Jacob Hunka June 29, 2026 · 5 min read
The cheapest new EV truck in America showed up this week with no stereo and no power windows, and people seem to love it for that. Someone finally drove the thing instead of just looking at renders. Elsewhere: a sodium battery built to outlast your mortgage, a wave-power claim that falls apart on closer inspection, a home battery aimed at renters, and James May discovering he likes a pickup. Here's the week.
THE WEEK'S BEST STORIES
After months of renders and spec sheets, Auto Focus got hands-on time with the Slate truck and the $24,950 starting price held up. What you get for that is a rear-wheel-drive pickup with a roughly 65 kWh battery, 181 horsepower, a claimed 205 miles of range, and 120 kW charging on an NACS port. What you don't get is most of a normal car. No power windows. No speakers. No center screen. Every truck ships in the same gray finish, and those colorful ones in the press shots are vinyl wraps you buy later. The whole idea is that you bolt on what you want when you want it. With federal incentives in limbo, a sub-$25,000 price that doesn't need a tax credit to make sense stands out. Auto Focus also shows the truck converted into a five-seat SUV with a bolt-in roll cage and second row, something owners can do after the fact. The driving surprised the host: the single rear motor felt quicker than 181 horsepower suggests, with firm, Tesla-style one-pedal regen on by default. Here's the rub, though. Slate hasn't published a full accessory price list, so nobody knows what a usefully equipped truck actually costs. The $24,950 number and the truck you'd really want are probably two different prices, and until the configurator goes live, the headline figure is the only one anyone can quote.
CATL's TENER Sodium Battery Promises a 25-Year Grid Stack
Everything Electric TECH
At Intersolar in Munich, Everything Electric's Elliot Richards walked around CATL's TENER stack, a grid-storage system built on sodium-ion cells instead of the usual lithium. Sodium is cheaper and far more abundant, and it handles temperature extremes better, but it stores less energy per kilogram, which is why it lands in stationary storage first rather than cars. The numbers from the video: about 30 megawatt-hours per stack, a claimed 25 to 30 year service life against the roughly ten years Richards gives typical storage, around 15,000 cycles at 25 degrees, and operation from minus 20 to 45 degrees. On safety, CATL claims thermal runaway down 60 percent, vented gas down 35 percent, and heat output down 50 percent versus lithium-ion. Richards flags all of it as the manufacturer's own figures, which is the right call. The detail that stuck with me was the self-healing design, meant to keep a unit running when one part fails. He compares it to old Christmas lights wired so a single dead bulb doesn't kill the whole string. The blocks also swap out individually without taking the rest offline, which grid operators care about more than headline capacity. Whether any of this survives independent testing is the open question, but CATL has the factories to actually build it at scale, which is more than most sodium hopefuls can say.
A Floating Wave Machine Claims One-Cent Power. The German Science Guy Is Skeptical.
German Science Guy
A device called the Waveline Magnet has been bobbing off Cyprus for two years, and its developer, Sea Wave Energy, says it can make electricity for as little as a penny per kilowatt-hour. That would beat solar and wind outright. The German Science Guy explains the design and then explains why he doesn't buy it. The machine is a long modular string that rides the waves rather than fighting them, and the company claims a single unit could top 100 megawatts under perfect conditions, against maybe 15 megawatts for a typical offshore wind turbine. The problem is what actually got tested. A 32-meter, 1.8-ton prototype produced 1.4 kilowatts in a tank. Not megawatts. Kilowatts. For scale, the video pegs current wave power at around 72 cents per kilowatt-hour and the world's biggest solar park near 1.6 cents, so a real one-cent wave system would be an enormous outlier. Almost all the supporting data comes from the company, only one independent study exists, and after five years of prototypes the project has gone quiet while it hunts for partners. Wave energy has been breaking hearts since the 1970s for exactly this reason: the math looks incredible on paper and the ocean destroys the hardware. Worth keeping an eye on. Not worth believing yet.
Can a $1,500 Plug-In Battery Stand In for a Powerwall?
Undecided with Matt Ferrell
Matt Ferrell's question is whether a $1,499 battery that plugs into a wall outlet can do the job of a Powerwall. The product is Pila, and it needs no electrician, no permit, and no panel upgrade, and it comes with you when you move. Each unit holds 1.6 kWh and puts out 2,400 watts continuously, enough to start a fridge compressor, and up to 64 of them can mesh together like WiFi nodes into one house-wide system. One thing up front, because Ferrell says it himself: he's a paid advisor to Pila. So this is a fan with a disclosed stake talking, not an independent bench test. Even so, the core idea is sound. Home batteries have always been built for people who own a single-family house, which leaves renters and apartment dwellers with nothing, and a movable plug-in unit is aimed straight at them. The wrinkle is the law. Pushing power back into a regular outlet, the thing that would let these units shave your peak bill, isn't allowed under current US electrical code. Ferrell points to 28 states plus DC weighing plug-in storage rules and a UL safety standard still being written, so the picture may change. For now, a single unit isn't whole-home backup and won't run a Level 2 charger or a heat pump. Bought for what it does today, quiet backup and time-of-use savings, it makes sense. The grid-feeding part is a maybe, not a feature.
James May Takes the Rivian R1T Across Virginia and Comes Away a Pickup Convert
James May's Planet Gin
James May says he's never liked pickup trucks. Then his companions Lucy and Eve put him in a Rivian R1T for a trip across Virginia, and by the end he'd changed his mind. The video is more travelogue than review, heavy on diners and frozen custard and one long argument about contactless payment, but the verdict is clear enough: he likes this truck. He likes the looks, calls the cabin comfortable and Scandinavian, and is genuinely charmed by the gear tunnel, the storage pass-through behind the cab that doubles as a step and a seat. The obvious rival is the Cybertruck, and May makes the comparison himself, granting it more luggage space but preferring the Rivian on feel. He drove what he says was the roughly 1,000-horsepower version, though he kept it in a range-saving front-wheel-drive mode most of the way. The gripes are real and specific: firm ride on the chunky all-terrain tires, vague steering when you take over manually, and no Apple CarPlay, which he brings up more than once. All three of them end the trip agreeing they'd take the R1T over a Cybertruck. A man who started out certain he didn't want a pickup finishing the drive wanting one tells you most of what you need to know.
The week is yours. See you next Monday.
Jacob Hunka, Founder nexusEVnews.com
P.S. Know someone who follows the auto industry and ignores the electric side of it? Now is a good time to fix that.