“No touchscreen” is a really great selling point imo
Every smart feature a vehicle *doesn’t *have is a selling point for me. I want my car to be dumb as a boot.
Yep, the more software it has, the less I want it. And I’m saying that as a software engineer.
After reading the article and the website, I can’t find anything that explicitly says there is no network connection built into the vehicle.
The instrument panel is a screen, and will be used to display the backup camera video. There is some computer capable of handling video processing and displaying the instrument graphics - so more than just low-level electronics to handle the battery and drive control. It could have built-in GPS, it could have 5G, it could still be collecting and sharing data on driving habits &etc, it could be subsidized by that on the backend. Just because those functions aren’t displayed to the end user doesn’t mean they aren’t in the system.
Everything you describe could be handled by a single ESP 32 module but they probably do have much more computing power than that.
Other articles seem to indicate that it would need you to use your phone to perform updates on the onboard computer.
I guess this doesn’t preclude the possibility of other types of embedded surveillance.
Oh yes I was not commenting on any of that. Data privacy and the reliability of computer hardware and software over time are separate issues.
I was just speaking from the basic-level user experience of operating a vehicle- touch screens are terrible. Pretty much everything you want to do in a car should have 3 requirements:
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Keep your eyes on the road. Controls need to be in consistent locations and have some other way of communicating what they are and what their status is non-visually. Dials, knobs, buttons that lock in-or-out, switches, levers, sliders. Anything close together needs to be differentiated- buttons with different textures, shapes, or resistance for example. This is very difficult and almost antithetical to touchscreens. The strength of the touchscreens is their flexibility- they can have deep menus that re-use a small amount of space efficiently, but the trade-off is that they need the user’s vision to work.
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Non-visual feedback to the user for their activation. Touch screens CAN do this with haptics and sounds. And there are physical inputs where this can be a problem, like regular buttons or knobs with uniform shapes. Levers, sliders, switches, and dials have this as inherent properties
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Response time. Touch screens on vehicles are usually underpowered and seem to take seconds to register an input, then apply it. If the music changes and is suddenly way too loud, it’s annoying to be subjected to that for 5 seconds while navigating the touch screen and waiting for it to work, in contrast to a regular old volume potentiometer that operates basically instantly. Really any music or audio controls can get really annoying with delay, though I’ll admit those are a luxury. Things like the lights are not.
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Not a requirement, but cars should be judged on whether these things FEEL good. Touch screens have improved slightly over time with better materials and haptics, but that only applies to higher-end ones and still isn’t great. Cheap physical inputs can suck too, though they are usually still better than touch screens.
Hoping it doesn’t have tracking 🤞
If they also make a 4wd version in the future then this would basically be the first new car I’d consider buying.
Edit: I emailed them and they said it doesn’t have any data collection at all.
The vehicle will absolutely collect data, but likely won’t be transmitting or collecting personal data (which is mostly done within vehicle infotainment units). It’ll be stored within the hardware which is much more preferred but I’d still consider that “data collection”.
Most vehicles have an Event Data Recorder (EDR) which records and stores vehicle data in the event of a collision/abnormal operation above a certain threshold. They’re mandated in many countries. You can connect to these systems, some easier than others, and get vehicle data such as vehicle speed, accelerator pedal position, brake activation, changes in velocity, yaw rate, steering wheel angle, steering wheel angle rate of change, ABS/TC activation, number of ignition cycles, odometer readings, etc. Newer vehicles with enhanced safety systems (of which this vehicle doesn’t sound like it’s intended to have) can provide even more data including but not limited to proximity to a target object and camera images.
It’s not data in the sense of personal or tracking data, but it’s still data.
It’s backed by Bezos. Wouldn’t even consider it for that reason alone.
Fucking FINALLY.
I’ve been waiting for a small pickup like the old 90s 4-banger Toyota. And this is electric, simple for function, and actually affordable?
Capitalists must be seething. If it doesnt have leather interior, 19 speaker surround sound, and cost 80k, get it out of our country! /s
Small gas-powered trucks are effectively illegal in the US.
It’s regulation made in response to automakers calling everything a “light truck” to get around fuel economy and emissions standards in the 90s and 2000s.The straw that broke the camel’s back was the PT Cruiser being classified as a truck by Chrysler.
So, starting in model year 2012, vehicle fuel economy standards started being based on vehicle footprint. The side effect was that small, powerful vehicles designed for moving cargo more efficiently or in tighter spaces than large trucks were impacted. It’s why 2011 was the last year model of the old Rangers, S10s, Dakota, etc.
