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And also, at the moment, no trucks.
I swear, there’s a massive opportunity in the market for robust and inexpensive products.
Stop making shit as ‘thin’ as possible. Stop adding a bunch of nonsense just to drive up the price.
Keep it simple. Keep it basic. Do one thing and do it well.
Make it 10k-12k and it would be a yes if parts and repair ability were guaranteed for 10 years.
Yes, more of this please!
No idea why it has no stereo though. That feels like a pretty basic feature. Doesnt even need to be built in. Just iso standard head unit bay would do.
Already tired of seeing this cool car and now I’m already seeing more “fuck car” articles and post; as well as countries wanting to limit cars on the road. Something is at foot
It’s backed by Bezos. Wouldn’t even consider it for that reason alone.
I’m sure, somehow, mostly everything is at least slightly backed by bezos
The design is bad. The front trunk is a bad use of space, and the Japanese figured this out decades ago with the Kei truck. If you want to see real utility, look at this design.
They don’t make electric Kei trucks though.
The front trunk is a safety feature called a crumple zone and is objectively safer to be in a crash with.
Hm. Interesting point.
Maybe as we move our economy away from cars, and people dont all have to be drivers, we could also move away from cars that are poorly designed specifically around bad drivers.
Kei was recently found to botch all of their safety test scores for many years. As another commenter said, any crash in that design is guaranteed life threatening without some type of buffer.
If theres anything Ive learned from the fire departments insistence to have big wide roads so that they can shave off nano seconds to their response time, sometimes theres bigger things than persieved immediate safety to the individual.
For example, if we all drove Kei trucks slowly on small roads, a collision would not be as bad as driving a big safety focused truck at 80mph.
Still, your point is well taken. Maybe there are some ways to make safe small vehicles, including trucks, that arent explored yet.
You need infrastructure to actually support an alternative, otherwise cars are a necessity for many people to get to work and the grocery store.
Yeah, it would be nice to not need cars. I feel like this is a step towards function and away from vanity. Which is a good thing, even if it’s not the end goal.
That is true, except I’m talking about utility primarily. Garbage trucks already fulfill the design I’m mentioning and are used daily in most cities already.
People in garbage trucks don’t experience the same magnitude of force in a crash of equal speed, even without crumple zones, for a few reasons:
- Sheer mass of the garbage truck means that the same amount of momentum transfer results in less force to the humans inside. A garbage truck might weigh literally 20 times as much as a kei truck, which means that an abrupt collision will transfer 1/20 as much impulse to the passengers (as most of the force goes into changing the speed of the truck). Even collisions with still objects (trees, walls, poles) result in less force on the passengers, as a lot of the energy ends up deforming or disintegrating that stationary object as a crumple zone.
- Driver/passenger height in a garbage truck is generally above where the collision/deformation occurs. The passenger compartment isn’t under as much crushing force in a garbage truck crash compared to a kei truck at normal human height.
- The height of a garbage truck gives a lot more physical structure to dissipate the forces in a crash.
So the exact same shape/proportions of vehicle can be vastly different safety when large versus small.
Are you saying that because a heavy duty, highly specialized, utility vehicle, doesn’t have a crumple zone that the Slate truck is a bad design?
In my view the Slate truck is designed as a work vehicle. It’s for people who need to both hual things, and have a place to store tools. It’s trunk is perfect for that.
The Kei, and box trucks that we have in the US (which would have been a way better example for you to use.), are great for delivery vehicles. Jobs where you load things up and come back with an empty truck.
There’s a place for both form factors. The Slate is not a bad design, it just doesn’t fit what you think the use case for a small truck is.
Except that driver and passengers are above most crash situations. That is a cab over truck. The Japanese mini truck you referenced is a forward control. Different things , actually.
That’d be fine too. What’s your point?
Counterpoint: One of the first things people buy for a truck is a container for the bed for things they don’t want to be in the weather but also not in the cab.
