Slate's $1,450 Destination Charge Brings Actual Base Price To $26,400, Undercutting Maverick By $2,590

When the Slate truck was announced, and later when the official MSRP number dropped, the pricing was the main selling point: Just $24,950 gets you a brand-new fully-electric pickup truck, provided you don't care about it being much more than four wheels, two doors, and a bed. But as anyone who's bought a new car knows, there's always a destination fee lurking somewhere, waiting to bump your thousands digit up, and Slate hadn't announced it yet. Now we know that fee is $1,450, bringing the truck's MSRP to $26,400. 

That bumps the Slate truck over the magic $25,000 point, and might make it feel unreasonably close to other competitors like the Ford Maverick — especially considering that the Mav offers such incredible luxuries as "power windows," "a stereo," and "door pockets." Look a bit deeper, though, and you'll find that the Slate is still a deal: Counting destination, the Maverick starts at $28,990, and other competing trucks only go up from there. 

Destination fees actually increase the price gap between the Slate and the Maverick, as Ford's destination charge of $1,845 is higher than Slate's. The larger Ford Ranger's destination fee is even higher at $1,895, bringing the starting price up to $34,445. Nissan's destination fee on the Frontier is $1,745, for a base price of $33,895, and Toyota charges the same fee on the Tacoma for an even higher base price of $34,190. Chevy beats all, with a $2,095 destination fee on the Colorado that makes for a starting price of $34,495. 

The Slate is still the cheapest truck on the market, and far and away the cheapest EV with a bed — the Silverado EV will run you more than twice as much. We know Ford is working on a Maverick-sized four-door electric truck that will start at around $30,000, though with destination that could be more like $32k. Every automaker has its destination fees, and most of them are higher than Slate's. Whether it's worth the cost difference to the Maverick is up to every individual buyer's cross-shopping, but destination fees likely won't make or break a deal.