That’s why the new Rangers are larger than the old F150s. They have to make them bigger to meet CAFE standards.
Same issue hit the small cargo vans in 2021/22. As the CAFE standards went up, it became impossible to meet fuel economy standards for the NV200, Ford Transit Connect, and Ram ProMaster City compact cargo vans, so they were all discontinued.
New York City was changing its whole Taxi fleet to NV200s due to their flexibility and accessibility options, and now can’t buy new ones because a Toyota Camry has less-strict fuel economy requirements.
What are the Maverick and Santa Cruz classified as? I think they fit the small or light truck category, if they are categorized as trucks at all.
A Maverick is a light truck in much the same way a 737 is a small plane. Sure there are bigger ones, but it’s a 4 door truck with a 4 foot bed that’s high enough to make loading and unloading harder than it needs to be. It’s twice the weight and almost twice the size of a 70s/80s Toyota Pickup, which is a light truck.
Light trucks, which means less CAFE regulation. Same classification as crossovers (why crossovers are so popular).
That’s why the new Rangers are larger than the old F150s.
If you’re comparing a crewcab Ranger to a 2-door F150, sure, but that’s not really a valid comparison.
Comparing equivalent configs tells a different story: every crewcab F150 is taller, longer, and wider than a new crewcab Ranger. The 10th gen and earlier (pre-2004) F150s, which are shorter than 11th gen+ F150s, are still bigger when compared to the Ranger in equivalent configurations.
Don’t get too excited about seething capitalists. Bezos is a major investor.
Article said it caught his interest, which to me means he took notice and will likely try to own it and enshitify it soon, not that he is currently behind it.
He’s one of 16 investors. Source:
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a64564869/2027-slate-truck-revealed/
Relatively affordable. It is 20k after the federal discounts and kick backs. Meanwhile, the Chinese EV market has been making cars as low as 4k. https://greenspeedx.com/cheap-electric-cars-available-in-china/
I’m not a pro China person (because one time in Ark, a Chinese team kept destroying my thatch base), but they seem to have the things. Apparently Mexico is aiming to compete in the EV market as well.
America used to have the things as well but then there was a civil war and it got banned.
You might ask yourself what it is that allows them to produce and sell a brand new vehicle for $4k, basically the same price as a high-end PC or a couple of high-end smartphones.
Yeah, I’m pretty hype for this. It’s got just the basics of what’s needed, and if you want to mod it with upgrades you can.
I only wish there was a way to make it AWD/4WD, and if there was a way for it to tow a little more weight, then it’d be perfect.
As it is now, it’s still a very compelling concept that I might get into as outside of towing, it solves all the things I need a truck for.
Capitalists must be seething
Capitalists funded this, that’s one the benefits of capitalism, if the market is only offering pricey crappy products that people don’t enjoy buying, theres an opening in the market that can be filled with a company selling people exactly what they want and need.
The design is bad. The front trunk is a bad use of space, and the Japanese figured this out decades ago with the Kei truck. If you want to see real utility, look at this design.
The front trunk is a safety feature called a crumple zone and is objectively safer to be in a crash with.
Hm. Interesting point.
Maybe as we move our economy away from cars, and people dont all have to be drivers, we could also move away from cars that are poorly designed specifically around bad drivers.
Kei was recently found to botch all of their safety test scores for many years. As another commenter said, any crash in that design is guaranteed life threatening without some type of buffer.
That is true, except I’m talking about utility primarily. Garbage trucks already fulfill the design I’m mentioning and are used daily in most cities already.
Are you saying that because a heavy duty, highly specialized, utility vehicle, doesn’t have a crumple zone that the Slate truck is a bad design?
In my view the Slate truck is designed as a work vehicle. It’s for people who need to both hual things, and have a place to store tools. It’s trunk is perfect for that.
The Kei, and box trucks that we have in the US (which would have been a way better example for you to use.), are great for delivery vehicles. Jobs where you load things up and come back with an empty truck.
There’s a place for both form factors. The Slate is not a bad design, it just doesn’t fit what you think the use case for a small truck is.
Except that driver and passengers are above most crash situations. That is a cab over truck. The Japanese mini truck you referenced is a forward control. Different things , actually.