A front-trunk eliminates this need which also frees up bed space.
Exactly, you can usually tell someone actually needs a truck if it’s got a stainless box behind the cab. Obviously there’s still people who cosplay as truck drivers that will have them too, but there are other signs you can use to tell them apart.
Americans won’t buy a Kei truck though. Granted, the frunk is a marketing concession, but it’s a fine one, if it can help push the market away from huge and expensive SUVs.
Or, more succinctly, don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Americans can’t buy them new because of the so-called Chicken Tax. We can only import them if they’re speed-governed, or at least 25 years old.
Even with those restrictions, lots of Americans want them, including me. There are quite a few importers bringing them over, including one that just started up in my area. They’re desirable enough that major media outlets are running articles about how people who need to get real work done covet kei trucks.
Yes, Americans would buy them. Americans are buying them.
It’s not the chicken tax itself, even if it plays a role. It’s that the chicken tax makes it not economically feasible to try to import light trucks, so they aren’t designed to U.S. emissions and safety regulations. And several U.S. regulations are, in my opinion, misguided, but that doesn’t really change the fact that an importer wouldn’t be able to comply with vehicles that weren’t engineered to those specifications.
Meanwhile, the cars and trucks engineered to American safety and emissions regulations face the perverse incentive to get bigger. This article describes some of the overall issues but contains this interesting nugget:
That’s a sensible recommendation. Except the 3,000-pound 2010 Ranger featured by IIHS has become the bigger and taller 2024 Ford Ranger, which weighs up to 5,325 pounds. Like so many US cars, the Ranger got supersized, a trend fed by a mix of consumer desires and government regulations that carved out gas efficiency loopholes for the trucks and SUVs that make up a swelling share of the US vehicle fleet.
In a sense, the trend of people wanting kei trucks paradoxically comes from the same reason why they’re not street legal: they didn’t get bigger because they weren’t subject to U.S. regulations pushing trucks to get bigger, but the noncompliance with those regulations makes them impossible to import and register (at least until they’re 25 years old).
You’re correct, my memory took a shortcut. Thanks for the very thorough explanation!
Yep, the Chevrolet Bolt is the closest I could get to a Kei van.
Americans won’t be able to afford anything anyway pretty soon.
Forward control trucks, like that Kei truck are shit in so many respects, it would take a while to list. Source: I’ve owned one of it’s larger siblings and learned to hate them (being 187 cm tall didn’t help)
Front trunks save lives in collisions though. I’d 100% rather be in a vehicle with a hood between me and another car, and I say this as an avid kei-truck fan.
I have owned a Nissan vanette, And let me tell you, it’s a van-full of nope! Steering is super weird, as the wheels are under you, the feeling that your knees are going to be what crumples in a crash is unnerving, having the engine right next to you (it’s between the front seats) is smelly, warms up one of you thighs, but just one, even in the summer, and a slew of other shit. Standard layout for me, at least Eurovan layout.
Yea but we’re talking about electric vehicles now, no engine block.
Crazy how so many people have been begging for bare bones, affordable electric vehicles.
Then when one comes on the scene they do nothing but complain. Can’t please anybody these days it seems.
Edit: sp
It’s a great concept, but it has blinding LED headlights and automatic high beams
instant fuck off
Part of the problem is they exist, but not in America. Ford even makes a small EV hatchback in Europe.
Odds are they’re not the same people, but I see your sentiment.
The moron refusing to buy it just because it’s backed by Bezos clearly has no idea about the world he’s living in.
Lost me at “American”.
I hate that Bezos backed them
When you got unlimited money, you have a finger in everyone’s pie. An unfortunate reality.
Rich people’s money and actual dark illegal money is intertwined in our economy. The economy would probably collapse without it.
I wonder how this could be fixed?
If you taxed the rich would it work best to do it gradually? Also would that give cartels and organized crime advantage? Would you have to tackle both?
