What They Deleted

Three companies are now building a small, cheap truck for the American market, which is two more than anybody expected and three more than the industry said was possible.

Slate is furthest along, with a $24,950 electric pickup that has no paint, no stereo and hand-cranked windows. Ford announced the Fathom on August 6, a fully-featured midsize electric truck at $28,350. And REO Industries, a Texas startup that has revived the name Ransom Olds used after he left Oldsmobile, says it will sell a gasoline, body-on-frame, manual-transmission compact pickup for $21,500 in late 2028.

The small truck is back, and it is worth saying plainly that this is good news. But the reason it is interesting is not that three companies arrived at the same destination. It is that all three of them got there by deleting something completely different.

Slate deleted the product

Start with what is actually gone, because the list is longer than most coverage admits. No paint, which is why every Slate is grey and every colorful one you have seen is wrapped. No infotainment screen, which means no Apple CarPlay and no Android Auto, because there is nothing to project onto. No stereo. No power windows. One row of seats.

Now the more interesting list, which is what they kept. Air conditioning is standard. So are power steering and power locks. That combination tells you the deletions were researched rather than reflexive. Somebody sat down and worked out which absences a buyer would experience as charm and which ones they would experience as punishment, and then drew the line between them.

InsideEVs got an hour in a pre-production truck around Newport and came back notably impressed. A 65 kWh LFP pack, 205 miles of range, 181 horsepower, 195 lb-ft, eight seconds to sixty, 2,000 pounds of towing, a 37-foot turning circle and a bed longer than a Ford Maverick's. Their reviewer described precise steering, low noise, a comfortable ride, and no creaks from a prototype, and used the phrase "feels production ready." He also noted he might place an order.

Two specification changes worth knowing if you followed the launch: power came down from the originally announced 201 horsepower to 181, and range went up from 150 miles to 205 while the larger 240-mile battery option was discarded entirely. Delivered price with the $1,450 destination fee is $26,400, which undercuts a gasoline Maverick by more than $3,000.

The bet Slate is making is clean and legible: a meaningful number of buyers will trade features for price, and will enjoy doing it. The truck is designed to be modified, with fastening points everywhere, published files, removable doors, and $5,000 and $7,000 kits that turn the pickup into an SUV. It is the first mass-market vehicle in decades that treats the owner as a participant.

Ford deleted the process

Then Ford announced the Fathom at $28,350 and the entire calculation changed.

For $3,400 more than a truck with no paint, the Fathom is specified to include a large high-resolution touchscreen, integrated Apple Maps, both Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, greater interior volume than a Toyota RAV4, an open bed, a frunk, all the sensors required for Ford's hands-free BlueCruise, and the thing that actually decides it for a lot of people: a rear seat.

Note what Ford did not do. Ford did not win this by removing things. Ford's answer is a manufacturing answer. Vehicles on its Universal Electric Vehicle platform are assembled in a new way, with the vehicle effectively split into multiple parallel assembly lines. Ford has been describing this internally as its "Model T moment," which is a large claim, and the specifics live behind The Verge's paywall so treat the mechanism as reported rather than explained.

The strategic content is clear enough without the detail. Slate reached $24,950 by subtracting from the product. Ford reached $28,350 by subtracting from the process, and got to keep the product.

The most instructive thing published this week was not a spec sheet. It was Jalopnik's writer, who describes himself as the exact person the Slate was built for, a self-identified maker who wants a truck he can modify and does not care that it has no radio because he intends to install his own and 3D-print the speaker enclosures. He worked out that the Fathom costs about $66 a month more over five years. He said he would take the Ford.

Not because he stopped liking the Slate. Because he has friends, and a back seat is worth $66 a month.

(The two price gaps you will see quoted are both right and they measure different things: $3,400 is base to base, and Jalopnik's $3,545 is the gap after destination fees.)

The lesson sitting inside that $3,400

Here is the part that transfers, and it has nothing to do with trucks.

Cost only ever comes out of a business in one of three places: the specification, the process, or the channel. Which one you cut is not a tactical choice. It determines what kind of company you become and who is able to come after you.

