Slate Auto, which makes the electric truck backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and seems to be in many ways the opposite of Tesla’s Cybertruck, received more than 100,000 reservations in just two weeks, TechCrunch reports. Of course, the Cybertruck had more than a million reservations before the first one rolled off the lot. But despite CEO Elon Musk’s assurance that “demand is off the charts,” the company sold only 46,000 in the first year the model was out. In other words, small, refundable deposits are not the same as purchasing a whole vehicle. (The initial fee to reserve a Cybertruck was $100 and a Slate truck reservation currently costs $50.)
That said, the price of Slate’s whole vehicle is just a fraction of the cost of a Cybertruck — coming in at less than $20,000 with the federal EV credit and less than $27,500 without — making it an outlier among not only electric vehicles but American cars in general.
