Two trucks defined today, and they were never going to meet. One costs $24,950 and has no screen. The other is a Porsche Macan GTS reading $132,830 on the sticker, where the red stitching alone is $3,710. It is more interesting than a joke about rich people. Both cars charge for something you cannot really see, in opposite directions.
Slate removed everything it could and kept the price it promised, even after the federal tax credit disappeared. Crank windows, steel wheels, a phone mount where the infotainment would go. What you pay for is a battery, a chassis and a warranty, and the company is not pretending otherwise. Porsche does the reverse. The performance is largely present in the base car, and the option sheet sells you authority over eighty small decisions. Neither company is confused about what it sells. The buyer might be.
Then there is the thing you truly cannot see. Rivian reservation holders are arguing about a lidar sensor because it has a name and a shape, while the component that will actually determine how the car ages is a chip with no badge, sitting behind a panel, unchangeable after the order is placed. Software updates over the air. Compute does not. The sharpest version of that showed up in the least comfortable story of the day, where a Tesla Semi is reported to have struck two stopped vehicles and nobody outside the investigation can say what safety systems were running, or whether any were. The most advanced truck on the road, and the central fact is an absence.
What to watch over the next six months is whether buyers start pricing that invisible layer at all. Right now the market rewards visible content: screens, wheels, badges, sensors you can point at. The Gen4 Formula E car on the Goodwood hill is the exception. Nobody in that crowd can see the software or the energy management that lets one car finish a race that used to take two. They can only hear it go faster, because racing put a clock on the hill. Consumer EVs have no equivalent, which is why compute generations arrive quietly and depreciate loudly.
Bottom line: Slate wins this round on clarity, not price. One build at one price is the only strategy here where the buyer knows exactly what they bought. Everyone else is charging against a promise about hardware, software, or a stitching room in Germany. The losers are reservation holders betting on a spec sheet nobody has written. If a company cannot tell you which computer is in the car you ordered, that is the answer.
Editorial commentary drawing on third-party video reporting linked above. Figures and claims are as presented in those sources and have not been independently verified. Spotted an error? Tell us and we will correct it.