Cutting the specification is the fastest and the most visible. You can do it this quarter. Customers understand it immediately, and it produces a clear story: we removed what you were not using and passed you the savings. The problem is that it has a floor, and the floor is reached quickly, and anyone can copy a deletion. There is no proprietary advantage in not including a stereo.

Cutting the process is slow, expensive, and nearly invisible from outside. It takes years and capital and it does not photograph well. But it compounds, it is extremely hard to copy, and it leaves you holding an option nobody else has: you can give the features back. A company that took cost out of its process can always add specification later and still hit the price. A company that took cost out of its specification cannot manufacture its way to a better margin on demand.

That asymmetry is the whole story of this week. It is also why competing on subtraction against a much larger operator is dangerous. If your entire position is that you removed things, then the moment a company with real manufacturing capability fixes its cost structure, it arrives at your price with your customer's actual wish list attached, and your differentiation evaporates in a press release.

None of which means Slate loses. It means Slate's real moat was never the price. It is the modification ecosystem, the published files, the fastening points, the SUV kits, the community of people who want a vehicle they are allowed to touch. Ford is not going to ship a truck you can take the doors off and 3D-print parts for. That is a genuine position, and it is a much better one than being three thousand dollars cheaper.

REO deleted the channel

Which brings us to the strangest and most interesting of the three.

REO Industries is aiming at $21,500 for the Runabout T4X, with a four-door T4C at $25,000 and an S4C SUV at $28,500. The T4X is 180 inches long, roughly a Corolla or a 1980s S-10, about 74 inches tall and wide, body-on-frame, with mechanical four-wheel drive, a target payload of 2,500 pounds and 4,500 pounds of towing.

It is also gasoline-powered, with a naturally aspirated four-cylinder and the option of a six-speed manual. Founder and CEO Zach De Bernardi calls the category "Ameri-Kei," an American upscaling of the Japanese kei class. Physical controls for every function. Screens at an absolute minimum. The entry truck may arrive without a radio or finished door cards.

Two things about REO's model are genuinely novel and worth stealing from regardless of what happens to the company.

The first is the open-source approach. Buyers get access to the information about the truck and are encouraged to design parts for it. Engineers at the company will validate those parts, and validated parts can be listed for sale on REO's own site. That is not a marketing gesture. It is a decision to treat the aftermarket as a product line and the owner as a supplier.

The second is that REO says, repeatedly and emphatically, that there will be no dealer network.

Now the honest part, because enthusiasm without arithmetic is just noise. REO has no production vehicle. The final design is promised for the fourth quarter of this year and first deliveries are targeted at late 2028 or early 2029, which is two and a half years out. A place in line costs $25. De Bernardi's background is Dallas real estate rather than the automotive industry, and on funding his public statement is that the company is funded and that a lot of his own money is in it. Road and Track, to its credit, runs the graveyard in its own piece: Fisker, Lordstown, Faraday Future, Nikola, Canoo. Building a few thousand vehicles and delivering them is a different discipline from designing one.

De Bernardi also names the thing that made the attempt possible, and it is regulatory rather than technical: he points to CAFE fees being removed in December 2025 as the signal that a vehicle like this could exist. We take no view here on whether that policy is right. It is simply the enabling condition the company itself cites, and it means the business case is exposed to a policy that can move again.

Cheer the idea. Price the risk. Both at once.

If you sell vehicles for a living

Two of these three brands intend to reach the customer without you, so it is worth being precise about what that actually removes.

Direct sales removes the storefront. It does not remove the work. Somewhere, a $21,500 body-on-frame truck with an owner-designed accessory ecosystem still needs warranty labor, recall execution, parts distribution, collision repair, state registration, financing for a buyer whose credit is exactly why they are shopping at $21,500, and a trade-in appraisal when they are done with it. None of that disappears because the transaction happened on a website. It gets unbundled from the sale and it lands somewhere, and right now nobody has said where.

