Slate Auto, the electric truck startup backed by Jeff Bezos, has now collected more than 150,000 refundable reservations for its low-cost electric car that expires at the end of 2026.
The company shared the figure in a new Q&A video with CEO Chris Barman, in which she answers questions from those reservation holders about the company’s plans for self-driving (there aren’t any) or whether owners will be able to put a car seat in the optional rear seats (they will).
Reservations are a somewhat useful metric for gauging general interest in a new car, but they are by no means a signal of surefire success. Time and time again over the past few years, we’ve seen EV companies tout booking numbers only to go broke, either because they weren’t able to get through the difficult process of halting production or because they weren’t ready to have cars on the road.
For Slate, the promising thing is that the numbers have continued to rise, meaning new bookings are coming faster than any attrition the company might see. That said, Slate crossed the 100,000 reservation mark way back in May, right after it came out of stealth, so it took just over seven months to grow the list by 50%. And looking ahead, Slate plans to make 150,000 of these EVs a year at the factory it’s renovating in Warsaw, Indiana, so it’ll need to attract far more buyers if it plans to succeed in the market.
Any continued enthusiasm for Slate’s EV has to be a reassuring sign for the company given the general state of electric trucks these days. Yesterday, Ford announced that it is ending production of the all-electric F-150 Lightning, the first major battery-powered pickup truck that hit the U.S. market a few years ago. (It’s being replaced by a version with a gas generator attached.) The company said the Lightning simply didn’t make enough money—a fact compounded by how Ford was never able to sell more than a few thousand a year. quarter. Sales of other electric trucks, such as Tesla’s Cybertruck and General Motors’ Silverado EV, have also struggled to stay above that mark.
Of course, the Lightning was something of a Frankenstein’s monster of a vehicle, with Ford shoehorning EV technology into a design originally intended for gas drive. Slate’s truck was designed from the ground up to be an EV, and the company is hyper-focused on selling it for a price tag in the mid-$20,000s. The decline in offerings from Ford and others could help clear the way for the Slate to find early success — that is, until Ford’s real shot at a low-cost electric car hits the market in 2027.