I wonder if in doing so without doing it gradually would be as messy as what the Trump admin is doing now?
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Stop being an asshole.
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he knows people will want it 🤷
I find this minimalism strangely appealing. Unfortunately, I do not live on a farm. I hope this thing is useful to those who do, though.
I pretty much do and I’m kinda stoked, cautiously
If I can have a Linux truck that works and can tow something if need be… I’m down
Linux truck
And has to resemble the late 1970s-1980s body styles because of the kiss methodology. I’d love me a 1972 C10 or a 1981 F150 with Debian.
Oh fuck yeah
Sudo unlock drivers-door
Imagine turning on the engine and the A/C via SSH on a hot day, remotely from the office.
I live in a rural area and need to do truck stuff frequently (ex. We have no trash pickup and have to haul it ourselves to the dump). Something like this is very appealing to me. I could also see this being useful as a fleet vehicle that doesn’t really leave campus grounds (think facilities/grounds/maintenance).
no touchscreen
Sounds like a dream. Or public transport. It doesn’t have touchscreen either.
Is it a networked surveillance nightmare?
It doesn’t seem to come with any gadgets. No touch screen, not even a radio. It’s possible that it still broadcasts location data and it’s possible they could hide a mic to record audio as well. But it isn’t connecting to your phone with Bluetooth, it can’t exploit the Bluetooth connection to scrub your messages and socials. So it’s a LOT better than most new cars.
Less reason to believe that it is than most cars that literally market themselves as connected
Perfect except for it being a truck. Why is North America allergic to small cars?
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Trucks are incredibly useful?
Sure but not every single person needs a truck? My comment isn’t even intending to hate on trucks, I literally just want a small car that’s electric. I don’t drive often and I want something that’s electric but doesn’t take up much space
I have an answer for this that’s from my personal life if that’s helpful.
I’ve lived either in the great plains or in the rural south my entire life, and I only found out a year ago you can pay $20 to rent a pickup truck. So up until that point, I thought, every group (of friends or family) has to have a person with a truck in it, in case someone needs to move, or in case of an emergency (like a tornado effing up their house and now you have to clear the property).
When I found out that renting a truck is so cheap, I was so mad! All that time wasted paying extra for more car than I needed! I prefer something small and cheap and efficient, personally, but so does everyone else I know so I always wound up with the truck. (And I helped a LOT of people move over the years as a result.)
Obviously this is n=1 but at least it’s my story? And my answer is legit, “ignorance and being too poor to own my house, and landlords like to jack rent on someone staying in one place every year so you have to keep moving to avoid that needless creep of fees.”
My hope is this will be another nail in the coffin for the giant bro dozers. Everybody I know who does actual real truck stuff have been crying for this exact vehicle for years. A small (in American terms) utilitarian vehicle for getting your truck stuff done. Essentially an American kei truck
Plus I think there have been a lot of small smart-car sized EV offerings, but I can’t really think of a small truck besides the Telo truck.
No stereo is fine if it has ports for me to just buy my own car stereo kit and add it afterwards. I don’t see the point of no paint, like don’t you need it to protect the metal from the environment
It’s no paint because the body is plastic. It’s not even black plastic coated grey. Just grey plastic.
I see, are there any other all plastic mass market cars out there, I’m just not sure how that material holds up in terms of wear and tear and accidents
Look up Saturn plastic body panels. The hood, roof, and top of the trunk we’re still metal.
I had one as my first car. I got rear ended once, and the plastic parts were mostly fine (a little paint chipped off), but the metal top got bent. The trunk itself worked and I never fixed the metal.
Edit to add: the car was made in 1999, I think I bought it in 2008 and had it for about ten years. I got rid of it because the electronics were getting gremlins. Neither the paint on the plastic or metal panels had issues except for the mentioned fender bender.
Saturn used to have door panels set up in their dealerships and encouraged kids to jump on them. I was one of those kids.
We need to move back to demonstrations like this.
