Is It Time Automakers Built More Bare-Bone Cars Without The Gimmicks Again?

Marie Kondo’s 2019 Netflix series Tidying Up inspired millions of people to take a fresh look at all the stuff they’d accumulated in their houses and throw out what they didn’t need. Six years later, could Slate’s ultra-basic Truck have the same effect on new cars?

Slate says it’s on a mission to produce a vehicle that features all of the important functional and safety equipment that the modern driver needs, but none of the fluff it doesn’t. So no gimmicky color-changing LED interior lights, no complicated touchscreen, no cooled seats and no trick cruise control that lets you take your hands off the wheel to handle your foot-long when lunching on the go.

Do You Really Need All Those Amenities?

But it goes further than that. Slate’s electric Truck is so bare bones that in standard form it has no radio, no speakers and makes do with keep-fit windows. Most of the gadgets that you’d expect on a modern vehicle from Ford or Toyota can be optioned, but that’ll bump up the cost.

Related: You Can Buy This Pickup For $4K Less Than Slate’s EV Without Cranking A Single Window

By leaving them out of the standard specification Slate is promising to bring the truck in at $28,000, which should translate to $20k if tax credits are still a thing by the time production kicks off next year.

Dacia’s low-cost, low content philosophy has already caught on big-time in Europe where the brand’s Sandero is the best-selling car. And in the US, where Dacia doesn’t have a presence, the idea of an even more no-frills vehicle like the Slate seems to have caught the attention of car fans.

It made us wonder whether other automakers should be making spartan cars, trucks and SUVs, vehicles with way less gadgetry than they currently have in even their most basic form.

The fully-loaded Maverick XL

And let’s face it, Marie Kondo could find plenty of features to junk in even the bottom-rung $24k Ford Maverick XL. Though about as luxurious as North Korean jail cell compared to the high-spec Lariat, the XL still features air conditioning, power locks and windows, cruise control, Bluetooth, an 8-inch touchscreen with Apple CarPlay, an electric parking brake and automatic LED lamps.

In some cases it would probably cost Ford more to engineer basic alternatives to some of those features than it would just to leave them in. We already know that automakers like Audi find it makes more economic sense to build entry-level cars with a ton of kit, but make it inactive unless owners sign up to a subscription.

Remember When Mirrors Were Optional?

Things weren’t always this way. Yes, equipment levels have naturally improved over time and equipment that was once the preserve of luxury vehicles is now commonplace, whereas BMW 40- years ago was happy to sell even the 7-series in some markets with a manual transmission, cloth seats, no radio and only one mirror.

But accepting that cars will naturally get better equipped over time, it still feels like automakers in the 1980s and 1990s seemed happier to give us the chance to buy simpler trims. If that’s true, the reason they don’t do that today could be that we don’t actually want bare bones cars and actually like our luxuries.

Could you live without some of that Maverick XL’s equipment if it meant Ford would bring the price down closer to $20k, and would you like to see other automakers make the same kind of de-cluttering, price-cutting moves? Or do you consider equipment like a touchscreen, Bluetooth, power locks, trip computer and cruise control stuff that all cars should have regardless of price?

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