{{ The secret is now out as Ford races toward building its first model, a new truck it says will be nearly as fast as a Mustang, travel around 300 miles on a single charge and feature in-car technology to compete with Tesla and China. It’s aiming for a 2027 launch and a price tag of around $30,000, the cost of a Toyota Camry. }}
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A response to the new Slate coming out this fall?
But 300 miles on a single charge and feature in-car technology to compete with Tesla and China. Does Ford have some new secret sauce? Perhaps parts from the Ford Ranger will be utilized? The Slate is anticipated to cost in the high $20k range.
I look forward to seeing the new Ford EV pickup.
Sure. But the Slate doesn’t even have power windows and door locks. It doesn’t even have a sound system. It is so “basic” that, sorry, it is bound to flop.
The slate offers a lot of DIY customization parts. You can get it outfitted with power windows, door locks, and sound system, but then it’s a $40,000 vehicle.
{{ Accessories are the crux of Slate, with the high-margin parts giving buyers the chance to modify the Truck to their personal and budgetary needs. The brand claims more than 100 accessory items will be available when deliveries of the Truck begin at the end of 2026, ranging from power windows to a 2.0-inch lift and 1.0-inch lowering kit, to even an SUV kit, which adds a roof panel over the Truck’s stubby bed and a three-across rear bench seat, roll bar, and airbags aft of the cab. }}
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Agree.
Does anyone here believe Ford can achieve 300 miles on a single charge and feature in-car technology to compete with Tesla and China. for $30k?
What’s the point of doing that, though? There’s a reason why so many car features (including all those) come standard. Demand for them is so universal that it’s more efficient for the manufacturers to just put them in every car rather than deal with the logistics of treating them as options. It really doesn’t seem like this is going to be an effective strategy except as PR - an effort to maybe get some press for selling a really cheap EV, maybe. Even then, that seems like it would backfire, as a lot of folks will end up being disappointed that by the time you add back in all the stuff that’s minimally expected of a vehicle, it’s no longer especially cheap.
As for the OP, I’m sure that Ford is trying to develop a $30K EV with China-beating range and interior features. But no guarantees it will happen.
No. Worse yet, I believe they’re chasing the wrong target. Ford is convinced people want an EV pickup because, well, they buy gas pickups. But that’s wrong: pickup owners want a few things, none of which have to do with “energy source.”
Some want cargo capacity, heavy loads for gravel and sand and bags of cement and the like. Those guys aren’t going to “go electric” because of charging time. Some want to haul a 5th wheel, and that means distance - and distance with weight is.a no-go for electric pickups. And lastly, there are those who just want to tool around in a pickup because, you know, cowboy. And that segment is virulently anti-EV, (“EVs are woke”) so they’re not gonna buy them either.
Ford might sell a few here and there, but overall I predict a flop. The Slate, I think has a better market, because there are lots of (dare I say immigrants) who would love a cheap pickup for their landscaping and other manual labor businesses, who don’t care about roll down windows, and who will carry a phone and ear buds for music, or a boombox or some other substitute rather than a $2,000 upgrade for a radio. And I see a second market for homeowners who occasionally need a pickup but don’t want to go 50-large to have one sitting in the side yard most of the time.
Ford is stuck in the rut of their own making. They don’t have sedans, so they figure if they’re going to get in the EV business it has to be with a truck. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Ford came out with the Mach E and the Lightning, and then nothing. Nothing else. They just stopped. What did GM do? Heck, CADILLAC has 5 EVs to choose from now! Plus the Chevy and GMC options.
Ford needed an EV Explorer and Escape. And they did neither. Agreed, the truck market is not prime for electrification yet. Even the people (and there are MANY) who used trucks as nothing more than transportation (no trailers, no heavy loads, never off pavement) want the masculinity factor.
As Elon Musk explains automakers typically sell cars at little or no profit and make their money price gouging on spare parts. Tesla was unusual in that it had a compelling product that it could sell at a high margin.
intercst
A related article today:
I disagree. I want a truck to do truck stuff. Sure, if I am taking a road trip, sure I want all the bells whistles. But I am hauling gravel from Home Depot I want a truck.
I don’t want or need more than a two seater. Which you almost can’t buy these days. The bed on the Slate is also bigger than the Ford Maverick or Hyundai Santa Cruz. Big plus if you want or need a truck. Plus you get the frunk as well. Good place to keep tools out of sight.
