# The Adventures of Slate: Privacy as Philosophy (Not Just Marketing) in Their Bare-Bones EV Pickup
Jonathan M. Gitlin just published an absolutely fascinating piece this morning over at Ars Technica — I devoured it the second my coffee kicked in, and I think it deserves way more attention from our community than most tech-car crossover stories get! Slate Auto is a Warsaw-based Indiana startup that's gone all-in on their antithesis-to-modern-CAM concept with something genuinely called "ownership value over being the product." They've literally built this pickup around stripping down to exactly 600 parts and components. Think about that number — just two seats, manual wind-up windows in a world where every car you buy has more microphones than an Apple Store, and zero embedded modem so there's no always-on data pipeline sucking your driving habits into whatever cloud they're hosting on today!
Now here's the thing: Slate isn't some analog throwback. You absolutely still get their smartphone app for managing settings, changing drive modes (which apparently includes multiple terrain setups), pulling range estimates and charging diagnostics — all of it working over a local device-to-vehicle connection when your phone is actually in the car with you. Leave that bad boy at home on a Saturday afternoon road trip? You're as untraceable as somebody cruising around in an SR5 from '85, minus the automated license plate readers (unfortunately). The company laid out explicitly what they collect during account setup and why — diagnostics for future maintenance guidance, service support data when you visit dealers, charging context tied to your station location profiles over time — OTA update status tracking without forcing real-time telemetry through a cellular tower. Their quote is basically everything I've been wanting OEMs to say all along: "Privacy isn't compliance footnote; it's part of the product experience." And honestly? They even said they'd rather be precise and trusted than overpromise connected features while collecting data with no clear customer benefit behind each piece — which, as someone who just got hit by three different apps in my car this morning asking for location permissions I don't actually understand yet again.
The timing is *chef's kiss*. This came out right after Roberto Baldwin (who frequently writes our Ars cars sections and has been covering Slate since day one) dropped their full report at SAE International, which gives you the proper industry credibility backing up what otherwise sounds like marketing poetry. We're seeing an entire polarized landscape around this: those cheap Chinese connected EVs that US lawmakers basically got bipartisan support to regulate after realizing some have backdoors straight into Beijing state servers while European regulations since 2018 treat car telemetry as personal data under GDPR's strict definition, versus America where automakers still view all the collected signals as "free license" to sell — remember GM getting caught selling driver behavior profiles in their own fleet without clear consent earlier this year? The FTC actually warned OEMs back then that they don't have carte blanche over customer info beyond what's needed for requested products/services (and whether that remains after January 2025 changes, we'll see), while Mozilla laid bare the whole broken trust problem in a comprehensive analysis of automakers' privacy practices last fall. Slate is betting everything right now on an untapped segment willing to sacrifice some convenience layers — no remote unlock from your office at three o'clock if that's what it takes to not be monetized alongside all the other data points flowing through those connected car pipelines every single day into perpetuity.
What do you guys think? Am I being overly idealistic about this, or does the future actually belong somewhere in between total analog purity and everything-connected-to-everything? I genuinely want different takes before committing to whether Slate could shift the industry pendulum back toward thoughtful design instead of just stacking on more sensors for no particular reason.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/06/slate-says-its-electric-pickup-will-never-track-you/
Also see: Roberto Baldwin's SAE report coverage, Mozilla Foundation automotive privacy analysis (March 2025)
Jonathan M. Gitlin just published an absolutely fascinating piece this morning over at Ars Technica — I devoured it the second my coffee kicked in, and I think it deserves way more attention from our community than most tech-car crossover stories get! Slate Auto is a Warsaw-based Indiana startup that's gone all-in on their antithesis-to-modern-CAM concept with something genuinely called "ownership value over being the product." They've literally built this pickup around stripping down to exactly 600 parts and components. Think about that number — just two seats, manual wind-up windows in a world where every car you buy has more microphones than an Apple Store, and zero embedded modem so there's no always-on data pipeline sucking your driving habits into whatever cloud they're hosting on today!
Now here's the thing: Slate isn't some analog throwback. You absolutely still get their smartphone app for managing settings, changing drive modes (which apparently includes multiple terrain setups), pulling range estimates and charging diagnostics — all of it working over a local device-to-vehicle connection when your phone is actually in the car with you. Leave that bad boy at home on a Saturday afternoon road trip? You're as untraceable as somebody cruising around in an SR5 from '85, minus the automated license plate readers (unfortunately). The company laid out explicitly what they collect during account setup and why — diagnostics for future maintenance guidance, service support data when you visit dealers, charging context tied to your station location profiles over time — OTA update status tracking without forcing real-time telemetry through a cellular tower. Their quote is basically everything I've been wanting OEMs to say all along: "Privacy isn't compliance footnote; it's part of the product experience." And honestly? They even said they'd rather be precise and trusted than overpromise connected features while collecting data with no clear customer benefit behind each piece — which, as someone who just got hit by three different apps in my car this morning asking for location permissions I don't actually understand yet again.
The timing is *chef's kiss*. This came out right after Roberto Baldwin (who frequently writes our Ars cars sections and has been covering Slate since day one) dropped their full report at SAE International, which gives you the proper industry credibility backing up what otherwise sounds like marketing poetry. We're seeing an entire polarized landscape around this: those cheap Chinese connected EVs that US lawmakers basically got bipartisan support to regulate after realizing some have backdoors straight into Beijing state servers while European regulations since 2018 treat car telemetry as personal data under GDPR's strict definition, versus America where automakers still view all the collected signals as "free license" to sell — remember GM getting caught selling driver behavior profiles in their own fleet without clear consent earlier this year? The FTC actually warned OEMs back then that they don't have carte blanche over customer info beyond what's needed for requested products/services (and whether that remains after January 2025 changes, we'll see), while Mozilla laid bare the whole broken trust problem in a comprehensive analysis of automakers' privacy practices last fall. Slate is betting everything right now on an untapped segment willing to sacrifice some convenience layers — no remote unlock from your office at three o'clock if that's what it takes to not be monetized alongside all the other data points flowing through those connected car pipelines every single day into perpetuity.
What do you guys think? Am I being overly idealistic about this, or does the future actually belong somewhere in between total analog purity and everything-connected-to-everything? I genuinely want different takes before committing to whether Slate could shift the industry pendulum back toward thoughtful design instead of just stacking on more sensors for no particular reason.
Source: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/06/slate-says-its-electric-pickup-will-never-track-you/
Also see: Roberto Baldwin's SAE report coverage, Mozilla Foundation automotive privacy analysis (March 2025)