The Slate Truck is, on paper, a masterclass in strategic Down-Selling
Strategic Down-Selling vs. the Cybertruck
Ask anyone about vehicles today, let alone brand new ones, and you'll hear the same refrain: they’re way too expensive. For years, the EV conversation has been dominated by premium brands competing on features, range, luxury, and status. Larger, bigger, with more screens, features, and ballooning price tags. Tesla’s Cybertruck is rapidly becoming the endgame of this trend and also a business disaster.
But something very different is happening on the other end of the spectrum.
Enter the Slate Truck, an allegedly $20,000 electric utility vehicle (we'll see about that, of course, but let's assume it will eventually get in the $35-40K zone). The truck doesn’t care about competing on horsepower, sleek UI, or autopilot modes. It’s a stripped-down, honest machine that does just what’s needed—and nothing more. No screen, no stereo, just about 200 km of range, and manual windows. Damn.
In doing so, Slate isn’t just offering a cheaper truck. It’s executing a textbook-perfect Down-Sell with strategic intent and cultural edge. You might see that as just "cheap" or a compromise, while for me, it’s probably a masterful category creation.
Category creation and being an underdog
I recently worked on a full playbook on organic growth strategies for the worldwide leadership teams at Saint-Gobain. And while we addressed a vast array of tools and approaches to organic growth (ie, growth powered by new or repeat customer activity without much–if any–capital injections), one of the most challenging to address is what I call a down-sell.
The core prompt is "What if growth lies in the inverse of feature creep—radical simplification and reaching out to a customer category you never connected with with your current offers?" or more bluntly: "How could you simplify your offer to provide 80% of the value for 30% of the price?"
Weird? Not so much. This is Ryan Air, McDonald's, Uniqlo, Muji, Amazon Basics, Coursera, Ikea, etc.
The Slate Truck aligns with this strategy beautifully. Building an EV with as core principle to remove all the fluff a modern automaker would feel compelled to add to justify a $50-80K price tag, as what we are talking about. Instead of dealing with a huge bill of material cost, including a monstrous battery to get in the 600km autonomy range and self-driving capabilities, thinking in terms of just moving stuff from A to B as effectively as possible is bold.
And while we marvel at the specs of the truck (or lack thereof), the real move is in the business model. Slate went down-market—not by diluting value, but by redefining it. This is not a poor man’s Cybertruck. It’s something else entirely: a functional tool designed to talk to a part of the market no automakers currently talk to.
A flywheel built for scale
If I still want to believe the team at Slate Truck is a genius, I could see how it activates a powerful business flywheel:
- Focus your core offer – A no-nonsense utility truck.
- Attract new customers – People left behind by inflated EV prices.
- Increase volume of sales – Simpler manufacturing, broader appeal.
- Enable modularity to fit more use cases – Onboard more possible customers with no-nonsense options.
- Enhance operational excellence – Local production, lean supply chain.
And that's the other neat strategic trick: the truck is also built as a flexible mobility platform. While the core offer is barebones, you can add modules and curated options to make it a fun beach car, a delivery pickup, or even an SUV (if you really want). But you don't have to.
It’s a smart, lateral strategy to expand use cases and customer categories along the way. Think about it as a reverse-Tesla master plan. Instead of going premium and slowly walking down the market segments and painfully trying to reach the low end of the market, start at the bottom and curate ways to aggregate customers' use cases by use case.
This is disruption 101.
Don't fight Tesla's or BYD's approach to EVs, ignore it.
Finding value where others see risk
What makes the Slate Truck so aligned with a down-selling strategy is how it reframes the downsides as strengths:
- "It’s too basic!" Good. Basic is what makes it accessible.
- "It might hurt the brand." Only if you have a premium brand to protect. Slate is starting from scratch—with scars built in.
- "It won’t appeal to mainstream consumers." That’s the point. The mainstream has been overserved. Slate is going after the overlooked.
And they’re doing it with design intent. Slate’s design lead, Tisha Johnson, talks about the truck like a street-fighting shark: scratched up, battered, and still swimming. The aesthetic isn’t about perfection—it’s about durability and purpose. In contrast, the Cybertruck is a monument to maximalism. It’s a stainless-steel spaceship priced like a luxury good. It makes headlines, turns heads, and promises a Blade Runner-esque future. Also? It's crappy manufacturing.
This, by the way, I often work with designers on some strategic projects. While my understanding of "design" is limited (put me in the enthusiastic aficionado category), just like their approach to "strategy" very much is, the synergy is like good wine and cheese.
To push this further, here's a quote from the wonderful book Substract:
For a lot of human history, we’ve been surrounded by a world that can mostly be improved by adding stuff… where adding was really the dominant way to make things better. This idea that we systematically overlook subtraction as a way to make things better is really problematic.
Final thought...
Down-selling isn’t about lowering your standards. It’s about removing the unnecessary, uncovering latent demand, and enabling access. The Slate Truck as a shot at proving that radical simplification, when paired with purpose, doesn’t just build a product. It builds a movement.
Will it succeed? I sure don't know, and it might end up being just another vaporware EV company. With deliveries realistically expected in 2027, anything can happen from now on...
But that, in my playbook, is what innovation truly looks like.
Notes:
- I was already talking about this strategic move back in 2011. 😱