Like a decade ago, I got into the idea of brewing beer. Didn’t know the first thing about how. So I looked it up on Youtube. First video I saw was this dude who had apparently added a room onto his house, like he walked out what looked like an exterior door into another room full of stainless steel counters and basins and such, and I quit watching about the time he was pouring sacks of barley into a hand-cranked grinder. Then I found a Canadian guy named Craig who was like “I buy this can of goo from the brewery store, you dump it into 5 gallons of hot water, stir it up, ferment it in a bucket for a week, and bottle it.” and that was a bit more my speed.

The dotcom bubble was very dumb but I don’t remember it taking the rest of civilization down with it. Some idiots who jumped on a bandwagon they didn’t understand got venture capital for saying a buzzword, they bought expensive office chairs and then lost their shirts, but it didn’t quadruple the price of a cheeseburger.

If that’s true, it’s dumb, Not like Americans ever move from one region of the nation to the other and take their vehicles with them.

Illinois Nazis. I hate Illinois Nazis.

When you grew up in suburban North Carolina and your high school French teacher was a southern belle and self-proclaimed “chauvinist piglet” so to this very day you perley vew freyansay.

They venn diagrammed too close to the sun. They tried to make a single vehicle appeal to as many people as they could, meaning it’s for basically no one. It sucks at everything.

It’s a pickup truck that has a weirdly high cargo weight rating for the tiny bed you’d have to haul it in. Ideal for those who must move very dense cargo very short distances, like our nation’s many millions of short-haul plutonium deliverymen. I’m sure in 1985, plutonium is available at every corner drug store.

It’s a 2-door 5-seat SUV in a market that already has three 2-door 2-row SUVs: The Jeep Wrangler, the Ford Bronco and the Land Rover Defender. All three of those are pretty serious 4WD offroad machines, all three are available as more normie-fied 4-door variants, and all three sell WAY more 4-doors than 2-doors. Because what the 2020’s American public needs is a full-size sedan, but they want to look rugged and outdoorsy, because if they actually drove a sedan or minivan, in the words of Jeremy Clarkson: “That says 'I’ve had my children and now I’m waiting to die.”

It’s an EV with the frame weight and aerodynamics of a pickup truck. So for it’s battery capacity, it’s got awful range.

It’s an EV that’s also cheap. So it’s got 400V architecture, no Vehicle-To-Load or Vehicle-To-Home, no 110VAC outlet, relatively slow charging despite its relatively small battery, and no heat pump.

So much of its fundamental design is in conflict with itself that it really only appeals to people who have no cargo, no passengers, and nowhere to go. It’ll probably carry home some Stouffer’s and White Claws from the Food Lion every week.

Shame too; I kinda like the eschewing of dashboard tech, the a la carte options list, prominent whatever-the-owner-wants mounting rails everywhere.

Personally? Never have. I know folks with similar trucks who do so daily.

Here’s my thing though: It’s got weirdly high onboard payload capacity, but a small bed. So…how do you load it that heavy? At the same time, it has a low towing capacity, so it’s not great for a contractor pulling a trailer. It’s almost backwards in a way.

It won’t be. But cute idea.

The payload is actually pretty damn good for a truck of its size. Compare it to an S10, most are rated for 999 pounds in the bed. In which I have hauled cow shit, half a ton at a time, from one end of the county to the other. Thing is…I don’t think the Slate can carry 1500 pounds of cow shit, the bed is too small.

Towing capacity is better than they initially said, earlier they quoted 1400, 2000 is lawnmower trailer territory. Compare that to the 5600 pound towing capacity of my S10.

We know.

The only solutions are way better/larger batteries, much smaller cars, or massively expanded charging infrastructure. Unfortunately nothing [affordable] in the market is addressing any of those.

I think the market is addressing all three. The F-150 Lightning is giving way to the Slate and Ford’s upcoming Ranchero. They’re working on battery chemistries, they’ve been getting better. Charging infrastructure HAS been built out.

Gas car owners haven’t seen EV charging stations going in, because they’re often put in out-of-the-way places. They’re not as visually obvious as gas stations, so gas car owners may have been surrounded by them and not realize it. So they don’t feel like the infrastructure is there, when it is. The EV charging industry has done a better job of concealing itself from the American public than the NSA.

