There’s a Very Simple Reason Why You Love the Slate Truck

Tisha Johnson is a rare anomaly in the car world: a design leader for an automaker who is not a man. In a resolutely testosterone-fueled industry where, traditionally, women have seemingly been given positions of authority in design labs as long as they focus on interiors, colors, or material selections, very few have been afforded free rein on the most important visual element of the car, the exterior, let alone promoted to run the entire aesthetic show. Johnson has.

As head of design at Slate, this gender-specific fact might be why the world has fallen in love with the Jeff Bezos–backed truck. Casual observers might put the Slate EV's popularity down to its low price. Starting at $24,950, the Slate arriving later this year won't just be the cheapest EV on the US market; it will also be the cheapest pickup truck of any power flavor.

But people buy cheap all the time. Be it a pickup or portable speaker, cheap doesn't mean they love the product; it usually means a compromise. And it's hard to love a compromise. The real trick is in creating something beautiful and accessible.

It's a hard task—ask Jony Ive, who has fashioned the best-looking automotive interior in decades for the $640,000 Ferrari Luce. Even though you could buy 25 (and a half) Slate trucks for the same price as a Luce, the Ferrari's exterior has been met with a frosty reception, to say the least. The budget Slate, meanwhile, has won multiple awards for its looks, not just for how much it costs. Johnson and her team have nailed beautiful and accessible. The TL;DR secret sauce? Ditch the testosterone and bring in a woman's perspective, and, perhaps more importantly, lack of ego.

Johnson has been working toward getting people to love the Slate for 27 years. Her final-year thesis at California’s Art Center College of Design in 1999 focused on the genuine need for a useful, affordable, and hopefully desirable vehicle for a single mom. It has taken two long spells at Volvo (a 17-year tour in total), with stints in between as head of design at Whirlpool and Herman Miller, to realize her vision.

Toward the end of this year, Slate's first customers will get behind the wheel of Johnson's dream of an astonishingly affordable vehicle—one that can transform from an electric truck to a traditional “squareback” SUV to a jeep-like “fastback” SUV, thanks to a genuinely ingenious modular design. Complete color changes will be possible in two days and cost just $500. Panels can be swapped out; decals, roof racks, and $60 grille plates can be bought from Slate or, as the company is going to publish a load of its 3D files, tweaked and printed by owners themselves. Many companies talk about genuinely democratic design; very few deliver.

I sat down with Johnson to discuss this rare and laudable woman-centric approach to the Slate, and exactly how it's brought about an EV that the design world, auto trade, and the general public (180,000 preorders and counting) all love.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

JEREMY WHITE: Pickups are trapped in a hyper-masculine, aggressive design language. Giant grilles, towering fronts, hostile postures. As a woman leading the truck's design team, was stepping away from that intentional pushback against car-guy tropes or a byproduct of creating a utility vehicle with empathy and affordability?

TISHA JOHNSON: We were always intentional in what the expression would be. There were definitely things that we didn't want it to be. We didn't want it to be a jerk. We literally said that. First and foremost, we wanted the vehicle to be truly approachable. Friendly but very confident. We all attach to the vehicles we drive. They represent our personality, our self-expression. This vehicle, the ability to personalize, is a cornerstone of the thinking here.

We talked about—before we actually ever had one line sketched—that you're walking through the parking lot; you've been shopping, and you look and see your vehicle. How do you feel? How do you feel when you see a Slate? You feel like you cannot wait to get back to that vehicle, and it's a vehicle you can count on. It's someone you can trust. These were the kinds of things we wanted to see. We didn't want it to be cliché or look at the past. We said it would be familiar, but at the same time feel very relevant today.

Having written your thesis on designing a vehicle for a single mom with kids, starting from a different goal than a male designer, what tangible design decisions does your team bring to the Slate to create a truck for everyone, not just men? Did a different design language have to be established?

I want to make sure I'm super clear with you: We absolutely rejected an overly aggressive, hyper-dominant look. We didn't want it to look like a beast on the road. No way. Look at the front fascia, where the headlamps are. The face of the vehicle—it has eyes wide open. Round headlamps. There are reasons why this is good for accessorizing; it's very easy to get to and put different headlamps there if you want—but it also has an alertness to it that we wanted. But if you look at where that hood line is, it strikes across part of that headlamp, and that is so that there is definitely an expression of overt confidence.

Look at the side mirror; there's an area there where we put a little landing pad for a small decal. If you had only a few bucks in your pocket, and you just wanted to give a little pop of expression or color right there, you could. I just love that.

