Yes, I know you’re used to the other caveat maxim, but that’s not what came to mind when I read Jeff Bezos is backing Slate Auto. They’re the EV startup coming out with a minimalist, budget-friendly, bare-bones, stripped-down base model electric truck starting at $24,950. The modular two-seater pickup is designed as “do-it-yourself” (by that they mean, “customize”) and will begin deliveries in late 2026.
There’s other stuff I want to mention, but first, the price.
$24,950. It’s not $25,000. OK, not a genius observation. It’s a pricing tactic known as “charm pricing” or “left-digit pricing.” The idea is that people don’t process numbers purely mathematically; they process them psychologically, and Brand Keys is expert at that. $25,000 is mentally categorized as “twenty-five thousand dollars.” $24,950 is mentally categorized as “twenty-four thousand something,” even though the difference is only $50.
The left-digit effect is when people pay disproportionate attention to the leftmost digits. Seeing “24” instead of “25” can make the price feel meaningfully lower. And prices that aren’t round numbers signal the seller calculated the price carefully. Instead of arbitrarily setting it. So, an electric truck priced at $24,950 can feel like it’s been discounted, even if there was never a discount. (BTW, luxury brands do the opposite, pricing something at exactly $5,000 rather than $4,999 because round numbers can convey affluence, confidence, and prestige, and the $1 difference makes a difference.) Even when people know the trick, the effect still influences first impressions.
OK, I mentioned Slate is going to have a “customize-it-yourself” marketing strategy, and here’s how it works: the base, two-door truck starts at $24,950, but if you want a two-door SUV version with a second row of seats that starts at $29,950. The production model has a standard battery providing an estimated 150 miles of range. But an extended 84 kWh pack can bump the range up to 240 miles. It also bumps up the price. It lacks touchscreen, stereo, and power windows, but it does have a universal mount for a smartphone. Buyers can build and customize the vehicle using over 200 interchangeable accessories and parts, swap configurations to turn the truck into an SUV, an open-back beach buggy, or a family vehicle. So, cool beans, right?
Except, “caveat venditor.”
This isn’t the first time a marketing approach like Slate’s has been tried. And failed. Epically.
I wrote about it four years ago, and things haven’t changed much. Consumers don’t think how they feel, don’t say what they think and don’t do what they say. Consumers may say one thing but it’s usually not what they really expect. And, sure, everyone wants to pay as little as possible for, well, everything, but it’s not the way they’ll behave when they get around to factoring in what they really expect.
“Cheap” is the rational part of decision-making. “Expectations” are the emotional ones. And because decision-making today is mostly emotional (we estimate in 2026 it’s a 70:30 ratio), it’s a good idea to have a fix on what those expectations are before creating products and taking them to market. Relying only on what people say, invariably takes you down the wrong highway.
The column I wrote in 2022 was about the Nano, from India’s Tata Motors. It was a car priced to drive off the lot at just under eighteen hundred dollars ($1,800). Sure, this was the Indian market we’re talking about, but Tata came up with an economical car because the target audience said they’d buy a car if it was “cheap.” And it was. But cheap in ways nobody expected.
Low sticker price, sure. It had a tiny 0.6-liter engine producing just 33 horsepower. Plastic bumpers. Glued construction. Fixed seats. One side mirror. One windshield wiper. Hand-cranked windows. A manual transmission. No airbags, AC, hubcaps, or radio. No external gas cap. No trunk access from outside the car. Not even a glove compartment. The engine sounded like a lawnmower, although to be fair, it was incredibly cheap.
So, what was there to complain about? It was basic. It was exactly what consumers said they wanted.
And there it is: the say-versus-expect paradox.
Automotive brand success – any brand success, really – comes down to one thing: how well it meets customer expectations. Regular readers will recognize this theme. Expectations drive behavior (no automotive pun intended). They may vary by category, audience, even geography, but they’re emotionally driven, which means the real ones often go unspoken.
So, when consumers said they wanted cheap, Tata Motors built a cheap car. A very cheap car. They expected a hit.
Alas, sales ran out of gas (that pun was intended). Why? Because “cheap” splits in two: cheap as price, and cheap as image, or in the automotive world, self-image. Consumers asked for the first but felt the second. What they really wanted was something that felt more upscale. You know, at the very least something with a glove compartment and a gas cap!
Although, to be frank, it was less about gas caps and glove compartments, and more about symbolism. Consumers said, “I need affordable transportation.” What they felt was “I want transportation that signal’s my economic progress and dignity.” The Nano became known as “the world’s cheapest car.” And that label destroyed it!
Final score: Expectations 1, Tata Motors 0. Details here: April 2022.
So, yeah, caveat venditor. That advice hasn’t changed in four years.
Slate’s marketing language contains similar warning signs. They celebrate no touchscreen, manual windows, stripped-down interior, DIY assembly, and bare-bones design. These are rational benefits. But consumers interpret products more emotionally today rather than rationally. A buyer may say, “I don’t need a screen.” Yet when shopping, they compare vehicles and think, “Why does this one feel less premium than the others?” The emotional evaluation happens instinctively (70:30, remember?).
The major difference between today and the Nano era is that EVs have acquired emotional meaning. EVs became associated with innovation, technology, eco-consciousness, and futurism. Consumers expect EVs to feel advanced, not do-it-yourself, which creates the potential (and highly probable) expectation disparity.
So sure, customers may admire the concept, but they don’t actually buy it.
Consumers may praise the idea of a minimalist EV but still expect their actual vehicle to make them feel modern, capable, successful, and proud. If they interpret the Slate as “the EV equivalent of settling,” then the Tata Nano story becomes a much more relevant warning. The deeper lesson from the Nano isn’t cheap products fail. Its products fail when their emotional meaning contradicts customer expectations.
The more commonly quoted caveat emptor, buyer beware, is ancient wisdom. But in modern markets, sellers should be just as careful. Because what customers say they want is often the least reliable predictor of what they’ll actually buy. Sure, consumers may tell you one thing, but what they don’t is what they really expect. And for the past two decades expectations have been in the in the driver’s seat.
Ignore that distinction and you may discover that building a cheap vehicle is a lot easier than selling one.
Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash
