Can a $25K pickup with crank windows change the EV game?

0:00This message comes from Workday, the enterprise AI platform with a deep understanding of your organization's context and guardrails. So every AI action is permission aware, giving you the ability to get work done right. It's a new Workday. WBUR Podcasts, Boston. We can design, engineer, assemble, all American, and it's affordable and it's something that people love. And it's an EV. Slate Auto wants to shake up the industry with an electric truck starting at$25 ,000. But is it too late for Detroit to catch up to the rest of the world?

0:50It's Wednesday, July 22nd, and this is Here and Now, Anytime from NPR and WBUR. I'm Chris Bentley. In just a few minutes, we'll hear about a, quote, unprecedented cyber incident at OpenAI. The company says two of its artificial intelligence models broke out of the sandbox they were being tested in and got access to another company's data. What OpenAI's accidental hack means for cybersecurity, coming up in about 10 minutes. But first, the global auto industry is going electric. But you wouldn't know it from looking around the U.S. EVs were about a quarter of global auto sales last year, more than twice the share in the U.S., and up substantially from the year before.

1:39One of the big global players is the Chinese company BYD. It's got several budget models under$25 ,000. The American government is effectively blocking those cars from being sold in the U.S. with a 100 % import tax. But some American automakers want to build their own. As Scott Tong reports from Michigan, they think there's an appetite for low-cost cars that run on batteries instead of gas. One of those companies is a startup in Michigan, where I reported last week with here-and-now producer Julia Corcoran. It's called Slate Auto. At Slate's administrative and engineering headquarters outside Detroit sits its electric pickup.

2:22It's called the Blank Slate. Get it? It comes out later this year. Here's Slate Auto CEO Peter Ferrissey. New car prices are over$50 ,000, but even used car prices are over$30 ,000 to$35 ,000. So it's quite difficult for working families and working individuals to afford a vehicle at all, let alone a new vehicle. And when you say affordable, give me a number. What's affordable? Well, if you take a look at the median income in the U.S., most financial analysts would recommend you keep your car payment on a loan to something in the$400 range. At$50 ,000, most people would have a car payment in the$800 plus range.

3:08We're going to have this two-door slate truck available for sale for$24 ,950. that truck will allow you to have a loan payment that's in the$400 range. Ferris says Slate Auto started from scratch with a team of leaders, not just from the auto biz, but also Silicon Valley and e-commerce. They rethought the whole design, rethought the whole concept of manufacturing an electric vehicle. What did they eliminate from the process? So one of the most famous choices we made was we don't have a screen in a Slate. We don't have an infotainment system. Many people are quite excited about that because they end up using their phones or their tablets in their own vehicle today.

3:50And they're excited to save the money of paying for an infotainment system that they don't use. So, ballpark, what do you save by not having the entertainment system? Roughly a few thousand dollars in your vehicle price. And on the architecture of the vehicle, just to give you an order of magnitude, we have less than 900 parts in a slate. some of our competitors will have 4 ,500 parts in their vehicle. That makes it much more expensive to design, much more expensive to assemble, and very expensive for the consumer to afford. Slate Auto's PR team says they borrowed from the California chain In-N-Out Burger.

4:28You start with a blank patty, add a bun if you want, add cheese if you want, lettuce and tomatoes. You get the idea. You can actually start with something very affordable and slowly over time add the accessories and add the features you want. All of our trucks go between three form factors, and this is an exclusive. No one else is doing this in the world. You can buy our trucks as a square-back SUV or the fast-back SUV, which is sort of more fashionable, has a slanted rear window, or you can buy the base slate pickup that we're looking at right here. By the way, with the original Ford Model T, the founder, Henry Ford, said you could buy it in any color you want, so long as it's black.

5:07Well, the blank slate comes only in gray. The company factory has no paint shop, which saves tons of money. Now, you can pay extra for what's called a color wrap, stick-on panels, and dozens of colors, even patterns. What's the challenge of being a new brand out there? I think the most important thing we're trying to do is build trust with our customers because we don't have any on the road. So I think one of the big challenges is how do we give people enough data and enough evidence from the few people who've had a chance to drive it so they feel comfortable, but we'll soon be in a position where we'll be able to push them across the U.S.

