POLL: What are you most interested about with the Slate truck?

[Driven5]

In fact, you are raising an interesting point regarding Slate's long-term appeal to the car buying community. Every aspect of the truck is scaled to affordability and what's essential, nothing more, nothing less. Totally...adequate. Now if Slate is rated "adequate" in every category, will it be a hit? How long do "adequate vehicles" fall out of favor with the consumer? I am struggling with how I will feel about Slate 2 or 3 years down the road after all the excitement and new car smell wears off.

Aside from a pervasive infotainment tech bloat, the typical RAV4, CRV, and their ilk are nothing more than adequate by any other measure... Yet they sell by the boatload year after year. Few drivers seem to find this to be a long-term ownership problem.

 

[OldGoat]

What can't be added (yet) to the reason to buy list is Cost of Long Term Operation. Without all the ICE parts we can bypass timing belts, water pumps, fuel filters, spark plugs, ignition coils, tranny services, oil changes, and much more. But the truck will have to prove itself before we can say it's less costly to operate over a longer period. But I'm betting it will be. And if Slates really are easier to service by The Average Owner, well then....the scales will really favor them over perhaps a comparable ICE choice that over time will nibble at the wallet.

 

[AZFox]

What can't be added (yet) to the reason to buy list is Cost of Long Term Operation.

Unless you expect the Truck to have design defects that require unusual maintenance costs, low cost-of-maintenance can be expected

"Fuel" and Insurance also factor into cost-of-ownership. It's reasonable to expect those to be favorable as well.

 

[Luxrage]

I'm technology-averse as concerns my vehicles, so I'm a bit out of the loop on some of this (15+ year old cars). Is this repair information readily available with affordable diagnostic hardware? Do I need a Picoscope and some kind of software license to deal with it? Honest question. I don't know the details of the gap between the basic OBDII reader and high-end mechanic documentation. I don't think I remember stumbling across many pieces of advice more complicated than "pull codes", but also see previous comment about vehicle vintage.

As EK said, there's other interface cables / software for the non OBD2 side of cars for their other software and I can give you at least one example I dealt with myself. My roommate's 99 VW Passat required a special VAGCOM interface cable and third party software to interface with the body control module (couldn't reset the transmission and fix an issue with the mirrors without it).

Luckily the volume of VW owners and popularity of the brand made it so I could get a cable (at the time) for $35 and the software had a shareware limited version I could use. If the Slate has anything specific like that it will take volumes of people owning and driving it and demanding solutions for the third parties to step up and start cranking out whatever OEM tools we need / software workarounds for right to repair if Slate doesn't.

For me the Slate's appeal is two things. Small two door pickup truck and it's cheap.

 

[atx_ev]

No franchised dealers!

Hate dealers due to their morals, ethics and business decisions that erodes customers trust.
Even dealer service depts are horrendous!

• PHEV: had to drive thru 2 counties to find a dealer that would not mark up the car.
• BEV #1: before finalizing the order, had to find a dealer that would not mark up the car - next county over.
• BEV #2: previous dealer changed their pricing and started to mark up the car. Spent 2 days calling around to find a dealer 2 counties away who would not mark up the car.

wanted to lease an equinox BEV before the fed incentive ended. According to the chevy website based on the dealers listed price and all my discounts I should have been able to get a 2 year, 10K mile lease with zero down for under 200/month.

the dealer wouldnt honor that price, they wanted to charge $320. I asked them to show me the adjusted cap cost, residual, and money factor because with those 3 things you can 100% calculate the payments.

The residual and money factor are set by GM financial, so the only thing the dealer could adjust was the cap cost( price) so they were essentially lying to me about the price but would never show me the actual "price" I was getting.