Sorry, But Slate's $25K Electric Truck Is Getting Way More Hype Than It Has EarnedSomewhere out there is an auto writer who has not yet published a teary-eyed tribute to Slate Auto's $24,950 electric pickup, and we'd like to shake their hand. Because the rest of the internet has officially lost its mind over this thing. A budget EV truck! Crank windows! No touchscreen! It's being treated less like a vehicle launch and more like the Second Coming of the affordable car.We're going to do the thing nobody else seems willing to do and actually squint at it. And once you stop swooning over the price tag, the Slate looks a lot less like the savior of American motoring and a lot more like a clever exercise in calling "we removed stuff" a feature."Minimalist" is a generous word for "they left it out to save money"Strip away the breathless adjectives and here's what Slate is actually selling: a truck with no infotainment screen, no built-in connectivity, optional speakers, hand-cranked windows, and an unpainted body you're expected to wrap in vinyl yourself. The official spin is "radically simple." The honest version is that a touchscreen, a modem, power windows, and a paint shop all cost money, so they got deleted and rebranded as a lifestyle.AdvertisementAdvertisementThere's nothing wrong with cheap and basic. Plenty of legendary vehicles were exactly that. But let's not stand around applauding the absence of features like the company invented restraint. They invented a spreadsheet.The fine print eats the headline aliveThat magical $24,950 buys you a two-seat, two-door, rear-wheel-drive truck with an estimated 205 miles of range, 181 horsepower, and 195 lb-ft of torque. No all-wheel drive. No four-by-four. If you'd like to bring along more than a single passenger, the five-seat SUV conversion runs an extra $5,000—and Slate openly expects that pricier version to make up 60% of sales.Translation: the truck everyone's celebrating at $24,950 is not the truck most people will actually buy. The real-world Slate is closer to a $30,000 EV with modest range and the towing-and-trail credentials of a golf cart. If you came here for capability, know that there's a reason serious haulers still reach for diesel, not 181 horsepower and rear-wheel drive.EV startups promising profit is the oldest ghost story in the businessSlate has reportedly torched more than $1.3 billion in funding to hand-build a few trucks a day, and its CEO is vowing to achieve something he cheerfully admits no automaker in history has managed: making real money on a dirt-cheap EV. Bold. Also exactly the kind of sentence that precedes a very bad earnings call.AdvertisementAdvertisementWe've watched this script before. The EV startup landscape is littered with companies that promised the moon and delivered a Chapter 11 filing, and even the ones still standing keep getting sued by owners who say the futuristic promises never showed up. Confidence in a design studio is not the same as a truck in your driveway that still works in February.The competition has dealers, history, and arrows it can surviveSlate also isn't launching into an empty field. Legacy automakers are sharpening their own affordable trucks, and they come with dealer networks, service departments, and decades of institutional knowledge. Meanwhile the EV-truck darlings keep generating headlines for the wrong reasons—just ask the Cybertruck, which became a literal target on Joe Rogan's podcast. And with even GM rethinking which trucks are worth building, the whole segment is more turbulent than the Slate hype suggests.Reserve one if you want. Just hold onto your skepticism.To be fair, we'd genuinely love to be wrong. America badly needs a brand-new vehicle that costs roughly half the price of the average new car, and Slate actually built one instead of merely posting render after render. There's a real, scrappy charm to a wrap-it-yourself truck that flips off the connected-car complex.But somebody has to say it while everyone else is busy writing valentines: 180,000 refundable reservations are not 180,000 sales, "affordable" is not a synonym for "good," and the most impressive thing this little truck has pulled off so far is convincing an entire industry to stop asking obvious questions. Put down a deposit if you're feeling brave—just keep the receipt, and don't sell your current car until a Slate has survived a real winter.