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

Here is what could be potential deal-breakers:

- Lack of a mobile app. Minimalist design is great, but I still want an app to manage charging and be alerted to any vehicle issues.

- Lack of good charge management and battery conditioning. Either that, or a cheap and easy to replace battery pack. I'd really like both!

- Comparable hauling and towing capacity to the 1998 Ford Ranger. Those numbers aren't exactly impressive, but I do use the truck as a truck, and I occasionally need the hauling capacity (weight).

- Bucket seats. I need a bench seat so I can take my wife and dog. Think weekend glamping trips. Picture 8 shows a bucket seat. It doesn't look like that would work.

If anyone from Slate is reading this, this is how I'm looking at this truck. FYI, I'll be comparing this to the Ford Maverick.

Noooooooooo! No apps, please! Finally a car not tethered to and dependent on your phone, and we already have our first request to app-ify it!

EDIT: Ughhh, according to the video that another user posted, it looks like there's an app, and yes, "updates" go through it :(

> - Lack of good charge management and battery conditioning. Either that, or a cheap and easy to replace battery pack. I'd really like both!

Yes to a simple battery system!

> - Comparable hauling and towing capacity to the 1998 Ford Ranger. Those numbers aren't exactly impressive, but I do use the truck as a truck, and I occasionally need the hauling capacity (weight).

Yes!

> - Bucket seats. I need a bench seat so I can take my wife and dog. Think weekend glamping trips. Picture 8 shows a bucket seat. It doesn't look like that would work.

Yes, definitely. It being a 2 seater is kind of a deal breaker for families. You really want a bench seat to at least stick a small child between the driver and passenger. Back in the day, we'd stuff 3 kids between two adults, but these days the Safety People would have a heart attack just thinking about that.

The article mentions an SUV upgrade kit that will bolt onto the back of the truck. Ugh, OK I guess. Sad that that's the way it will probably have to go.

1: https://youtu.be/cq1qEjwSYkw

What you need is not a pickup truck. Catering to families means expensive bells and whistles, like entertainment systems, etc.

> Back in the day, we'd stuff 3 kids between two adults, but these days the Safety People would have a heart attack just thinking about that.

Rightfully so. Back in the day we did so many things we shouldn't have, and survivorship bias makes us default to thinking it was ok. As kids, we used to go barrelling down dirt roads in the back of pickups or played in the backs of station wagons. There's a reason automobile deaths have gone down.

It absolutely does NOT mean those things.

Cars didn't have entertainment systems for nearly a century and families did just fine.

<Get off my lawn>

My entertainment system was the window. Observe the world, not just whatever AI-generated garbage some algorithm pushes to a small screen 8-10 inches away from your eyes.

</Get off my lawn>

What is the need for OTA updates for an EV, once you remove the autopilot and touch screen? Genuinely interested, I would guess there is none, right?

Yes, and no.

I've only started following this recently, but a lot of OTA updates aren't just bug fixes, they're additional features.

My wife's car recently got a free OTA update which upgraded her radio to get HD stations. A previous update allowed her car to start recognizing more types of School Zone and Night Speed signs.

I've read that every year (February, I think) Tesla pushes out a big update that adds features. However, the last two Tesla pushes included a bunch of features that came standard with my wife's (much cheaper) car years ago.

You could certainly argue that her car should have come with HD Radio enabled from the start, and ditto for the Tesla features. But to suppose that all OTA car updates are nothing more than more invasive tracking and bug fixes is not strictly correct.