The second thing worth noticing is who these vehicles are for. We wrote last week about the near-$50,000 average new vehicle price and the fact that a customer choosing the cheaper option that does more is not failing a loyalty test, they are doing arithmetic. The Wall Street Journal has reported that roughly a million new-car buyers have left the market and are not coming back soon. Three separate companies, with completely different technologies and completely different theories, independently concluded that the hole at the bottom of the market is the biggest opportunity in the industry.

That is a demand signal, not a product trend. Whatever you sell, the customer who was priced out of it is still there.

The playbook

DMAIC at the strategic layer, disciplined delivery underneath. Six moves for anyone deciding how to reach a customer who cannot currently afford them.

Name which of the three you are cutting. Specification, process, or channel. Write it down and say it out loud, because a business that has not decided ends up cutting a little of each, which produces a worse product, a messier operation and a confused customer simultaneously. All three are legitimate. Ambiguity is not.

Do not lead with subtraction if somebody bigger can out-process you. A deletion is copyable in a quarter and it has a floor. If your only story is that you removed things, you are holding a position that any better-capitalized operator can take by fixing its own cost structure, and they will arrive with the features still attached. Subtract if you must, but build the thing they cannot copy at the same time.

Find out what your customer genuinely will not miss. Slate deleted the stereo and kept the air conditioning. That is a researched line, not a brave one. Every business has features that survive purely because nobody has ever asked whether anyone uses them, and removing the wrong one costs more than the whole exercise saves. Ask before you cut, and ask the people who left as well as the people who stayed.

Quote the delta in the unit your customer actually thinks in. The Jalopnik piece did not compare $24,950 to $28,350. It compared them at $66 a month, and at $66 a month the answer flipped. Your customer is not evaluating your price. They are evaluating a payment, a monthly line item, a per-seat cost, a cost per job. Present it in the wrong unit and you will lose an argument you were winning.

If you remove the channel, budget for the work the channel was doing. Distribution is expensive because it is doing things. Service, returns, financing, trust, physical presence when something goes wrong. Cutting the middle is a real strategy and a real margin, but the obligations do not vanish with the intermediary. They land on you, usually later, usually at scale, usually at the worst moment.

Treat a preorder as a signal, not as revenue. A $25 deposit against a vehicle arriving in 2029 is a wonderful measure of demand and it is not a sale. This is a general rule and it applies well outside the car business: interest is cheap, intent is expensive, and the distance between them is where most optimistic forecasts go to die.

Our position

We are on the side of the small truck, without qualification. An industry that spent twenty years discovering that every vehicle should be larger, heavier and more expensive than the one it replaced has finally produced three separate arguments in the opposite direction, and at least one of them is already driving around Rhode Island being described as production ready.

What makes it genuinely interesting is that the three answers do not agree with each other in the slightest. Slate says the way to build a cheap truck is to stop building most of a truck. Ford says the way to build a cheap truck is to build the whole thing differently. REO says the way to build a cheap truck is to use a gasoline engine, a manual gearbox and skip the dealership. Those are not variations. They are three different theories of where cost lives.

They cannot all be right, and the market is about to run the experiment in public, which is the most useful thing that can happen to an industry that had stopped asking the question.

Ford will probably sell the most of them. Slate has the only real community. REO has the best idea and the longest odds. And the customer who has been priced out of a new vehicle for most of a decade suddenly has three companies competing for their attention, which is three more than they had in January.

The small truck is back. Whatever you sell, somebody is about to do this to your market too, and the only question that matters is which of the three things you would be willing to delete.

Sources: Tim Stevens for The Verge on the Ford Fathom (August 6, 2026, partially paywalled / everything cited is from the free portion); Jalopnik on the Fathom against the Slate; Jens Meiners for InsideEVs on driving the Slate; Matthew Guy for Driving.ca and Lucas Bell for Road & Track on REO Industries. All REO figures are company targets for a vehicle that does not yet exist. The Fathom is announced but not delivered. Only the Slate has been driven by a journalist, and that was a pre-production unit.