OEM sound systems sound like garbage. So I’d rather install my own.
Info systems get out dated rapidly and have high failure rates. I’m using my phone for navigation anyway, so all I need is a clip that holds it up where I can see it. Again, I’m not road tripping. I’m going to the garden store.
I like power door locks though. I’d pay extra for that.
Not sure what that has to with my question, which was asking what the point was to selling cars with manual door locks or windows.
Every single car on the market today comes with power locks and windows standard. Not just the pricey cars, but even the cheapest models from automakers that eagerly play in the cheaper segment. That tells us something:
Those things are cheap. Cheap enough that it doesn’t make sense to treat them as options, rather than standard equipment. Perhaps even cheaper than bothering with a manual mechanism.
Which makes me think that this whole “manual crank windows” thing is just performative. They can’t possibly be saving enough money for that to matter, for it to be worth the hassle of making it a bespoke option. Build-to-order makes it possible to do this sort of thing when it wasn’t before - to match the one person out of a hundred that might be willing to have manual locks with the one car out of a hundred that gets built with manual locks. But the cost on resale value (when that matching disappears and your manual lock car has to be bought off the lot) will undo that right quick.
Of course, you are an N of 1 … the questions are:
Possibly, but there are instances of companies increasing feature sets (and prices) until a new competitor comes in at the bottom of the food chain and captures a segment with “cheap”. The entire “Innovators’ Dilemma” is predicated on exactly this sort of thing happening (although not perfectly; generally the trope involves a “new disruptive technology” but not always.) The incunmbent is usually busy chasing higher margin segments - and successfully - when a new entrant comes in seeking new/cheap customers, and for a while the incumbent laughs and says “no threat to me” until oops, later they realize that they’re losing market share and can’t sustain with only the highest of the high end.
Now that’s the cataclysmic end, but there are outcomes that stop short of that, but still leave room for.a lower priced entrant to make headway. Coke & Pepsi successfully pushed RC Cola and the others into oblivion, and then Sam’s came in and has taken share (profitably.) Kellogg’s and Post had a decent duopoly when bagged (cheaper) cereals came in underneath and now they’ve got shelf space in the cereal aisle.
I have no idea if that segment is large enough to make it profitable; it takes a sizable amount of capital to build assembly lines for cars, but I wouldn’t discount the possibility of someone coming in well under the current “leaders” with a product offering that might be attractive.
The innovators dilemma scenario is a new next generation of the product, not a stripped down version of the incumbent product. In this scenario, it would be someone coming in with a new way of unlocking doors, or a completely new type of window, or something like that. Turning back the clock to obsolete technology isn’t really the ID in action.
There is an innovation at play here - the build-to-order model. With customers shopping from dealer inventory, it’s very efficient to have standard equipment for a lot of the car. Even if there’s some small number of people who would prefer to deviate from that standard equipment (“I’d accept manual door locks to save $11!”), you have a matching problem. If 1% of customers would prefer manual door locks, and you offer 1% of models with manual door locks, the customers and the cars aren’t likely to easily find each other. If you make a car with a manual door lock, it might end up sitting in dealer inventory for a long time, because that specific subset of customer is so narrow they might not find that alternative. And the small amount of extra value you create for your customer is swamped by that matching problem.
Build-to-order sort of solves that. You make the customer a little better off by matching to their unusual needs, and you don’t have inventory or matching risk. It’s the difference between, say, having an inventory of items personalized with someone’s name vs. having a machine that puts someone’s name onto a blank item - you don’t have to solve for Bort.
But there’s an issue, which is why I think this doesn’t make much sense. The matching problem is only solved for the initial sale. That car will eventually be resold, and it will become a problem down the road. The customer will have trouble selling the car. Because 99% of people don’t want manual door locks, even if it saves them $11, and dealers who might buy the car know that. While the customer received a small amount of “better off” at the initial purchase, they’re much worse off when it comes to resale.
I can see a start up company like Slate saying to themselves, “well, that’s a 2031 problem, not a now problem” - and they’re probably right. But that’s why I don’t think that type of stuff is material or likely to last. Letting your customers make poor decisions when they buy their car is unlikely to build lasting brand value.