If my 45 minute drive yesterday morning is anything to go by, I think Slate Auto will have quite the hit on its hands. The startup had one of its prototype trucks in town and asked if I wanted to check it out—no hopping on a plane or spending a night in a spare hotel room, just a drive from Southwest DC to Rockville, Maryland. Easy-peasy.
The prototype truck was well used, with almost 6,000 miles (9,656 km) on the small and minimalist but very readable digital display that also shows your speed and, when you turn, the backup camera. And while the cabin layout was representative of the production version, the surface was certainly not-the prototype used instead a lot of hard and shiny black plastic, with strips of Velcro here and there left out when the interior had to be camouflaged when the vehicle was out in public.
Getting to know Slate was refreshingly easy. The Morris Marina-style door handles open with a pleasant mechanical action. The seat and steering column adjust manually, but with plenty of reach, something many budget models have used to save on costs.
The key fob folds into the dash to turn it on, and there’s a column switch to select from Drive, Neutral, Park, and Reverse. Put your mirrors first – even by hand – and it’s time to go. Visibility from the two-seat cab is good, and while the Slate is on the smaller side, it’s as tall as most other crossovers at 68 inches (1.7 m), so you’re still sitting relatively high, certainly compared to a sedan.
I still remember how to use a manual window winder, and the three dials on the dash to make it warmer, colder and more or less windy inside, come the platonic ideal of car climate control. If we needed navigation, a phone mount on the dash would have done the job, but the area they now call North Bethesda is familiar ground from my past life in science policy, and the roads were mostly where I remembered leaving them, so I could just focus on driving.