Is the Future Minimalistic?
A few weeks ago I was sent an email. It was an article about Slate Auto, asking whether it has the road map to beat China. I'll leave that question to the experts. Some people write whole books about it. My first thought scrolling through was simpler: this is back to basics, in the best possible way.
Affordable, customizable, minimalistic. The Blank Slate starts at $24,950 (they call it the most affordable truck in America), and building one is half the fun. Body style, colors, stripes, tech: as much or as little as you want. Clicking through the configurator, I got a genuine chuckle out of the audio options. There is no touchscreen. There is no infotainment system. There is a phone mount and a Bluetooth speaker holder.
I love it. And look, one article ago I called myself an Apple CarPlay truther. Slate called my bluff and skipped the middleman entirely: your phone isn't mirrored on their screen, your phone is the screen. Why does that work? Because we already know it works. No connectivity issues, no calls mysteriously jumping to your AirPods, no software update holding your commute hostage. We trust the device in our pocket more than any dashboard Detroit or Silicon Valley has ever built.
I think this is brilliant, and I think it's generational. This is a generation that has watched refrigerators learn to tweet. AirPods led us back to corded headphones. We fantasize about appliances from the '60s that still run. We don't care what your product can do. We care whether it works.
I don't need to tweet from my fridge. Does it keep my groceries alive? Plenty of people feel the same way about their car. I don't need it reporting near-misses to my insurance company. Does it start and take me to work? Awesome.
Minimalism plus reliability: fewer things that can go wrong. Meanwhile, the new $70,000 pickups have what amounts to a dual-monitor setup on the dash. Nobody is using Excel while driving. But we've been stuck in this era of more tech, more money. Slate answered with less tech, less money.
I'm all in on Slate. Not because crank windows are romantic, but because my generation has spent years asking for the thing our parents had at our age: a new car you can actually afford. Somebody finally listened.
Is the future minimalistic? If it starts every morning and keeps the groceries cold, count us in.