5:43and give people a chance to test drive it. Is there a reasonable date when there will be a test drive near me? Yeah, later on this year, this fall. Yeah, sometime this fall. We climb in, and Slate Executive Peter Ferrissey is right. there is no screen, no audio system. In fact, under the dash, there are these two super-sized glove compartments side by side. A couple Spartan dials for the AC. Yes, they kept that as standard. Another cost-saving feature, hand crank windows. Seven turns of the knob to open the window. I have to say you've improved on the crank from circa 1985. $185. If I want a color, a wrap, and I want to pay professionals to do it for me, do I understand that starts at$1 ,000-ish?

6:34All in, counting labor and counting the wrap, it'll be under$1 ,000. So we have 54 colors we're launching with on our classic wraps. How about if I want to convert it when I want to a standard SUV? What is that going to add? around$5 ,000. If you're very handy, which I'm not, unfortunately, you can install it yourself. We recommend for most customers, they use one of our service centers. Those repair pal centers can install it for you for a few hundred dollars as well. I think our philosophy has always been, we look to what competitors are doing. We're inspired by the things they're doing. But at the end of the day, it's all about what we can make for our customer.

7:16Before I finish, I also want to mention that we're very proud of what we've done down in Warsaw, Indiana. This is where the plant is. This plant used to make, if you remember this, the Yellow Pages and the Sears catalog. We're very proud to have brownfielded a plant in an existing town. At scale next year, we hope to employ 2 ,000 people, which is really what they had employed at their peak of making the Yellow Pages and the Sears catalog. Again, that's Peter Ferrissey, CEO of Slate Auto. The question is, will drivers want a bare-bones electric pickup? I put that to a longtime Detroiter. Paul Eisenstein, I'm an auto writer.

7:53I publish Headlight.News and also The Car Collective on Substack. Paul Eisenstein says, for context, the electric vehicle space has been challenging in this country. It wasn't all that long ago when we had maybe a dozen or so EV companies starting up. Tesla is the most famous. Rivian and Lucid are still out there. But we have seen one EV startup after another. Fisker, Lordstown Motors and so on fail or they may claim they're in business, but you know that they'll never actually go into production. Slate was one of the late comers. They've only been around for, what, about four years or so right now.

8:35Let's say it works. Electric pickup, 20, 25 grand. And are people going to buy it? Is there a market? Well, if you listen to conventional wisdom, right now people will tell you, oh, there's no market for EVs. Well, that's not true. But it's still about 6 % of U.S. auto sales this year. So out of a market of, say, 16 million, that's still a million vehicles, a million EVs that will be sold this year. And lately, with fuel prices the way they are, with the uncertainty about fuel, we've actually started seeing some increases. A couple automakers have actually seen their EV sales. Toyota, for example, has actually seen an increase in EV sales this year.

9:21So, can Slade Auto elbow itself into this market? Eisenstein says one issue is its range, about 200 miles per charge, compared to an emerging industry standard of 300 or more. And he says Ford is creating its own electric truck, about to release one that's more souped up for a mere 30 grand. So direct competition, perhaps. But to Eisenstein, the biggest wildcard is Chinese EVs. Right now, they're not sold in this country, but they are making inroads into Canada. Could just be a matter of time. We know from studies out there that Americans would certainly check out Something like 80 % of Americans say they would be willing to take a look at Chinese vehicles.

10:03If they can deliver the sort of low-price, high-quality, high-feature models that we're seeing everywhere from Mexico to Europe. I think that, well, Jim Farley, the CEO of Ford, called it an existential threat. And he probably wasn't off base. For now, though, the low-cost EV of the moment is the startup Slate Auto Pickup. Again, starting at a couple pennies under$25 ,000 deliveries later this year.

10:34Scott Tong reporting from Michigan. Click the follow button in your podcast player right now so you don't miss our upcoming episode about Michigan's politics this year. Scott talked to folks there about the Senate race, among other things. You don't want to miss it. So click that follow button and thanks. Coming up next on today's show, though, while the U.S. might be playing catch-up with regards to electric vehicles, it is leading on AI. That's not without its drawbacks, of course. In just a minute, we'll hear about a, quote, new kind of security incident involving rogue AI and what it means for you.

11:15Stick around.

11:25This message comes from Workday, the enterprise AI platform with a deep understanding of your organization's context and guardrails. So every AI action is permission aware, giving you the ability to get work done right. It's a new Workday. Since the early days of artificial intelligence, there have been fears of AI going rogue. OpenAI says two of its AI models acted on their own last week, broke out of their digital labs, hacked their way into a tech startup. The company is calling this an unprecedented hacking incident. So time to get reporter Ina Fried of Axios back on the line. She joins us regularly to talk AI.

