Slate Auto to build electric pickup in Indiana
The US startup Slate Auto has announced the location for the production of its Slate Truck. The electric pickup truck will roll off the production line in Warsaw, a small town in the US state of Indiana. More precisely, on the approximately 130,000 square metre site of a former large printing plant, the main features of which opened in 1958 and ceased operations in 2023. This was reported by Business Insider.
“We would like to see what we can do to go into an existing facility that has been shuttered and reindustrialize and revitalize that community,” the US media outlet quotes Slate Managing Director Chris Barman as saying. Slate’s first own production facility is expected to create up to 2,000 new jobs in Warsaw, significantly more than were lost when the factory closed two years ago. At that time, the print shop still employed around 500 people.
It is not uncommon for American electric car manufacturers to take over and repurpose existing production facilities, albeit from old car factories. Rivian’s main plant in Normal, Ohio, for example, was previously a Mitsubishi factory, while Tesla’s first Gigafactory was originally part of the ‘New United Motor Manufacturing’ joint venture between General Motors and Toyota.
The site in Warsaw is home to two factory buildings, each measuring around 56,000 square metres. The US company has not yet announced how much space Slate Auto will need at the site for its production. However, demand for the Slate Truck, which Slate Auto expects to deliver to customers from the end of 2026, is high.
According to the startup, more than 100,000 pre-orders for the first model, which should be able to travel 241 or 386 kilometres, depending on the version, were received within a few weeks of the presentation in spring 2025. However, interested parties only had to pay 50 dollars. Compared to other electric pickup trucks, the Slate Truck is rather slimmed down and impresses above all with its high level of modularity, which also keeps prices low due to the large number of identical parts.
Without extra features, it is expected to cost 27,500 dollars or about 23,600 euros. This would make it the cheapest pickup truck in the USA at the moment. The angular and emphatically restrained retro design is reminiscent of the pickup trucks of the 1980s and early 1990s.
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