I would argue that a woman is not looking for a vehicle designed for her. Research shows our buying behaviors are not focused on anything clichéd, that's for sure. So we made that face come off as confident, fair, and modern, and with more product-like attributes than other vehicles.

Then you go from there. On the surface, there's a really nice strong shoulder. That is a cue that there's a vehicle there that's safe and reliable. We didn't get into a lot of surfacing that is swoopy and arrowed. The angle of the windscreen is fairly upright. We didn't go all super-fast there. These are decisions rejecting the tropes expected in a vehicle today. These modern clichés, we just left those behind.

Considering you rejected the design clichés, are you surprised at the plaudits that Slate’s looks have garnered from the male-dominated auto design world?

I'll give you a little bit of behind-the-scenes. We started with some assumptions that you would find any design group considering, like putting precious materials in the front area; and this is where we'll put the name mark, the DNA, and it is placed there beautifully, never to be touched, just to be admired. That's what goes on in a design studio.

As we were looking at designs and testing internally, we could see what people were attracted to. But as a design group, we kept saying, “This isn't right yet.” Then finally we realized the problem: We were using the exact playbook that has been handed down from generation to generation. We literally said, “This is all wrong. We cannot do this.”

So we literally threw out that playbook and said, if this is Slate's DNA, then we're going to put a plate right there between those two headlamps that has exposed fasteners. Yes, it holds the main brand mark, but we designed it in such a way that it's easy to remove, easy to replace. Yes, we offer some different designs, but we're saying this is easy enough for you, as the owner, to 3D-print something to put here if you want to. Now, that's outrageous. That is different.

Absolutely we wanted to forge a new path. We just did not know that it would be recognized. We didn't think it would be. We weren't considering it being appreciated so quickly and by so many. That's been an honor for us as a team.

EV development has been hijacked by tech-bro posturing. Ludicrous acceleration; giant screens. Is stripping away unnecessary tech bloat fundamentally an exercise in empathetic, less ego-driven design? And how do you take the ego out of auto design when it seems to be impossible at almost every other car brand?

Yes, I wish I could say it better. Before we had the design, we had some principles that were core, and one of those was to take away all of the unnecessary tech. It drives up the cost, yes, but I was driving in a car with my niece and her friends, a mix of twentysomething men and women, but mostly women. They were taking jabs at the tech-bro culture and talking about how it was getting in the way of the simple pleasures and things that you could appreciate. They said, “Like all of these screens everywhere. I don't use them. I'm not interested in it at all.” I was in heaven hearing it.

We considered radical things like, do you really need an HVAC unit? It wasn't a provocative idea that somebody put on the table to make a point. It was fiercely debated, and it won for good reasons. But the integrated stereo system did not win. We did a cost analysis on the window crank against a power pack, and the window crank won.

I infused a word into the design process. It wasn't overtly in the first description of the Slate, but it was there, between the lines. The word was “love.” That's a word we felt in the design studio, because we understood that as we were starting—the descriptions of the vehicle being affordable, easy to own, personalized, something that was robust and something that you wanted that was cool. You put that all together? That spells love.

So we wanted to be very open that we wanted people to love the vehicle. It requires real commitment on all of those levels at the same time. These are natural tensions that, in any other program I've ever worked on, at some point you let go of one of those big ideas to get to the goal on time. We said no.

In so much other car design, the word is not love; it's sex. Phallic fronts, power bulges. Car designers generally don't talk of lovable cars, do they?

Just being candid, I've been in design reviews in my earlier years where I would feel the conversation completely left my point of view out—the point of view of actually most people. We know that a female in the household is driving decisionmaking around a car purchase. She doesn't want to be classified or catered to in a way that is cliché. She does want to be considered, and that's important, because a woman will be inclined to consider the needs of everyone in the household. Letting all of that “gender” into vehicle design? I've always thought it was kind of silly. Love is so much more stable, Jeremy.

And lasts longer.

It does. You would see female designers more likely to be color and material designers on the interior. More and more, you are seeing a more equal distribution of men and women around different topics in car development, and that's great. But the conversation used to go, “Well, once you get inside of the vehicle, then you have the emotional bond, and it's more of an animal attraction on the outside.” I really push back on that. Yes, there is an attraction [with the Slate]. But that attraction that draws you toward it is based on something that is very lasting from the inside out. It's a deeper emotional connection.

How do you think you'll feel when you see your first mom driving around with two kids in the back of her Slate?

Emotional. It's very emotional to think about that. It's something I wanted to do, and I just hated that I didn't do it. And so, every day, I'm motivated because I'm involved in the act of doing that, of realizing that. It's incredibly rewarding.