Really really hoping the slate pickup does well. If it does, it might inspire other automakers to go back to the basics. Like do people really want a heated steering wheel when it probably adds $500+ to the MSRP of the vehicle? I think probably not.
Fathom will be the EV for the people. Prepare for a very Tesla Model 3-ish interior mixed with Lightning Pro materials. It's gonna be pretty cheap on the inside, but it will hit the sub 30k price point with 4 doors and all the basics and not be completely gutted like the slate.
Although the cost of owning a vehicle isn't actually the purchase price, it's depreciation, fuel, insurance and so on.
I think the potential advantage of the Slate is that it will be cheaper to repair, and insure, and maintain, precisely because it doesn't have features like metallic paint, ultrasonic sensors, complicated lights or whatever else.
You prang the bumper or front quarter on a bollard with a normal car and that's how many hundreds of dollars to take out the dent, respray the bumper, replace the ultrasonic sensor, do the wiring, do the programming. The Slate has plastic panels which will be much less likely to scratch or dent, if you want to replace it you can buy another panel for $50, unscrew the old one, screw in the new one and carry on.
A fancy headlamp can cost literally $2-3k to replace, the device itself could be over a thousand dollars for matrix headlamps, sometimes mechanics need to disassemble part of the car to fit the new module, and the labour alone is hundreds. With the Slate the module can be bought and replaced easily.
That money is either paid by you or the insurer who then bumps up the premiums for everyone who owns that car.
There's also potential that depreciation will be lower if parts are much easier and cheaper to replace. Say, older cars partly depreciate because the seats get stained or leather cracks, but if it's cheap and easy to replace the seat covers, that isn't an issue. Or cars depreciate because the infotainment software immediately goes out of date, old hardware, old software, poor designed software from the start. Most cars now just basically have a shitty ipad stuck to the dashboard, why not just have a slot and put an actual ipad in it? That could be replaced whenever someone wanted an update.
EVs are cheaper to fuel and maintain, but I'm not claiming they're cheaper to repair because they're EVs.
There is extra cost in repairing and insuring EVs at the moment but a lot of that is because of the way they are engineered, these are exactly the sort of thing the design of the Slate should help with:
The issue, it seems, comes from the way many EVs are designed.
"There's a real focus on keeping weight down, because electric vehicles are heavy," says principal advanced technologies engineer Dan Harrowell.
"To save some weight, there's a lot of integration of components. They're glued together, rather than using fixings, which is great to reduce weight, but not great for repair, because you have to replace whole systems rather than individual components."
In a nearby workshop, a nearly-new model from a mainstream manufacturer is jacked up on a ramp.
This car was brought in following a relatively minor accident, and Harrowell points to a few scratches and scrapes on the protective casing of the battery underneath the car.
The core of the battery, containing the cells which provide power for the car, is unharmed. But because the whole assembly is supplied as a single unit, it would need to be replaced in its entirety for a full repair.
I think Teslas are also expensive in part because they have insane acceleration and attract a certain form of driver. And most modern cars are expensive to insure because they are so expensive to repair.
its not just the design, its the supply chain. companies are following tesla model and trying to be as vertically integrated as possible. so repairs must use oem parts and only oem has all the knowledge to repair properly. thats changing over time as telsa relaxes who can buy oem parts. but its still a choke point.
while slate is less complex, its new and low vol, so it supply chain wont be robust as some other ice cars.
Good points. Don’t you think though a low volume manufacturer is more likely to pick a part off a shelf rather than try to design something custom? Maybe some potential there for simplicity. Although you’d need an off the shelf component which didn’t come as a single integrated unit. I guess I’d say this is the aim of Slate, whether they’re successful is uncertain, but it should be visible in the insurance premium.
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u/Candid_Cat_5921 8h ago
Really really hoping the slate pickup does well. If it does, it might inspire other automakers to go back to the basics. Like do people really want a heated steering wheel when it probably adds $500+ to the MSRP of the vehicle? I think probably not.