Will Your Next Car Be a Blank Slate?

The hottest thing to hit the automotive industry this year is an EV startup company called Slate Auto, headquartered in Troy, Michigan.

The company was originally founded in 2022 under the working name Re-Car.

like a memo, like this is regarding a car.

So obviously they just took the subject line of an email and named the company after it to start with.

Okay, that's cool.

Their purpose was to develop an affordable EV platform and actually truly affordable EV platform.

It was originally founded by MIT grad entrepreneur and manufacturing guru Mike Arnone, along with former Amazon executive Jeff Wilkie.

These two guys had previously started a company called ReColon Build Manufacturing in 2020.

Because, hey, what else was there to do except start a company in the middle of a global pandemic? But they did it for the purpose of strengthening American manufacturing capabilities by building this network of engineering and manufacturing businesses and expertise.

Basically, they saw what the pandemic was doing to the supply chain across every industry and just how reliant we had become on China.

And they thought, yeah, we should probably do something about that.

So they built this network and said, hey, let's use this to build affordable cars.

China's doing it.

So can we.

So while they were developing that EV platform, they were also out there raising a boatload of money and they purchased a defunct printing plant in Warsaw, Indiana.

And then they began hiring experienced executives from the automotive industry.

Remember those disgruntled guys I mentioned? So in 2025, they publicly launched a company called Slate Auto.

and they revealed the blank slate concept.

I'm going to give them bonus points for some cool branding here.

But before we go any further, there are some rumors flying around the internet that this is a Jeff Bezos company, that he's running this startup.

He is not.

That's a bunch of internet clickbait bullshittery.

Some investment entities connected to him, which are there any that are not connected to him these days? have contributed to various rounds of funding for this startup.

So he's technically an investor, but he is not involved in the operations of the business.

But it does tell you how deep some of the pockets go that have invested in Slate Auto.