For about two decades, the American new-car market has been quietly turning into a luxury showroom while pretending nothing is wrong. The average new vehicle now runs around fifty grand, base models keep evaporating, and “affordable” became a word automakers used right before showing you a $48,000 crossover with a subscription button for heated seats.
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So it’s a little disorienting to report that the single cheapest new vehicle you can buy in America is, as of this week, a two-seat electric pickup with crank windows and no touchscreen. We’ve officially entered the affordable EV pickup wars, and the opening salvo came from a startup most of your relatives have never heard of.
Slate’s $24,950 Truck Wants to Be Your Blank Canvas (Emphasis on Blank)
Slate Auto, the Jeff Bezos-backed EV outfit that’s been teasing a deliberately bare-bones electric truck, finally slapped a number on the thing: $24,950 to start, with preorders open the same day. Electrek went ahead and called it “America’s most affordable new car,” which is the kind of headline that makes every legacy automaker’s product planner spit out their oat milk latte.
The “Blank Slate,” as the base truck is charmingly called, is stripped down on purpose. We’re talking hand-crank windows, no infotainment screen, and a single gray composite body with zero paint options, because Slate skips the factory paint shop entirely and sells you wraps instead. Over a hundred wrap colors at launch, most full wraps under $500, plus 200-some accessories where 80% come in under $500. It’s a two-seat pickup you can convert into a five-seat SUV yourself, and Slate even launched “Slate University” how-to videos to walk you through doing it in your driveway. The SUV configuration starts at $29,950, which, depending on your worldview, either defeats the entire point or is the point.
The mechanical bits are sensible rather than spectacular: a single 65 kWh LFP battery (63 usable) feeding a rear motor making 181 hp, good for an estimated 205 miles. That 205 is actually up from an earlier 150-ish figure, because Slate swapped its original twin-NMC plan for cheaper LFP chemistry to hold the price down, trading a theoretical 240-mile ceiling for affordability. It does 0-60 in around 8 seconds, tops out at 90 mph, tows up to 2,000 pounds, and skips traditional dealerships in favor of selling directly to you, Tesla-style.
Now for the asterisk, because there’s always an asterisk. That $24,950 excludes destination, taxes, title, registration, and the rest of the fee buffet, so your actual out-the-door number climbs. More importantly: Slate originally pitched this truck as costing “under $20,000,” a promise that quietly assumed buyers would get the $7,500 federal EV tax credit. That credit is now dead courtesy of policy changes under the Trump administration, which is also why a bunch of automakers have been shelving affordable EV plans. So the under-$20K dream is in the ground, and $24,950 is the new reality. First deliveries are still slated (sorry) for the end of 2026.
The internet, predictably, lost it. The r/electricvehicles thread cleared hundreds of comments, with the usual split between “finally, a truck that isn’t a $90,000 land yacht” and “wake me when the destination fee lands and it’s somehow $28K.” A recurring greatest hit: Maverick owners pointing out their hybrid already does this job and gets 45-50 mpg, while bare-bones evangelists countered that landscapers, pool services, and recent grads will eat these up. Both camps are correct, which is what makes this fun.
Ford’s $30K Truck: Catching Up by Stealing Formula 1 Nerds
Here’s where it stops being a one-startup story and becomes an actual war. Ford is catching up, and it’s doing so with a roughly $30,000 four-door midsize electric pickup built on its new Universal EV (UEV) platform, headed for the Louisville Assembly Plant in 2027.
Ford’s framing is the spicy part. CEO Jim Farley has been openly trash-talking the competition’s engineering while explaining how Ford intends to beat low-cost Chinese brands at their own game. According to Farley, some Chinese EV makers have “really cheap batteries” with control systems that “aren’t that efficient” because the packs are larger and heavier than they need to be. Ford’s counter is efficiency, and it recruited for it the way a racing team would: more than half the aerodynamics team on the UEV platform in California comes from the Formula 1 world. Farley called that skunkworks team “one of the biggest gifts that Formula 1 ever gave Ford,” and claimed F1 hires would look at the work and say it’s “cooler engineering than a hypercar.”
The engineering flexes are real, if you squint. Ford claims aerodynamic and efficiency gains of 20-30% over conventional approaches, and says the same battery in the most aero-efficient midsize gas truck would net nearly 50 extra miles, or a 15% range bump on the highway. It’s using prismatic LFP batteries, cheaper and more space-efficient, though here’s the delicious irony: Ford is building them in the US using licensed tech from China’s CATL. So the truck meant to out-engineer China runs on Chinese battery know-how. Ford is also leaning on gigacasting (“unicastings,” in Ford-speak) to cut the part count for the equivalent of a current Maverick from 146 pieces down to two, and promises more passenger interior space than a Toyota RAV4 before you even count the frunk or bed.
There’s a real prototype out there, too, caught testing around Long Beach wearing camo with a hidden QR code that links to a “secret” UEV microsite. Subtle.
So Who Actually Wins?
The honest answer is that these two trucks aren’t really fighting each other yet, and that’s the most interesting wrinkle. Slate undercuts everything on price, including the Chevy Bolt (~$29K) and Nissan Leaf (~$32K), and it’s here first, sort of, with end-of-2026 deliveries. Ford’s truck is a more conventional, more capable, four-door machine that costs five grand more and doesn’t arrive until 2027. One is a philosophy statement about radical simplicity; the other is a legacy automaker trying to prove it can still build a cheap car without losing its shirt.
What they share is the thing that actually matters: both turned a price reveal into a national news event. When a sub-$30,000 starting figure feels genuinely shocking, that tells you far more about the sorry state of the new-car market than it does about either truck. For years the industry insisted Americans simply wouldn’t buy small, cheap, no-frills vehicles. We’re about to find out whether that was true, or whether nobody bothered to build one.
Either way, the affordable EV pickup war has a body count of exactly zero so far and two very different combatants. The first shots are fired. Now we wait to see if anybody actually shows up to buy crank windows in 2026.
We want to hear from you: Slate’s bare-bones $24,950 electric truck — crank windows, no touchscreen, paint-it-yourself wraps — is now the cheapest new vehicle in America, with Ford’s ~$30K F1-engineered EV pickup arriving in 2027. Which camp are you in: “finally, an honest cheap truck” or “wake me when the destination fee makes it $28K”? And for the Maverick owners already getting 45-50 mpg — does a 205-mile two-seat EV actually tempt you now that the $7,500 federal credit is gone? Let us know in the comments.