Slate, an electric vehicle (EV) startup backed by Amazon's (AMZN) Jeff Bezos, plans to produce 150,000 trucks yearly at its US factory in Indiana. Slate CEO Chris Barman joins Market Domination hosts Josh Lipton and Julie Hyman and Yahoo Finance Senior Autos Reporter Pras Subramanian to discuss the EV space, the company, the company's funding, and her outlook for the year.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Domination here.
Automakers slate creating buzz in the electric vehicle space. The Bezos backed EV startup is planned to manufacture vehicles in the United States, and here to share some more news about the company is Slate CEO Chris Barman. And joining us is also Yahoo Finance senior auto supporter Pras Subramanian. Welcome to you both. Chris, great to see you here on set.
Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.
So let let's start with this news, Chris. This is a new financing round, I hear. Walk us through it.
Yeah. Well, first, um, tell you a little bit about Slate, and then I can explain where we are with our financing. So if you, um, aren't familiar with Slate, we're, um, a new vehicle company. We just announced two weeks ago, and our mission is to bring the affordable vehicle back to Americans. So, um, we've designed a vehicle at a price point of about $25,000. We build it in a single configuration, but it's been built as a platform to be highly accessorized. So we want to put the power back into the hands of the consumer and let them decide what features and accessories they want to put on the vehicle. So we've been quietly working on this for about three years. Um, we've gone through a couple rounds of funding. So, um, Jeff Bezos was our lead in our first round, um, the Walton Group in our second round. Um, we also have General Catalyst as an investor, and we've raised nearly $700 million.
So that's a new figure there. I know there was a lot reporting on much less than that. But it takes a lot of money to build a brand new automaker, doesn't it?
Yeah, it takes a lot of capital investment, but we're really being really wise in how we're deploying it and what we're using it on. Um, our model is that we really, um, want to minimize that. So when we thought about the vehicle and how we would bring it to market, um, one of the, um, decisions that we made is that the exterior panels are, um, made of a composite. And in doing that, it allowed us to not have to have a stamping operation to stamp the exterior sheet metal. We don't need a paint operation, um, very significant investment in those 400 million plus that you have to put in. So we're being wise about our capital. You might wonder, okay, how then do you get the color into the vehicle if it's a composite. So it's, um, molded in color in a slate gray, but again, it's designed to be accessorized. So we've designed it upfront to be very easy to wrap the vehicle. And we'll provide a wrap kit as an accessory if somebody would like to choose a specific color, and, um, it'll be easy to do that. It's also, um, as a truck, it can be converted from a two-passenger truck into a five-passenger SUV. So the idea is that
the owner of the vehicle can change it out, um, as they acquire the vehicle, or, um, as their budget or their life changes. So they can buy it and use it as a truck, but if later they end up they have an expanding family, they need a little more seating space, they don't have to sell the vehicle. They can keep it and turn it into a five-passenger SUV.
So you've talked a little bit about how you're keeping that cost down then with some of those moves that you've made. What about in the tariff environment? I know it's made in the US, but are all the what about the parts of it and the metal that's being imported to to make it, etc?
Yeah. So we've, um, been designing it, and it will be manufactured in the US. Um, we're really focused on and want to reindustrialize America. So it'll also be produced in Warsaw, Indiana, um, in a facility that was previously used for, um, printing catalogs and phone books. So it had shuttered in September of 2023. Its footprint is ideal for us. It's about 1.4 million square feet. Um, other manufacturing facilities are 3 million plus, but since we don't have the
stamping operation, the paint operation, we're able to really consolidate on that. We were very focused through the process that we wanted to also source American parts. So we have a high number of US source parts within the vehicle. So we'll be very insulated against tariffs.
Is that is that really hard to do right now, though, because I imagine even automakers that were sourcing from outside of the US, they're now trying to get also the US-made parts too. You know, so is there a lot is there more competition, in other words, for parts?
Um, I think, you know, others will be shifting their strategy. Uh, it's it's not as easy in automotive that you can just like, you know, pick up and change from one to the other. Um, what we've seen though is we've locked in, um, almost 80% of our partners already. So there's a small amount left that we have to do. We've locked in our battery partner, um, SK On. Um, their plant in Commerce, Georgia will be producing our battery, which is, you know, a big component for the vehicle.