Slate Marketing is making me lose interest.

[sodamo]

I know I can’t ship anything in the bed or cab to Hawaii. Lots have tried.

 

[Mackleandy]

I'll be honest, I jumped to reserve the slate as soon as I heard of what it was. It peaked my interest immediately with its highly customizable nature, keep it simple stupid design. But does anyone else feel put off by the marketing? All of the ads are some highly metro version of this little truck. I have a little homestead and am planning on getting it to commute to work as well as pick up bags of grain, hay, chicken feed, whatever else I want to put in the back. I plan on putting some grippy tires on it and making it look more offroad than a starbucks runner. All of the advertisements I see are catered towards artsy, city dwelling people. I want to see it do a little work. Get a little dirty. It's starting to feel like I'm not a part of audience.

Edit: I still plan on buying one and I have the cash set aside. But its discouraging.

I just about cancelled my order when I had to watch Jay Leno shuffle around the Truck in a wrap with his name. Are they kidding? Is that their audience?

 

[sodamo]

If there is one thing this thread validates, it’s pretty much
“all about me” world. Entertaining for sure 🤪

 

[atebit]

Doo-Daa-Dippityy

 

[cadblu]

One caveat. If Slate announces a $20,000 price June 22, forget everything I said.

OK, all is forgotten. Let’s fast forward to June 22, and if it turns out that the base truck is announced at $20k and pre-ordering opens up, I predict that the servers will crash at Slate.Auto.

 

[2thlesswithta2s]

The marketing that got my attention was the "no tech unless you add your own" message. I'm not impressed with lifestyle marketing: urban, rural, or anything in between. I hope they do capture a diverse customer base: their ability to scale is dependent on it. Their ability to provide continued support & accessories is dependent on their survival. The strategic plan, product platform, manufacturing base, & experienced team are all in place. The commercial/marketing side is the big unknown. Your discomfort with the marketing is actually very reassuring to me. I haven't seen any ads yet.

 

[ScooterAsheville]

Doo-Daa-Dippityy

We owned that Kia Soul and loved it. We called it Grasshopper after the Kung Fu series. Then we bought two more and loved them too. We were about to buy the BEV version when they cancelled it. Now they've cancelled the whole Soul program.

 

[ScooterAsheville]

The message from Slate is almost bipolar. You see all the video shorts selling young and fun, with a gazillon colorful wraps. Then you go the website and it is all dark gray - even the color schema of the website itself.

 

[ScooterAsheville]

>> OK, all is forgotten.

I should have added a second caveat. The elevated price of gasoline. If this turns into a permanent situation, or even better worsens and stays worse - BEV skeptics everywhere will undergo a sudden epiphany and will be beating a path to anyone selling a new or used BEV.

 

[Ere]

A while back they showed one being used as a work truck with it wrapped.

 

[Luxrage]

stop paying attention to advertisements. THey are trying to entice who they think is their market. This is kinda a new thing.

Reading that immediately made me think of the internal design document that was leaked of the Honda Element

For a car that ended up mostly being bought by older folks that liked it for easy access and hauling.

 

[KevinRS]

They may or may not be leveraging AI to help them respond, but I've had fringe case discussions with them that no 'AI chatbot' I've encountered could have done... Especially not the kind a resource limited manufacturing startup is most likely to end up with. Occam's razor tells tells me there is still a human somewhere behind those emails.


Why would they ship it separately when they can just load them them in the bed before the truck is loaded on the transporter? I'm not sure if the rear will be spring spacers or replacement springs, but all signs so far point to the front lift just being strut mount spacers.

Shipping accessories with the truck has never been mentioned, and is probably highly unlikely.
For 1, the truck is basically going to have only 2 SKUs coming out of the factory as far as we know, and we will probably know for sure in a month and a few days. The 2 battery sizes.
With only 2 variations, they probably aren't going to ship you a truck with an assigned VIN number from the factory. They will look at city X has orders for Y small battery and Z large batteries, load those numbers on rail cars, and send those rail cars to the closest rail hub to that city, where they assign you a VIN when they tell you to come pick it up.
Another reason, Slate is unlikely to stock many of the accessories at the factory. My thinking is they probably won't even touch the inventory of most of them. They may order a few of each for testing, and marketing, but most will be 3rd party developed and sold. Ordering different tires, they may well come from something like tire rack, floor mats from weathertech, etc.

 

[KevinRS]

Issues with the marketing, basically it's pre-marketing at this point. They are throwing cheap videos out there on the chance some go viral and get them a boost. They already have enough reservations to even with a bad ratio of conversion, soak up the factory output at least until they get up to full speed. Once they have actual sellable trucks coming out of the factory, that's when I expect real marketing to start.

 

[RetiredOnPaper]

IMHO I am in agreement with the author of this Forum. I also have a country place with the first addition to the Slate will be my tool box from my old Ranger. My first trip will probably be a trip to the dump with a hosing out of the bed after. But as a life long Detroiter I have lived around car marketing hype that have no relation to reality. I don't need FSD, crew cab, Bose Sound, 0 to 60 in 0.1 sec. or the ability to tow a starter castle. utility trailer or snow mobile trailer will be more that enough.

 

[E90400K]

Shipping accessories with the truck has never been mentioned, and is probably highly unlikely.
For 1, the truck is basically going to have only 2 SKUs coming out of the factory as far as we know, and we will probably know for sure in a month and a few days. The 2 battery sizes.
With only 2 variations, they probably aren't going to ship you a truck with an assigned VIN number from the factory. They will look at city X has orders for Y small battery and Z large batteries, load those numbers on rail cars, and send those rail cars to the closest rail hub to that city, where they assign you a VIN when they tell you to come pick it up.
Another reason, Slate is unlikely to stock many of the accessories at the factory. My thinking is they probably won't even touch the inventory of most of them. They may order a few of each for testing, and marketing, but most will be 3rd party developed and sold. Ordering different tires, they may well come from something like tire rack, floor mats from weathertech, etc.

If you use a loan to purchase your truck it will have a VIN assigned prior to shipment. We are buying direct from the manufacturer, so the VIN has to be established at the point of sale, i.e. prior to shipment. Same goes if you pay cash in full.