May 22, 2025, 12:00 PM UTC Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge, Getty Images At last month’s rapturously received Slate debut, it took an executive’s quip that “Slate” and “Tesla” use the same five letters to shift my brain into high gear. I’ve covered the EV world for 15-plus years, and I virtually never spend time on counterfactuals. There’s quite enough to cover in the real world. But … I’m of the opinion Tesla could, and should, have launched a small, simple, cheap compact pickup truck—in other words, what Slate debuted—rather than the pickup it did produce, the Cybertruck. That expensive and polarizing vehicle has been, to put it bluntly, a sales disaster. Over 18 months, Tesla has sold only about 50,000, versus projections of many times that volume. Worse, while EV crossover utilities sell tens of thousands a month, the more expensive EV pickup trucks to date have not. The path not taken The company that led the world in EV production for more than a decade could have launched an inexpensive small pickup that would have democratized EVs to a whole new class of buyers. Tesla likely could have offered more range at the same price due to its in-house battery cell production. And it would have been a global product, likely to be sold in Europe and China from launch. Most important, it would have given Tesla the $25,000 EV that CEO Elon Musk had promised since 2020—and simultaneously pioneered a new vehicle in a “white space” in the market where no other entry existed. Now, Tesla is no longer targeting a $25,000 EV: Musk abruptly said in October 2024 the company had walked away from the ”$25,000 Tesla” idea entirely. He went on to suggest the idea of selling any $25,000 Tesla that wasn’t a robotaxi was both “pointless” and “silly.” Why exactly should Tesla have done a Slate? I see four factors: first and foremost, the hugely appealing idea of a truly affordable EV. Tesla could well have made a small, cheap EV pickup a huge hit, given its existing assembly plants, lower-cost batteries, plus the chance to sell globally right out of the box. A “$25,000 EV” to catapult Tesla into the major leagues The excitement over an unexpected product from an unknown maker likely reflects intense market desire for truly affordable EVs. That was historically what Tesla intended to do, over time: grow its volume by producing higher numbers of less costly EVs via economies of scale. In 2024, Tesla delivered roughly 1.789 million cars globally—20,000 fewer than its 2023 total of 1.808 million. That makes the company larger than Mitsubishi (945,000) Subaru (976,000), and Mazda (1.170 million), but smaller than BMW (2.45 million) and BYD (4 million-plus). Tesla likely could have offered more range at the same price due to its in-house battery cell production. With Musk’s hopes to sell hundreds of thousands of Cybertruck a year dashed for good, Tesla’s volume mainstays are now in their sixth and ninth model years (the Model Y and Model 3 respectively). Those vehicles now face competitors in all their main markets, which certainly wasn’t the case in 2020 or 2017 when those cars launched. More than 20 new EVs, both from existing automakers and startups like Lucid and Rivian, have hit the market since those years. The classic way to boost volume is to offer new products in new segments—and from 2020, the long-promised “$25,000 Tesla” was to be that product. Even before tariffs, the U.S. vehicle market suffered from an affordability crisis: the sales-weighted average transaction price of a new vehicle has stayed at $47,000 to $48,000 since the pandemic. If EVs are to take off, their prices have to be equal to—or cheaper than—their nearest gasoline counterparts. A truly affordable EV could sell like gangbusters. And if any company were well-placed to deliver it, it would be Tesla. Instead, Musk has doubled down on his vision of Tesla becoming a company whose products are robotaxis and humanoid robots. Soon we’ll know more about the substitutes for that $25,000 model, the promised “lower-cost Teslas.” They’re widely expected to be “decontented” (stripped-down) versions of today’s compact Model 3 sedan and Model Y crossover. They probably won’t start at $25,000, but we’ll find out soon enough. And, to be honest, they hardly seem likely to generate the same excitement and buzz as the Slate unveiling produced. Existing assembly plants Slate is now where Tesla was in 2011 and 2012, as it struggled to get the Model S into production in its newly acquired former GM-Toyota plant in Fremont, California. More than a decade later, Tesla has learned a great deal about building vehicles in volume. The company now has four plants: Fremont; Austin; Shanghai, China; and outside Berlin in Germany. That experience is something Slate’s production execs, with experience all over the auto industry, will have to impart to the new employees they hire to build cars in its own factory, a 1.4-million-square-foot former printing plant in Warsaw, Indiana. A truly affordable EV could sell like gangbusters. And if any company were well-placed to deliver it, it would be Tesla. With that experience, a Tesla Slate might have used conventional stamped-steel construction. Slate chose a nonstandard construction technique: molded gray polypropylene panels bolted onto a metal substructure. That saves Slate several hundred million dollars on the steel-stamping presses and paint shop it doesn’t have to build. Want a Slate in a different color? Simply wrap it—just as Tesla used to offer to do for the Cybertruck. To be fair, the Cybertruck too uses nonstandard materials, which contributed to some of the significant production delays before deliveries started in late November 2023. They were due not only to its brand-new assembly plant in Austin, Texas, but also the special tooling for its flat, angular stainless-steel design and the extraordinary challenges of reaching acceptable levels of quality in a vehicle built in that metal. We’ll see how Slate does in turn. Image: Slate