Demand for the angular electric pickup has continued to falter in the first quarter, making room for a new king.
The Tesla Cybertruck has lost the top spot on the list of best-selling electric pickup trucks in the United States. After finishing 2024 as a best-seller, Tesla’s only pickup has fallen to second place in the first quarter of this year.
After the first three months, the Cybertruck had amassed 7,126 registrations. The Ford F-150 Lightning overtook it with 7,913 registrations, according to the most recent data from S&P Global Mobility. The Chevrolet Silverado EV finished the first quarter in third place, followed by the GMC Sierra EV, Rivian R1T and GMC Hummer EV.
The $20k compact EV pick up by Slate (new start up) may be of interest https://electrek.co/2025/05/12/slates-20k-electric-pickup-suv-100k-reservations/
It’s no frills, there isn’t even a center console to speak of
What sold me was the manual crank roll-up windows, which is a no-frills option I’ve wanted back in vehicles for almost two decades now.
That and would someone please bring back fly windows.
It also doesn’t exist yet. I’m very skeptical that it’s going to be actually offered at the $27,500 price point.
Deliveries expected in Q4 2026, which means we’ll probably get a few trucks rolling out in their premium price point in early 2027, and maybe get some of the base models in 2028.
I also don’t see a backup camera screen (might be one in the rear view, but they don’t say) which means it can’t be sold as advertised. They list a whole bunch of customization stuff, which means it’s going to need a lot of modification hard points, how is it going to handle crash tests and rollover tests?
They’re early specs are wildly out of line with current offerings, which means they either need an unprecedented team of engineers, or it’s not going to be even close to how it’s listed when actually sold.
We put in a preorder for a Telo. It’s more expensive, but the extra range alone makes it worthwhile.
My wife drives a Mini EV, which has around the same range as the base Slate. It’s enough to get them to work, but I had to do a long range trip a while back and I’d never choose to do that again.
We really like our Ioniq 5 for longer road trips, the new models come with an NACS port too. The lack of good CCS chargers has a draw back, but now it seems a simple adapter can enable supercharging with NACS
What happened?
Needed to make two charge stops in the Chicago area. The first stop wasn’t too bad.
Second stop was a disaster. Went to a dealership, but you had to go inside and ask the staff to turn it on, but they were closed on a Sunday. Went to a casino resort that supposedly had a charger, but they had moved it to the employee-only lot after offering it to the public for awhile. Went to a grocery store, and the app wouldn’t work. Went to another grocery store, and that one finally did it.
Now, some of that is just bad charging infrastructure that can be fixed, but making two 30 minute stops on this journey isn’t ideal even if the chargers all worked properly. At 100 miles of range, you pretty much have to for this distance, and that’s only one way.
At around 200 miles of range, I wouldn’t have needed any stops on the way there, but would on the way back. At 350 miles, I could have made it there and back no problem. I think that 350 mile number is the sweet spot. If you calculate off 20% for cold weather and 30% to stay within the ideal 10-80% charge range, then you can still get far enough that you ought to be taking a 30 minute break, anyway.
That’s why I want a Prius. Plug in at home, burn gas when the battery is flat, still gets 50 MPG highway and city without grid power
I am really interested in seeing how Slate does and the cool things people, and possibly Slate itself, come up with to modify it.
If I needed a truck it would top my list of options.