There once was a truck from Nantucket…
How the Slate EV pickup truck reminds us to be better poets when we attempt to rhyme history.
It’s sort of cute, isn’t it?
For those of you unfamiliar, the Slate EV is a $27,000 bare-bones, utilitarian electric pickup truck. By the time tax credits kick in, you can pick one up (sorry, bad pun) for just south of $20,000. Not a bad deal.
When I say “bare bones,” I mean it. When was the last time you rolled down your windows…with a hand crank? (Kids, ask your parents.) Unlike the upward trend in energy density for other EVs, the Slate can only go 150-240 miles before recharging, depending on the battery pack. Even in a small city, that isn’t very far. If you’ve got “range anxiety” now, the Slate is not for you. Oh, and one more thing. It’s teeny. As in, 1985 import pickup teeny.
The image below (from the Slate website) compares the truck to the 1985 Toyota SR5—the classic claustrophobic pickup of that era.
I checked; you can’t fit one in the bed of a Ford F-150, but it’s close.
But instead of making excuses for those apparent limitations, Slate embraces them. With a few customizations, you can transform your pickup into a small SUV. I suspect there will be a thriving aftermarket for additional conversion accessories—camping, pet transport, small-volume deliveries, and even Uber-efficient Ubers.
If you’re interested, you can save your spot in line for $50. Over 100,000 people have already done it. I put my name in the hat as well. It’s fully refundable, and I’d like to see how this goes.
That said, any automotive news tends to bring out the armchair historian. And no, I’m not trying to stifle that instinct and claim the intellectual high ground. Quite the contrary. I want to show you how to explore historical parallels so that you can get better at it in the future.
“History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.”
There is evidence Mark Twain said the first part, but not the second. If you’re a quote geek, go nuts. Still, it sure sounds like something Twain would say.
No matter who said what, the basic idea is the same: Examine the past for lessons we can apply in our present. My issue isn’t with looking to history for advice—that’s what I do for a living—it’s with the lack of imagination we often have in our vocabulary. Put simply, most historical analyses fall into what I call the “Nantucket” category.
As in..
There was a young man of Nantucket.
Who went down a well in a bucket;
The last words he spoke.
Before the rope broke,
…
It might be fun to come up with different ways to rhyme “bucket” without resorting to carnal knowledge, but no one would confuse these lines with something from Whitman, Poe, or Angelou.
If we want to examine history to find rhymes we can learn from, we need to work on our poetry. When we don’t, all we write are the equivalent of bawdy limericks.
As much as I enjoy swearing (oh, fuck yeah, I do), we can do better.
Let’s have some fun.
Historical Rhyme #1: Tesla Model 3
Slate has deployed the same basic “preorder” strategy Tesla used when it launched the Model 3, though Musk and company scored nearly 400,000 preorders to Slate’s 100,000. How many of those converted to full sales? Tesla is cagey on that number, but the Model 3 is one of the best-selling (if not the best-selling EV) in the world, having sold over 1.2 million units since 2017. It also helps that, like the Slate EV, it was priced low ($35,000 before rebates). Low price tends to drive higher volume; see Econ 101.
However, I’m not sure that rhyme tells us much. I expect the Slate to generate some volume, but perhaps not as much as we might think. The much-more-well-established Nissan Leaf retails for just over $28,000. Low price just isn’t a compelling enough strategy in 2025.
Historical Rhyme #2: Chinese EV startups and the 1980s Japanese invasion
There’s much talk in the EV world about BYD—a Chinese-based startup selling EVs for less than $10,000. Not in the United States or Europe, of course—partly due to tariffs and partly due to safety standards. This rhyme is a bit better. Import vehicles tend to push improvements in the domestic auto market, much like the Japanese and Germans did in the early 1980s. It seems to me that merely the threat of a super-cheap Chinese import is (in part) driving Slate’s strategy. (And Tesla’s too—though the low-cost “Model Q” has been delayed.)
However, if Slate were paying attention to that rhyme, they’d be aiming for a much lower price point. They’re not.
Historical Rhyme #3: Ford’s Model T
If we step back in time a bit further, we can find a rhyme for both low-cost and the consumer customization. Early automobiles were…not good. Hundreds of manufacturers produced one-of-a-kind, hand-built, low-quality pieces of crap. Most people with a bit of knowledge know that Henry Ford reduced the price of his Model T each year of its production, helping to ensure that everyone who wanted a car could buy one. They also know that he pioneered the assembly line to reduce costs. What they often don’t realize is how those two innovations fit together. Improving consistency and volume improved quality along with lowering costs.
