RE: When You Look Into the Future of the Electric Vehicle, It Is Very Odd!

There are advantages to electric motors over ICE engines, when done right. By right I mean without all the bells and whistles, being susceptible to being shut off, hacked, and etc. Slate has proposed a pickup truck that fits the bill for me. Manual door handles and window cranks. No self driving or any of that crap. No computer at all. I think they even come without heaters for folks in climates or robust enough not to care. There is a particular feature of electric drive vehicles I very much want, and it is durability and lack of maintenance expense.

I once counted all the power tools I had in my 4 bay shop. Just over 50, and about half of them were ICE powered, like chainsaws and rototillers, and about half were electric motor driven, like table saws, band saws, and etc. Of the ICE powered tools all of them required regular maintenance, adding oil to the fuel (for 2-cycle engines) or careful monitoring of the oil in the crankcase, occasional replacement of the oil, filter changes, cleaning plugs and air filters, and on and on. You also needed to run the motor for a few minutes a month, whether you needed to use the tool or not, just to keep the gaskets wet so they didn't dry out, and then you had to keep track of all those things, and any special things you had to do for that particular tool, too. It was too much maintenance, and about half of them worked at any given time, the other half needing repairs or something that kept them from being used.

All the electric motor driven tools worked all the time, and none of them ever needed maintenance. Once I had to change the brushes in a tool driven by a brushed motor, but it took about 5 minutes and cost about $2 for the brushes.

That's why I want a simple pickup truck with electric motor(s). I don't want any other bells and whistles, like lane assist, backup camera, and I'm negotiable on a stereo. I want a work truck that will always work and doesn't require any maintenance, or as little as possible. Bearings and zircs need seeing to on an annual basis and perhaps R&R once a decade or so. Batteries will need swapping out more often, and are expensive, but I have learned there are several kinds of batteries that can be made from inexpensive materials and don't have the dendrite problem LiIon batteries do (and that seems to be soluble with a new kind of battery that requires a lot of silver to make - an unfortunately expensive proposition today).

The Slate claims it will be exactly this, and cost ~$20k brand new in base configuration. I also can make my own electricity by several different means, and already have some solar panels and LiFe batteries on hand because I used them to provide power to power tools on remote jobsites.

I don't want a Tesla, Ford, Porsche, or any of those over-complicated deathtraps. But if Slate lives up to the original marketing of a simple vehicle that has highly reliable electric drive, I do want one of those. If they have LiIon batteries, I might just rip them out and replace them with DIY boron/zinc, or some other kind. There are nickel/iron batteries manufactured by Edison more than 100 years ago that still work today. They're very heavy though, and not very suitable for automotive use - but they're not flammable. Edison batteries are awesome for powerwalls at home, which I completely agree with you that LiIon batteries are not.

Thanks!