At last month’s rapturously received Slate debut, it took an executive’s quip that “Slate” and “Tesla” use the same 5 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 …
