Slate will ship its minimalist, ultra-customizable pickup later this year with a different battery pack than the one it announced when it first revealed the EV last April. The Jeff Bezos-backed auto startup has swapped out its planned nickel manganese cobalt (NMC) battery for a lower-cost lithium iron phosphate (LFP) pack from a new supplier, the company announced Wednesday.
The new batteries will be supplied by Gotion, Chris Barman, Slate’s president of vehicles, told InsideEVs. Gotion will make them at its factory in Illinois, not too far from Slate’s own plant housed in a former printing facility in Indiana.
Photo by: Tim Levin/InsideEVs
LFP batteries are more durable and cheaper than the high-nickel cells that power Teslas and most other U.S.-market EVs. The chemistry trades away energy density, however, delivering less driving range than a similarly sized NMC battery pack. Growing in popularity and capability, LFP always seemed like a natural choice for affordability-obsessed Slate. At its just-announced base price of $24,950, Slate’s two-door pickup will be both America’s cheapest new EV and its most affordable truck when sales kick off by the end of this year.
Early on, Slate didn’t choose LFP in part because of the $7,500 federal EV tax credit’s domestic sourcing criteria for batteries, Barman told InsideEVs previously. Qualifying EVs needed to meet increasingly strict requirements around where their battery components and minerals came from, whether that was North America or a trading partner. Any connection to so-called “foreign entities of concern,” like China, was a no-go.
