A young Bay Area startup is designing a compact electric pickup truck that's as small as a Mini Cooper but rivals the storage capacity and battery ranges of other electric vehicle from Tesla, Ford and Rivian.
Telo Trucks, based in San Carlos, unveiled its design on Tuesday for a mini electric pickup truck that squeezes a full truck bed onto a vehicle that's only about two-thirds the size of Rivian's electric R1T and Ford's new electric F-150 Lightning trucks.
Telo's truck will also have a battery range of around 350 miles, longer than Tesla's entry-level Cybertruck, which reportedly will start at 250 miles of range and reach up to 500 miles in upgraded versions.
Initially, their target consumer is an urban dwelling adventurist who needs more hauling capacity than an SUV but lives in dense cities like San Francisco where storing and parking full-sized trucks is difficult.
Telo was co-founded by CEO Jason Marks and CTO Forrest North in 2022, and they brought on famed designer Yves Béhar and his studio, Fuseproject, to oversee the truck's design.
Marks previously worked on autonomous software and advanced driver safety systems at National Instruments, and he also worked on early lidar development projects. And North was a mechanical engineer at Tesla in the mid-2000s.
"Now's a great time to be starting an automotive company. It's not a great time to be scaling an automotive company," Marks said. "People that would normally not talk to a startup … are like, OK, they're doing something innovative and they're young, they're not going to ask or need a million of these parts tomorrow."
To fit a full-sized truck into a smaller footprint, the team eliminated airgaps between the cabin and the truck bed, and optimized the vertical space of the vehicle. They also cut off most of the front, which would normally house a combustion engine, and reduced the space in front of the driving wheel to just 18 inches.
The design brings the Telo truck to just 152 inches long, the company said, which is on par with BMW's super compact Mini Cooper.
"We don't see other electric vehicle trucks as competition," North said. "The competition is the incumbents, and some of the new entrants, as well."
The Telo truck will also come outfitted with an advanced driver assistance system, or ADAS, that meets Level 2 autonomous safety standards.
Tesla's most advanced vehicles, including its so-called Autopilot software, are also at Level 2 autonomy like most other consumer vehicles on the market.
The self-driving cars being tested on public roads by Cruise and Waymo are considered Level 4 autonomous cars — they're able to handle most driving conditions with no human intervention, but even those cars do not have fully autonomous capabilities, according to industry standards.
Rather than developing its ADAS software from scratch, Telo will use technology that's available off-the-shelf from other market leaders, they told me. It's using the same strategy for sourcing other components like battery cells and chips.
Telo will also contract with an existing car manufacturer, commonly referred to as an original equipment manufacturer or OEM, to build the trucks rather than attempt to run its own manufacturing facility, though they are a few years away from ramping up to mass production.
"We're really trying to go to market as fast as we can, and streamline that path using things that have been certified and are already validated and ready to go," North said.
Telo wouldn't confirm exactly who its OEM partner would be.
But one of the world's largest third-party vehicle component and manufacturing companies is Canada's Magna International, which already has partnerships with global brands like Mercedez-Benz.
In 2021, Hyundai revealed that Apple was talking to the Korean corporation about a potential manufacturing partnership for Apple's secretive electric car project, but that deal quickly fizzled out, according to the WSJ. Magna has since expressed interested in working with Apple, too, according to Motor Trend.
Telo's team is currently building out prototypes and expects to make its first deliveries by 2025, followed by a full commercial launch in 2026. The truck will be priced at $50,000 for its base model.
Rivian's R1T truck starts at $73,000 by comparison, while Ford's electric F-150 Lightning starts around $60,000.
Tesla's Cybertruck is expected to start at around $50,000, as well, though production has repeatedly been delayed. CEO Elon Musk told investor that the first deliveries of the Cybertruck will happen in the third quarter of the year, but volume production isn't expected until 2024, according to The Verge.
Around 1.8 million people have reportedly put down $100 deposits for a Cybertruck. The truck's supposedly unbreakable glass windows shattered during a live demonstration in 2019, and since then, a leaked report showed design flaws that caused "some basic problems with its suspension, body sealing, noise levels, handling and braking," according to a recent Wired report.
Telo is now taking fully refundable deposits of $152 to reserve a truck. The startup has also raised nearly $1.4 million in pre-seed funding from investors that include GoAhead Ventures, Underdog Labs, WorkPlay Ventures and Yves Béhar.
If you live in San Francisco, you might also have spotted a mini fire truck affectionately known as Kiri the Japanese Fire Truck, which its current owner and Bernal Heights resident Todd Lappin drives around the city. He doesn't put out fires, though. The tiny truck is a fraction of the size of a regular American fire truck and was designed by the traditional Japanese vehicle manufacturer Daihatsu in 1990.