I could rant about charging stations being difficult to find, “But use an app” you mean nazi stalker software? We’re in an age where a lot of people want to step back from all that shit because of who’s running it all. I genuinely do prefer to find gas stations by seeing their signs. I could throw my phone in a lake and drive my 2005 Buick to California, right now. I know how the US interstate system works and I know how to find and buy gas without any precise location enabled spyware.

Let’s ignore that for now, and instead: EV prononents like to point out that most charging will be done at home, and charging away from home will be a rare occasion mostly on road trips. Lemme ask you something: You got an app on your phone you only use occasionally? It’s a pain in the ass, right? Go to order your quarterly pizza from Domino’s and the app needs to be manually updated and logged back into and their terms of service have changed…sounds like fun to deal with when you’ve been sent on a 4 hour mission and you need to find a charging station. Phone apps aren’t tools you can get and put in your toolbox until you need them, they rust.

BUT ANYWAY. What they need is better communication of the vehicle’s limitations. The manufacturer spits out a number achieved in ideal conditions. Then you talk to owners and they go “Yeah. WELLLL…it depends” and start listing the conditions where you won’t get that. Start telling me what the machine WILL do, give me ways to predict the vehicle’s performance in non-ideal conditions, or start engineering those limits out.

I’d rather hear “It will do 200 miles between charges.” more than “It’ll do 300 miles. WELLLL…it depends. Maybe it’ll only do 180 if it’s cold out and you’re running the heater.”

Well when Futurama made that joke about the iPhone, the line was “It’s $500” and everyhing was basically true.

They eat beans and it gives them gas. It’s not a constructed joke. It’s like in Airplane 2: The Sequel where they take the Lunar Shuttle to 0.5 Worp speed and it does the trippy Star Trek visuals, and Elaine takes a drag from a joint and says “oh wow.” Dya get it? She did drugs, now she’s high. Didja get it?

It’s $400, there’s no choice of carrier, the battery won’t hold a charge, and the reception isn’t very-

More Slates than Silverados will be powered by coal.

It’s got a lot of elements that evoke other trucks and 4x4s.

A lot of the face evokes Toyota Landcruisers. The shape of the hood is very Land Rover. The thick B pillar reminds me of a Nissan Hardbody. The Slate graphic on the tailgate reminds me of old Toyota pickups. The fastback roof reminds me a lot of the later model 2-door Chevy Blazers.

You know what? You’ve led me to the diagnosis of my own EV range anxiety: Unpredictable performance.

In a gas powered car, you pretty much can think in miles. They put the “24 city, 29 highway” numbers on the sticker in the window, and that’s pretty close to what you’ll get out of it. Maybe loading it until it squats on the suspension or pulling a trailer or driving like a maniac will decrease the economy. But, if you do those kinds of things, you can fill the tank, note the mileage, drive like that awhile, fill the tank again, note the fuel consumed and the mileage performed and you’ve got a figure you can pretty much rely on no matter the weather. The limiting factor is almost always the driver. Drive 200-300 miles, stop for 5 minutes to fill the tank, drive 200-300 miles, stop for 5 minutes to fill the tank…

I happen to be a flight instructor. There’s a whole chapter in flight school about cross country flight planning and predicting aircraft performance. Wind is such a factor that you really can’t rate a plane in miles of range, but in hours of endurance. So to plan a flight, you look up the route of flight on an aeronautical chart, the weather forecast, read performance charts and tables out of the plane’s Pilot’s Operating Handbook, crunch a whole bunch of numbers and you’ll know fairly precisely how long you’ll be aloft and how much fuel you’ll burn.

With an EV…they spit out a range in miles that the vehicle will do in unspecified ideal conditions, tell you that heat, cold, using the heater, using the air conditioner, carrying weight, wind and age will reduce the range, and then they’ll get impatient with you if you try to work out what the vehicle will actually do and they’ll mail you anthrax if the answer you arrive at is “not enough.”

That’s a false dichotomy.

I’ve been driving an S10 for decades. Yeah, it’s a little bit 20th century, it makes 18mpg out of a large, slow, primitive V6. It’s great for small truck missions, it’s reasonable for long hauls, and I can expect to go THIS far on THIS much gas.

Aerodynamics. The Bolt is a slick little running shoe. The Slate is a slab.

And I see why, I could have phrased it more clearly.