That said, Ford didn’t encourage consumer customization as market of a promotional strategy; buyers modified their vehicles by necessity. “Options” were expensive, so Ford kept them to a minimum. That strategy applied to more than paint (“any color you want, so long as it’s black”)—early models didn’t come with features like…shock absorbers.
On a careful read, the Model T doesn’t rhyme with Slate very well either. Slate isn’t really innovating its production technology in the same way Ford did. Assembly lines are quite mature. What’s more, if Slate were really following Ford’s example, their truck would cost about $4,500. That’s the inflation-adjusted equivalent of the $260 entry-level Model T. When you compare Slate to its transportation alternatives, $20,000 is still pretty expensive. You can pick up a very nice Honda Civic for that price, and it has power windows.
Historical Rhyme #4: Scion
To be fair to Slate, let’s not move off the customization angle so quickly. While Model T owners were adding shocks, lights, plows, and trailers to their cars, and modern Civic owners heavily modify their cars into barely-legal street racers, one car company leaned into the “custom” angle: Scion.
From 2003 to 2016, the Toyota spin-off marketed basic utility vehicles with innumerable customization options. So, why didn’t it work? People say they want choices, but most people really don’t. (The Paradox of Choice, by Barry Schwartz is a must-read to understand how more choice does not make most people happier.) The market for “customizers” is usually quite small. That’s why Scion eventually folded back into Toyota. It was too much trouble.
Historical Rhyme #5: Volkswagen (aka the “People’s Car”)
Yep, this is the Hitler car. In the 1930s, the Nazis founded Volkswagen in Germany to build affordable cars for the average person. They didn’t get the chance before the war; the company ended up building military vehicles. Under British occupation, however, the company returned to its original vision. Eventually, it released the original Beetle—an icon on both sides of the Atlantic. In 1950, the $1,200 base model would cost about $15,000 today, but in an era of much more lax safety standards. (The newer Beetle model released in 1997 wasn’t quite the same bargain.) Again, this isn’t a great rhyme. Slate wasn’t founded by an American political party and (wisely) isn’t trying to leverage politics to its advantage.
(That’s a lesson several Fortune 500 CEOs I’m thinking of should take to heart.)
The issue with all these rhymes should be obvious: They’re all cars. That’s natural, isn’t it? We want to compare a new thing to an old thing we already understand. Sometimes, that’s useful. But other times—and this is one of those times—it’s not.
It would be unwise for Slate to use these comparisons to guide its innovation strategy as well. That’s because markets always evolve. You can’t go back in time; you can’t unring the bell. Consumer expectations evolve.
What was innovative in 2017 (opening preorders for the low-cost Model 3) isn’t innovative in 2025.
We’ve moved on.
If that’s the case, is there any point in using history to study innovation at all?
There is.
But we need to get more creative with our vocabulary.
Instead of looking at automotive history, let’s look at the history of the problem Slate is trying to solve: An incumbent group of competitors in the market has overshot consumer expectations. Cars are too complex, too expensive, and just…too much.
Clayton Christiansen described this tendency back in 1997. In short, he observed that technological advancement always outpaces consumer expectations. Over time, this creates a situation where the product (in this case, cars) are way more complex and expensive than consumers actually want. And that creates an opportunity for a disruptor to strip back features to the bare minimum to capture those consumers who want a basic offering.
(Since then, authors Arik and Derek Johnson have operationalized that strategy into their Angles of Attack framework. You can read about it here.)
Translating all that business-speak to historical poetry: There aren’t very good historical rhymes from the automobile industry to guide us.
We need to expand our vocabulary.
When we do, we find an obvious example.
And you already know what it is…and probably use it.
Google Suite.
Anyone who suffered through Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel (and god help us, Outlook) in the early 2000s remembers what an abomination they had become—bloated, overloaded, complicated, and borderline useless for basic tasks. There were even adult education classes to teach people how to use them…and they were popular!
The folks at Google took a look at those core applications and stripped them to their bare bones. They were super easy to use—so easy, in fact, that school districts all over the country started adopting them. It helped that they were free with a Google account, but that was hardly necessary.
Once people realized they could do 90% of what they needed with 10% of the effort—and could collaborate and share more easily to boot—people started switching in droves.
In 2005, Microsoft Office was the default.
In 2006, Google gave people a choice.
Today, Google has an 80% market share.
That’s the power of true disruption.
That’s the kind of rhyme Slate needs to be writing.
I’m not sure Slate quite gets it. They’re not cheap enough. They’re not bold enough. They’re not offering anything truly different enough.
Right now, they’re just a truck from Nantucket.
Maybe they need to hire a better poet.
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