RJ has an update on the Suburban he'd rather not talk about, so naturally we talk about it. Turns out the check engine light saga has a dumb ending: the cone filter on the cold air intake had fallen off at some point, and the truck had been happily inhaling raw ranch dirt down five miles of dirt road each way for who knows how long. Rob, the diagnostician, would like it noted that he was technically right about the intake side. RJ would like it noted that the truck still runs fine and still gets 17 miles a gallon.

Then the main event: Slate Auto. RJ walks Rob through the pitch for the blank slate — a no-frills, $24,990 electric pickup that ships in gray primer with crank windows and no stereo, built to be wrapped, customized, and even reconfigured from a truck into an SUV with a wrench in your own driveway. One chassis, one vehicle, no trim levels. From there it's a genuinely good back-and-forth about whether the concept works: EV range anxiety versus the reality of a 45-mile round trip, why cold and heat wreck the estimated range, bidirectional charging as a generator on wheels, and whether an EV actually makes more sense out at the ranch than RJ ever expected once you fold in solar. Plus the graveyard of dead EV startups — Fisker, Lucid — and whether Jeff Bezos money is enough to keep this one from joining them.

In this episode:

• The cold air intake mystery and the unfiltered ranch dirt confession
• Rob was right about the intake side, and won't let it go
• Slate Auto's blank slate: $24,990, primer gray, DIY down to the body panels
• Turning a truck into an SUV with a wrench, and the whole "grows with you" pitch
• EV range anxiety vs. the math of an actual daily drive
• Bidirectional charging, solar, and why the ranch might be the perfect EV setup after all
• The EV startup graveyard and whether Slate has the legs to survive it

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