Remember when pickup truck occupant capacity was measured in seats, rather than rows? When trucks were attainable workhorses, rather than near-six-figure luxobarges with front ends designed to look angry and do maximum damage to pedestrians? It seems Jeff Bezos remembers, because he spun up a section of Amazon to bring that very concept back for the EV age — a section of Amazon that’s now struck out on its own as a startup called Slate Auto. 

TechCrunch got a look into the inner workings of Slate, all the way back to its beginnings as re:Car in early 2022. Amazon loves the “re:” prefix for events, like re:Invent and re:MARS (events I’ve worked on in a past life), which points to how Amazonian Slate’s beginnings were. Now, though, the company seems to simply be taking Bezos’s money without integration into the larger Amazon ecosystem: It’s staffed by folks from Stellantis and Harley-Davidson, and it’s aiming to build a $25,000 two-seat pickup. 

Since Slate’s beginnings in the world of Amazon, the company has adopted a headquarters outside Detroit, a design studio in Long Beach, and is working on a factory in Indiana. Insiders at the company told TechCrunch they’re looking to build a first car — not just for the company, but for its buyers. Slate aims to target buyers just getting into their first car, though the company is taking an odd approach to doing so: Focusing on open-source as a differentiator. 

Open source, in the software world, refers to the ideal of free information — source code that can be viewed, edited, and distributed without restriction. Firefox, for example, is open-source, but differentiating your $25,000 product with software that is definitionally free to obtain seems like an odd move. It’s not something the majority of people care about, so long as whatever they’re using works, and it certainly doesn’t seem likely to pull buyers away from more established car brands. Slate also seems to be very interested in the idea of having owners contribute back to the ecosystem, with a customization experience formerly titled “Slate University” and a trademark for the slogan “WE BUILT IT. YOU MAKE IT.” This approach has worked well for maker-focused products like the Bambu 3D printer ecosystem, but it’s a stretch for a product most people see as an appliance. 

Slate hopes to have its affordable, reasonably-sized truck in production by the end of next year. Despite that timeline, though, it’s not yet clear where the company intends to actually assemble its pickup — no announcement has been made as to whether it’s inhabiting an unused factory or building one of its own, though the latter would certainly take its own chunk of the remaining months until production. Indiana may have plenty of current auto plants, but I can’t find record of former auto plants in the area that are still standing. Even the old Chrysler foundry out in Indiana was demolished after the company moved operations abroad. 

Building a new factory for Slate could put that 2026 date in jeopardy, but it’s not out of the question. Tesla’s Texas factory started producing cars within 18 months of breaking ground, and a smaller automaker building a factory around a single, simple truck could likely achieve similar results. Still, it’ll be hard to know what to expect from Slate until we get more details from the company — or at least until more insiders talk to TechCrunch. Until then, we’ll just have to dream of the $25,000 two-seat electric pickup, and hope that it comes someday soon.