12:03Hey, Ina. Hey, Scott. Okay, escaping containment. As I was reading about this, I jotted down The Terminator, the outbreak movie. How did these AI agents get out, as it were? Well, you know, they're getting smarter. And I think we are naive if we think getting smarter doesn't mean they aren't going to be more clever at getting around the rules we place on them. I think this is a huge wake-up call that if we build superhuman computer systems, they're also going to be superhuman at getting around the rules that we try and set. And our creativity is limited by our human capacity. Yeah, so these AIs, right, They kind of got out of the sandbox, as it were, the digital lab they were in, went into the internet wild, as it were, and then hacked into this startup called Hugging Face.

12:51So this hacking in, is that another gatekeeper they got through? There's a couple things that happened here. First of all, you know, this was a model that was being tested. And models have gotten really good at noticing when they're being tested. And they get that a benchmark just tests, do you figure this out or not? and often use any means necessary. So here they weren't supposed to have internet access, but they figured out that there was a way around that if they went through. And then they thought, well, who has the answers to this test? Well, Hugging Face, this site that hosts a lot of models, probably the answer is somewhere there.

13:28Then they found a flaw in Hugging Face's site, went and found the answer. But I think another important thing to keep in mind is, look, they did the task that they were assigned, which was to do well on this benchmark. So I think it's also a lesson. We have to be really explicit about the instructions we give these systems, especially as they're growing more powerful. And this is interesting, the startup hugging face that discovered this was happening and found a way to contain them using AIs. Is that right? AI in this case was also a bit of the solution? Yeah, and there's even more to it, which is they wanted to use the latest and greatest models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

14:09That was their first inclination to try and stop this. But because it was cybersecurity related, the model said, no, we can't help you here. So they turned to an open source Chinese model, the same models that are being threatened by the U.S. government or at least pockets of the U.S. government, because that was the best option. So, you know, this whole discourse around open versus closed, China versus U.S., it's a lot more nuanced than it would seem. Yeah. I know I read the OpenAI blog. It's talking a lot about ensuring this doesn't happen again, several paragraphs on that. But given the technology, should we just expect more of this to happen in today's age of AI?

14:50I think we should expect that these systems will try. I think we have to assume they're going to do whatever they can and get a lot better at prescribing rules and limits. And also, you know, there are folks saying, look, we have to slow down the pace here. I don't know how realistic or feasible it is, but I do know that this technology is moving faster than most of us humans can keep pace with. So, you know, there's surely some technology freakout going on among many. Is there a voice, an important voice out there saying, you know what, let's all calm down? Anything like that? There are. I mean, I do think it's important.

15:29this was a model that purposely had its protections turned down because it was being tested. So that's one thing we can breathe, like maybe a momentary sigh of relief. I think also in the end, you know, Hugging Face did detect the intrusion. That's good. I also think we should be careful that we don't penalize companies like OpenAI and Anthropic when they tell us about things going bad because it could create an incentive to just not say when they see bad stuff. And I think we do want the companies to say it. So that's a couple of my more subtle takeaways from this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fair point.

16:05And OpenAI has a public blog post on its version of the story. Ina Freed is Chief Technology Correspondent at Axios. Ina, thanks again. Thanks, Scott.

16:22This message comes from Workday, the enterprise AI platform with a deep understanding of your organization's context and guardrails, so every AI action is permission-aware, giving you the ability to get work done right. It's a new workday. Cubans are suffering under new American sanctions and an oil blockade that has contributed to repeated nationwide blackouts. That's on top of widespread trade embargoes and sanctions that American administrations have placed on Cuba for decades. The State Department calls its newest policies, quote, tough, and says they are intended to, quote, cut the regime off from resources used to line its pockets.

17:06The AP's Christiana Mesquita in Havana told Scott Tong, things are getting worse every single day. It's not just the massive power outages that we had, too, in less than 10 days. It's the controlled, they call it controlled blackouts that they have every day in different parts of Havana and certainly a lot worse in the countryside that can last to 20 hours to sometimes days. You can imagine, you know, the disruption it causes to families that don't have the ability to have water because they need fuel to pump the water into the homes. So they sometimes have to go a long way to collect water. They can't even have a fan going on at night.