People in garbage trucks don’t experience the same magnitude of force in a crash of equal speed, even without crumple zones, for a few reasons:
- Sheer mass of the garbage truck means that the same amount of momentum transfer results in less force to the humans inside. A garbage truck might weigh literally 20 times as much as a kei truck, which means that an abrupt collision will transfer 1/20 as much impulse to the passengers (as most of the force goes into changing the speed of the truck). Even collisions with still objects (trees, walls, poles) result in less force on the passengers, as a lot of the energy ends up deforming or disintegrating that stationary object as a crumple zone.
- Driver/passenger height in a garbage truck is generally above where the collision/deformation occurs. The passenger compartment isn’t under as much crushing force in a garbage truck crash compared to a kei truck at normal human height.
- The height of a garbage truck gives a lot more physical structure to dissipate the forces in a crash.
So the exact same shape/proportions of vehicle can be vastly different safety when large versus small.
European vans are probably the safest of utility cars, they don’t have a front trunk.
Counterpoint: One of the first things people buy for a truck is a container for the bed for things they don’t want to be in the weather but also not in the cab.
A front-trunk eliminates this need which also frees up bed space.
Americans won’t buy a Kei truck though. Granted, the frunk is a marketing concession, but it’s a fine one, if it can help push the market away from huge and expensive SUVs.
Or, more succinctly, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Americans can’t buy them new because of the so-called Chicken Tax. We can only import them if they’re speed-governed, or at least 25 years old.
Even with those restrictions, lots of Americans want them, including me. There are quite a few importers bringing them over, including one that just started up in my area. They’re desirable enough that major media outlets are running articles about how people who need to get real work done covet kei trucks.
Yes, Americans would buy them. Americans are buying them.
It’s not the chicken tax itself, even if it plays a role. It’s that the chicken tax makes it not economically feasible to try to import light trucks, so they aren’t designed to U.S. emissions and safety regulations. And several U.S. regulations are, in my opinion, misguided, but that doesn’t really change the fact that an importer wouldn’t be able to comply with vehicles that weren’t engineered to those specifications.
Meanwhile, the cars and trucks engineered to American safety and emissions regulations face the perverse incentive to get bigger. This article describes some of the overall issues but contains this interesting nugget:
That’s a sensible recommendation. Except the 3,000-pound 2010 Ranger featured by IIHS has become the bigger and taller 2024 Ford Ranger, which weighs up to 5,325 pounds. Like so many US cars, the Ranger got supersized, a trend fed by a mix of consumer desires and government regulations that carved out gas efficiency loopholes for the trucks and SUVs that make up a swelling share of the US vehicle fleet.
In a sense, the trend of people wanting kei trucks paradoxically comes from the same reason why they’re not street legal: they didn’t get bigger because they weren’t subject to U.S. regulations pushing trucks to get bigger, but the noncompliance with those regulations makes them impossible to import and register (at least until they’re 25 years old).
That’s cute. Do you have any idea how auto regulations work in Japan? The Auto industry owns the politicians and is the reason that cars are forced to be taken off the road after a set number of years. If companies like Toyota don’t want to make an EV, the government will not force the matter.
I have owned a Nissan vanette, And let me tell you, it’s a van-full of nope! Steering is super weird, as the wheels are under you, the feeling that your knees are going to be what crumples in a crash is unnerving, having the engine right next to you (it’s between the front seats) is smelly, warms up one of you thighs, but just one, even in the summer, and a slew of other shit. Standard layout for me, at least Eurovan layout.
There’s no radio, no Bluetooth, and no speakers of any kind beyond for those required to play basic warning chimes.
Many will consider this a cost-cutting step too far, but the interior was designed for ease of upgrading, with easy mounting space for anything from a simple soundbar to a full sound system.
There’s an integrated phone mount right on the dashboard, but there’s nothing stopping you from bringing something even larger. I expect the low-cost Android tablet and 3D-printing communities to have a field day coming up with in-car media streaming solutions.
This is 100% it.
All I want is a modular car system. Everything modular. Dashboard. Body panels. Whatever. I want 3+ cars possible on one frame, and to not need anything more than basic tools to swap parts around.
Gm said they’d build a sled drivetrain that they could just plop bodies on top of but that never happened sadly.
Wonder why? Seems to me like a money printing machine for them, the factory and non- factory repair shops and the aftermarket.
Unless it’s seen as a way to hide your car from illegal activities, which well now that I think about it is probably the reason they didn’t follow through with the idea.
If only that money wouldn’t be partially going into the pockets of Bezos, it would be amazing.
And while easily replacable panels and such are a good thing. Having the mounting screws exposed like that is a horrendus idea. Because I suspect I know what much younger and very drunk people would do, based on the Mercedes hood ornaments I have in a box somewhere.
