The leaders of Slate Auto, the electric-vehicle startup backed by Jeff Bezos, have raised $650 million from a group of investors and say they’ll deliver their first vehicles late this year and begin taking pre-orders in a few weeks.
Michigan-based Slate was incubated inside the Re:Build Manufacturing conglomerate and set out on its own in 2023. Its goal: Take an old-school approach to building an affordable, no-frills base model that owners can customize in various ways, including by converting it from a pickup truck to a five-seat sport utility vehicle.
In a statement, Slate CEO Peter Faricy and President of Vehicles Chris Barman said their newest funding round was led by TWG Global, an investment company that has interests in finance, technology and sports—including the Cadillac Formula 1 team that began competing this year. Faricy said the financing will let Slate “reach the next stages of production this year: on time and on budget.”
Slate will make its trucks at a converted factory in Warsaw, Indiana, into which it plans to invest nearly $400 million over time. In the meantime, the company’s sales teams—who have more than 160,000 reservations on their books—will begin taking preorders for trucks in June.
Worth noting given today’s inflationary climate: The Slate team says its truck’s price point will be “in the mid-$20,000s,” which is a good bit higher than where they were positioning it a year ago. The big change since then is the demise of up to $7,500 in federal tax credits—which suggests that Slate engineers have been able to keep a lid on their input costs as they prepare for production.
“Slate has remained laser-focused on the steps needed to develop our vehicle and reindustrialize our Warsaw factory,” Barman said. “We will deliver Slate Trucks at nearly half the cost of the average new vehicle—as promised.”
If the Slate team stays on track with its plans to start delivering trucks to customers late this year, its vehicles will be hitting the streets around the same time as lower-cost EVs from Rivian Automotive Inc. and Lucid Group Inc., although the latter’s vehicles promise far more accoutrements and will be selling for around $50,000. (Lucid on April 14 announced that Silvio Napoli will be its next CEO, taking over from interim chief Marc Winterhoff.)
Some of the automotive industry’s biggest names—most notably General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and Tesla Inc.—also are working on or planning cheaper EVs even as they’ve pulled back on many other electrification investment plans. Ford executives have been developing their Universal Electric Vehicle platform for several years and plan to launch a pickup truck next year that will sell for about $30,000.
