Slate Auto gets serious about privacy for its bare-bones EV pickup

Hey, I'll chuck Bezos's table over if I want!

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

(I do love that new text face, though lol)

Agree!! Ah such a neat idea. I do with a 4WD version existed

I have one of the aforementioned 90's style trucks. Still had an extended cab and a proper sized bed even then (late 90's at least).

It's also not my daily driver, but if I could get something off similar capability in a fairly simple EV I'd gladly swap it and my regular car over.

That's ridiculous. You want a van.

It's not purely a demand side thing. It's also a regulatory change. The CAFE standards were updated in 2010 to require a sliding scale of fuel economy standards where larger vehicles were permitted to have less efficient fuel economy ratings. Small trucks sat in an unviable zone of too small to be allowed to be fuel inefficient, and too big to actually be fuel efficient, so they were phased out right around 2010.

Now, fully recognizing that small trucks are in demand, and that EVs don't have worry about fuel economy standards, several manufacturers have made plans to occupy that niche with EVs.

Conveniently ignores the decades of politics, corruption, and outright fraud that took place to create this situation

Those people have no need for a truck. They are in the market for a penis replacement.

I'm talking about people who need trucks for work. They want smaller 4x4 trucks.

so the answer is no, then

Yes, repairability. If my quarter panel gets damaged on my truck, i can replace it and not total the truck.

Bed isn't long enough. It's only 5'.

There have been a handful of open source car projects like the Tabby EVO, but most of them seem to have stalled out somewhat. The Tabby EVO website appears to be down, though you can see it through the wayback machine.

Kit cars based on common off-the-shelf parts may be an easier route for people wanting to build their own car from scratch.

I mean it comes with a manual how to build it and the one I'm looking at is a 67 lotus. You tell me how that open sources because software is not my field

Yeah. I'm in Australia. They likely won't even sell it here

Byd will probably just grab some of the ideas, and I'll buy them 😂

I just hate that all the 4wd stuff is massive. I really want something more that's a jimny but BEV. I drive a jeep now, but I don't need to tow or compensate for anything

I think they absolutely can have deep hooks, but how much sway those hooks have somewhat depends on how much stake they own in the company, which AFAIK is undisclosed.

Slate Auto is ultimately a standard corporation so I trust them about as far as I can throw them, which is why I framed the point on privacy in the post body as if they follow through.

It is entirely possible that the privacy aspect is purely a pre-release marketing thing, and at the point of release the story suddenly changes and a modem is integrated.

Driver facing camera systems can be consistent with privacy, as long as they don't record or transmit any data other than a single dimensional metric of how distracted or drowsy a driver is (or even discrete binary state of yes/no) and timestamps when that state was detected.

A closed loop system that merely keeps that data for the current drive and maintains it solely in the vehicle's own systems can be consistent with privacy principles that nobody else should know anything about how a car is being used, except what can be observed from the outside.