18:07It's been extremely difficult. And you can see it, you know, in the faces and the voices of the people we talk to in the street. It's just exhaustion. Now, as far as electricity and the power grid, one reason is the shortage of crude oil. The U.S. has blocked oil going into Cuba for several months. But Trump administration officials, they argue Cuba's government, has neglected to maintain the power grid there. Is this a case where both can be true? It's both are true. I mean, we've been reporting for a long time that the power grid is ancient. It's in dire need of repairs and new parts. And those have been really hard to get, considering that there is an embargo in this country.

19:02So it's not easy to get those parts as well. But something could have been done, I guess, you know, to improve it a long time ago. There's more to that conversation about Cuba, and you can listen to it all at hereandnow.org, where we're also following the fallout from Medicaid cuts included in President Trump's signature budget law last year. Medicaid is public health insurance for people who are poor or disabled. Last year, Republicans in Congress passed Trump's bill adding new requirements for people on Medicaid that are projected to kick millions of people off the program. But how exactly does that happen?

19:43Samantha Liss of KFF Health News told Indira Lakshmanan about one woman's months-long battle with the state to get her benefits. So Marie Noon was working as a bank manager, shuttling her two kids between choir practice and robotics club. But then she developed a rare form of arthritis. It left her bedridden and unable to move. I was in so much pain. It made my joints swell to the point where I felt like I was being ripped apart. She became disabled and that qualified her for Medicaid. But first, she had to navigate a benefit system that felt like a maze and it denied her. Noon appeals and she starts panicking because now she's got to pay out of pocket for the eight medications that allow her to live her life.

20:30And yeah, I just paid for it and prayed that one of these appeals was going to work because there really were no other options. All right, so let me understand this, Samantha. If this woman is disabled and she's making under a certain income, doesn't she qualify for Medicaid? So why was she denied her benefits? We don't know exactly why. Contracts with the state show that Michigan's system is operated by the global consulting firm Deloitte. In an email, the firm told us it didn't find any, quote, system anomalies causing routine denials, unquote. But our reporting on state IT systems in Texas, Tennessee, and Florida also shows a history of mistakes that can make or break someone's access to health care.

21:16All right. Well, I think of Deloitte as a, you know, giant accounting firm. Explain to me why private companies like this are involved in determining who gets public benefits like Medicaid. Often, state Medicaid agencies are underfunded and don't have the manpower to vet all enrollees. This is big business for consulting companies like Deloitte. In Michigan alone, the firm has had contracts worth more than$760 million over two decades. Sometimes it feels like this system is needlessly complicated. We can send people to the moon, but we can't figure out who should get Medicaid. All right, so what happened to Marie Noon?

22:01Was she able to ever get reinstated in the system so that she could get the Medicaid to which she was entitled? Noon found an attorney who was willing to help. They fought her denial and won. But experts warn that next year, there's going to be even more pressure on the system. That's when states have to comply with the new rules from President Trump's big budget law. Here's disability rights lawyer Anastasia Kolosova. I'm really worried about more people falling through the cracks as our day job system comes under incredible strain. She's talking about Michigan's Department of Health. States are reworking their IET systems at breakneck speed.

22:44For the first time, they'll have to verify employment. And these are some of the biggest changes in years. So what does this mean for people like the woman Marie Noon you talked to in Michigan who rely on Medicaid? Marie Noon had been a bank manager, but she became disabled and began to rely on Medicaid. Millions of patients will have to prove they're working or exempt from work requirements at least every six months to keep or get benefits. These systems and rules are so complicated your eyes glaze over. But the consequences are staggering. Five million people are expected to lose their health coverage within the next decade.

23:29Well, I'm sure you'll be continuing to follow that story and bring us updates. Samantha Liss is a reporter with our editorial partners at KFF Health News, a nonprofit news site. Thank you so much, Samantha. Thank you. That's it for the show today. Here and Now, Anytime comes from NPR and WBUR Boston. Today's stories were produced by Julia Corcoran and Sam Rafelson. Our editors were Todd Munt, Micaela Rodriguez, and Michael Scotto. Technical direction from Matt Reed and Andre Peralta. our theme music is by Mike Moschetto Max Kleedman and me Chris Bentley our digital producers are Alison Hagen and Grace Griffin and here and now's executive producer is Alan Price thanks for listening we'll be back with you tomorrow

24:34This message comes from Workday. Guessing is for game shows, not your business. Especially when your margin for error is zero. Workday is the enterprise AI platform for HR, finance, and IT with a deep understanding of your organization's context and guardrails. So every AI action is permission aware, giving you accuracy 24-7 and the ability to not just get work done, but get it done right. It's a new Workday.