing. I also like Slate’s novel approach—sell something basic at a low margin, and make profit on a huge catalog of accessories. Accessories that can turn the Slate Truck into an SUV. I’m also fascinated by the sort of thinking that goes into making an affordable people’s car (or truck) like this. Cheap cars have long been great paragons of engineering, and this continues that lineage.
I just have a bad taste in my mouth, and I’m wondering if I should.
The wider world became aware of Slate thanks to the excellent reporting of Sean O’Kane at TechCrunch, who revealed that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is an investor in the project. We don’t know what Bezos contributed, but we do know he was part of an at least $111 million Series A funding round in 2023. It’s fair to assume that he kicked them more than a couple bucks. After all, Forbes reports that in 2023, Bezos was worth about $114 billion, down from $171 billion in 2022.
Slate’s pitch is that its truck is an antidote to the affordability crisis. “The definition of what’s affordable is broken,” said Slate CEO Chris Barman breathlessly in a press release. “Slate exists to put the power back in the hands of customers who have been ignored by the auto industry
Barman is not wrong. In a world where the average new-car price hovers near $50,000 and the median household income in the US is around $80,000—per the most recent Census Bureau data—any new sub-$20,000 car is a good thing. And in a world where we need to reduce our carbon footprint, a sub-$20,000 electric car is a very good thing.
But does it have to be funded by the guy who’s causing these problems? Wealth inequality is at a staggeringly high level in the US, and at the time of writing, Forbes says Jeff Bezos is the second wealthiest person in the world.
In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission and 17 state attorneys generals sued Amazon for anticompetitive practices saying Amazon’s “actions allow it to stop rivals and sellers from lowering prices, degrade quality for shoppers, overcharge sellers, stifle innovation, and prevent rivals from fairly competing against Amazon.” And then there’s Amazon’s anti-worker practices. Just last year, the National Labor Relations Board said that the company was breaking the law in its attempts to discourage a New York City warehouse from unionizing.
While no longer the CEO of Amazon, Bezos continues to profit massively from the very sort of customers looking for more affordable vehicles. The sorts of customers Slate wants to buy its cars. If Slate’s pickup is successful, it will be a boon for those on the wrong side of the wealth inequality spectrum; It will also help enrich one of the wealthiest people on earth.
One wonders if Slate wanted to obscure its wealthiest backer, who per a 2024 poll from the Tech Oversight Project, was viewed unfavorably by 59% of voters surveyed. One also wonders if Jeff Bezos imagines the parking lots of Amazon warehouses filled with Slate pickups, or huge fleets of pickups with Amazon branding on the side. Or perhaps both.
This isn’t to say that Slate is bad and all other automakers are good. BMW is owned by a family that profited off its Nazi ties during World War II; Henry Ford was a virulent antisemite; Lucid Motors is funded in large part by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a country notorious for its many human-rights violations; the list goes on. And while most car company executives aren’t as comically wealthy as Jeff Bezos, the CEO to average worker pay ratio at Ford is 312:1, and at GM, it’s 303:1.
And! Slate, if it can pull it off, is offering something that so many want, that so many need! Regardless of who’s paying for it, the Slate Truck is an EV pickup with a targeted base price less than half that of the average new car.
It’s also not like I can claim a ton of moral superiority here. I try to limit my Amazon shopping, but sometimes, it’s simply the best option. And I’d be naive to think any consumer product sold by a for-profit business would (or could) ever address the causes of our problems, and not just the symptoms. It’s a Band-Aid, but sometimes, you simply need a Band-Aid.
And what a neat Band-Aid. I can’t help but not love cool engineering and cool machines. I don’t like the military industrial complex, but fighter jets rip. The Slate Truck is no fighter jet, obviously, but it inspires similar cognitive dissonance in me.
F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” Twisting that around a bit, I would be smart to get on board with the Slate Truck, lest anyone think my intelligence isn’t first rate. (The horror!)
Kidding aside, so much in our modern world requires a similar approach. For your own sake, it’s best not to think too deeply about these tensions. I just wish I didn’t have to.
