A $25,000 electric pickup with crank windows and no screen walks into a room with Crayola. That’s not a joke—it’s Slate’s actual go-to-market strategy.
The startup announced this week that it will offer five Crayola-branded color wraps for its upcoming electric truck: Cerulean, Fern, Jersey Tomato, Dandelion, and Razzmatazz. Each “starter pack” runs $1,549.99 and includes the wrap, crayon-styled decals, a key fob cap, and a clip-on crayon figurine for the windshield. Ford gets Carhartt. Slate gets the box of 64.
It’s a clever bit of brand positioning for a vehicle that ships in unpainted gray thermoplastic body panels. Slate has always pitched wraps as the answer to its deliberately stripped-down look, and the Crayola tie-in leans into the playfulness that the truck’s spartan cabin otherwise lacks. Basic wraps start at $500, specialty colors at $670, with installation targeted around $500 on top. The Crayola option, then, is roughly triple the cost of a basic wrap before you even count labor.
That pricing tells you something about where Slate needs its margins to come from. The base truck is $24,950 with a 65-kWh battery, 205 miles of estimated range, 181 horsepower, and an 8.0-second zero-to-sixty time. Towing tops out at 2,000 pounds.
Payload capacity is 1,550 pounds, but the math there gets tight fast. The truck weighs 4,048 pounds against a 5,689-pound GVWR, leaving almost no margin once you factor in passengers and cargo together.
An optional SUV conversion kit is available, though the added weight drops towing to 1,824 pounds and payload to 1,263. Stack that kit with a generous options list and the price climbs to roughly $35,000. Slate likely needs most buyers to land somewhere in that neighborhood, not at the advertised base price.
Preorders are open now with a $300 nonrefundable deposit securing a delivery window. Full configuration happens closer to your slot. Deliveries are targeted for Q4 2025.
The interior is intentionally retro—manual window cranks, no infotainment screen—and Slate has framed that as a feature rather than a cost-cutting measure. Whether buyers agree will depend on how the truck drives and how well the ownership experience holds together from a company that has yet to deliver a single unit.
The Crayola play is smart marketing. It generates headlines, it differentiates, and it gives an otherwise utilitarian vehicle a personality transplant. Wrapping a truck in Razzmatazz is the kind of move that cuts through the noise of yet another EV startup promising affordable electrification.
But $1,550 for a branded vinyl wrap and a plastic crayon accessory on a truck that doesn’t have power windows is a specific kind of bet. It assumes customers drawn to a no-frills $25,000 pickup will happily spend six percent of the vehicle’s price on cosmetics. Slate claims over 100 wrap colors are available, so the palette isn’t the issue. The issue is whether the truck underneath justifies any of it.
Every EV startup eventually reaches the moment where the renders stop and the ramp begins. Slate’s crank-window simplicity pitch is refreshingly honest in a segment drowning in vaporware and six-figure trucks. The Crayola wraps add personality to a product that was designed without any. Whether that combination attracts enough buyers to sustain a production run is the only question that matters now, and no amount of Razzmatazz answers it.
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