Last week, Slate Auto, an electric car startup backed by Jeff Bezos and led by a group of former Amazon executives, announced the price tag for America's most affordable electric pickup truck: $24,950. It's not bare bones, but its pricing and design have grabbed the headlines and, according to the company, 180,000 bookings since its launch in April 2025 and 10,000 pre-orders since the pricing was revealed.
The basic Blank Slate pickup has only two doors and two seats. It doesn't come with a stereo or infotainment system, it doesn't have adaptive cruise control, and it's not painted. The body is composite, so the Slate offers a wrap for charging. Door rests, pockets, center consoles and other features common to modern cars are all extra costs and can be installed by the owner (Slide offers DIY installation instructions) or at a RepairPal certified shop (also for an additional fee). The Slate gets an electric range of approximately 205 kilometers and can be charged at the Tesla Supercharger network. The $25K price tag is impressive, considering that even Tesla, the largest EV manufacturer in the US, has never been able to build a car at this price point.
While there are plenty of questions about the demand for a cheap car among low-income consumers suffering from inflation, Slate Auto appears to have the business and manufacturing chops, increasing its chances of success. That's in large part due to the combination of former Amazon leaders across the organization and a unique “constrained design” approach to building the new Slate from the ground up, which helped save costs the company hopes will attract consumers.
Slate emerged from Re:Build Manufacturing, a project launched in 2020 by former Amazon chief marketing officer Jeff Wilke and investor Miles Arnone with the goal of “ensuring that the next generation of important products are built and manufactured at the highest level in America.” They started with aerospace and defense projects like XRAE-1 droneit is said “show the pony” of the Pentagon with a range of 8,000 miles—long enough to reach targets in China and the Indo-Pacific region.
Wilke spent 22 years at Amazon, most recently serving as CEO of Amazon Worldwide Consumer, before retiring in 2021, aged just 53. Arnone and Wilke met through an MIT graduate program called “Production Leaders,” according to a blog post on the Re:Build site. Arnone told the Observer that as he watches the auto industry chase bigger, more expensive, more sophisticated cars, he believes it is “leaving the average American.”
Slate Auto's CEO, Peter Faricy, is also a former Amazon executive. He previously served as VP of Amazon Marketplace and spent 13 years at the company.
It's more than just another EV company
Re:Build's automotive pivot was unexpected, according to Wilke, but is consistent with the company's goal of retooling US manufacturing for safety purposes.
“We weren't planning to build a car company; we were just planning to start filling some of the industrial capacity that the US has outsourced for the last 40 years—to the detriment of our democracy,” Wilke told the Observer. “If we don't do it, no one will do it, then we can just give the keys to China.
That philosophy is now at the heart of Re:Build and Slate, and, as it turns out, fresh eyes in automotive manufacturing have revealed a new way to design an affordable car, according to Wilke and Arnone.
Most cars are built from the ground up with consumer needs and profit at the center. Designers and product planners define the car, engineers make it work, and the factory adapts to those constraints. Slate and Re: Build to run that sequence in reverse.
“We call it controlled manufacturing design, instead of manufacturing design,” Arnone told the Observer. “The industry has as much a say in product design as the consumer.”
“Our entire ecosystem is capital-light and OpEx-light, and that's not how most companies—even most startups—operate,” CEO Faricy told the Observer. “We don't have a paint shop; we don't have a stamping plant—that's a half-billion-dollar savings right there. We've made a lot of decisions across the company to live up to that savings.”
ok two. The armrest doubles as the center console's upper surface, with a single design that serves three functions.
So-called savings are “moving throughout the organization,” says Barman, “because we need fewer engineers, fewer top people, fewer buyers, and fewer financial staff. And that ultimately reduces the amount of money we have to carry. It's the accumulation of small, efficient jobs over time that really adds up and lowers costs.”
Jeff Bezos' productivity bet
Slate is backed by the Bezos family's office, Bezos Expeditions. The founder of Amazon is betting on mass production. His AI startup, Prometheus, is building an “artificial general engineer”—software designed to compress the long timeline from design to production for everything from jet engines to chips. He describes it as a modern version of computer-aided design (CAD), which can make the “build-build loop” ten times faster. Slate and Prometheus do not share a corporate relationship, but their basic methods point in the same direction: Amazon's instinct to fix customer costs, strip out inefficiencies, and scale as cheaply as possible is now being used on the factory floor.
It is important to note that this technique has not been proven in the real world. There is, after all, a difference between a cheap and an affordable car. Slate has yet to build a single customer-ready truck, and consumer demand is still uncertain because reservations don't translate into pre-orders. Slate factory in Warsaw, Ind. it's only about three-quarters done, and Barman says production is expected to begin by the end of 2026, with delivery soon after. Faricy puts the factory resting at 80,000 cars a year, which is an unprecedented high, and Re:Build and Slate's production thesis is as strong as the cars that hit the road.
Wilke and Arnone plan the effort as a way to prevent China from dominating the affordable car market, though that competition may be years away. The immediate question is whether Slate can generate enough demand to reshape the auto industry and potentially others. For that answer, we will have to wait and see.
