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The electric pickup startup Slate Auto starts the week off well. This morning it announced it has raised $650 million as part of its latest funding round.<\/p>\n
Slate is a refreshing outlier among all the aspiring new electric vehicle OEMs. Lucid debuted with an electric sedan that intended to move the game on<\/a> from the Tesla Model S. Rivian said, \u201cWhat if [we had] supercar suspension and a smiley face for an EV with serious off-road skills<\/a>?\u201d Both arguably succeeded. Sony Honda Mobility wanted to make the EV a true digital content hub, at least until one half of that joint venture called time<\/a>\u2014who knows how that project would have turned out, although I suspect sales would have been underwhelming.<\/p>\n But Slate, which got its start in 2022, is doing things differently. It\u2019s not starting sales with something near six-figures; far from it. The abolishment of the federal clean vehicle tax credit was no doubt inconvenient\u2014with it, a sub-$20,000 starting price was possible<\/a>, but even at \u201cmid-$20,000s\u201d the Slate Truck should match or undercut the Ford Maverick XL, currently the cheapest pickup on sale in the US.<\/p>\n