A $20k American-made electric pickup with no paint, no stereo, no screen

This looks great. But isn't there a long history of new car companies over the last few decades that have an impressive car, take pre-orders and never deliver? Something about production hell?

Slate is financially backed by Bezos [1] and Eric Schmidt [2] so it's not like they're going to run out of money unless they choose to do so. And it's staffed by a bunch of Detroit automotive engineers, so it's not like they're going to be surprised to learn that building and selling automobiles is harder than launching a CRUD app or SAAS.

I do expect a steep price jump when they realize that all this customization (especially post-purchase) makes crash testing really difficult and expensive, $20k is not going to happen but hopefully it will be under $30k MSRP and under $40k with typical options, at least targeting a different market than Rivian.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/08/inside-the-ev-startup-secr...

[2] https://www.fastcompany.com/91322801/bezos-backed-slate-auto...