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>
A physical holder for a personal pad device.
The amount of not-invented-here, duplicate functionality that car companies execute poorly, when buyers already have devices that do that well, is ridiculous.
The biggest benefit of aligning manufacturing costs for profit should be jettisoning the "post-sale" revenue streams that drive complicated built-in tech for current cars.
And also, you-know, 100% A+ on getting back to "customize your own car, because it's cheap and supported"!
Owners being afraid of doing what they want with their devices/vehicles has to stop.
Like when GM invented their own computer to put into their cars instead of just buying one off the shelf decades ago
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?
I don't personally disagree with you, but today it pretty much does.
Anyways, my point is that this is designed as a utilitarian, cheap truck that covers the use case that most pickup trucks are actually utilitarian for, like local farm or light duty construction work. It's got a short range, no entertainment for long drives, etc. The article doesn't even say if it has AC (Slate's site seems to have images that allude to it having it).
The OP wants something for families, which exists and costs more because most families want more. They want good, cheap, and available when you can only have two. Even with gas/diesel powered trucks, there's a huge difference between the utilitarian ones construction workers and farmers buy and beat up and the expensive "luxury" quad-cabs that families now buy because minivans are too uncool.
I want something much more utilitarian than what is being pitched to today's families. If you want a Quad Cab, Infotainment systems, and yadda, yadda, yadda - the market already has options. Lots of them.
If you want a cheap, light duty truck similar to what a Chevy S10 or a Ford Ranger used to be, then you're pretty much SOL.
The world is pretty freaking boring when it's just pavement and the 5,000th time you've passed the same strip mall, gas station, and McDonald's. The same dirty snowbanks on either side of the same gray asphalt under the interminably gray winter sky.
Maybe you lived in a place of wonderful natural beauty, or a vibrant urban street culture. A lot of people don't.
However I strongly believe we can cultivate fascination with the droll.
A gray worldview might possibly say more about you.
Is a gray grain of sand interesting? Blaming a local world for being boring seems overly negative.
And yet, somehow the children survived and thrived.
They learned to make up games, to entertain themselves, and to -- perish the thought -- talk to other human beings in their own family! /shudder/
ARE WE THERE YET? ... ARE WE THERE YET? ... ARE WE THERE YET?
we would've called it parkour if we had known what parkour was back then
Honestly, I got bummed when I found out this was an electric vehicle, I wish there wasn’t a chance for my vehicle to get bricked through an over-the-air update, and I personally would like to have a basic stereo with an aux input just so I can listen to FM stations or Spotify while I haul a bunch of DIY materials around without having to install my own speakers.
My friend keeps telling me to get a truck for my next vehicle, and while this truck doesn’t make the cut for me, hopefully future trucks made either by Slate Auto or other manufacturers inspired by them will add juuuust the right amount of creature comforts to win me over.
I believe I saw there are plans for some sort of SUV conversion.
> Catering to families means expensive bells and whistles, like entertainment systems, etc.
IF it could just get a bluetooth signal from an iDevice or some Android thing, that would probably suffice for a basic option. If the owner needs more than than, let them install (or have installed) some sort of third-party infotainment head of some sort.
Back in the old days, cars sometimes had a single speaker and that was plenty sufficient for listening to music.
