Slate deliveries begin in late 2026 and continue through 2027, with position determined by reservation date. The flow is three steps: preorder now with a $300 refundable deposit, buy (finalise design and accessories) starting late 2026, then delivery. Destination is $1,450. Slate has not published a delivery schedule, a production rate, or per-region timing.
When will Slate trucks be available?
Deliveries begin in late 2026 and continue through 2027. That is the entirety of what Slate has committed to publicly, and it has not changed since the June 24, 2026 pricing announcement.
Last updated: August 10, 2026.
What Slate has not published, and what you should be sceptical of anyone claiming to know:
| Question | Status |
|---|---|
| First delivery date | Not published — “late 2026” |
| Preorder deposit | $300, refundable and credited to purchase ($250 with an active reservation) |
| Destination charge | $1,450 |
| Monthly production rate | Not published |
| Regional rollout order | Not published |
| Reservations-to-orders conversion | Not published |
| Your queue position | Not published to reservation holders |
| Cutoff for 2026 delivery | Not published |
That’s an unusually thin schedule for a vehicle within months of deliveries. It is also normal for a first-production-run startup, where the honest answer genuinely is “we’ll tell you when we know.”
How the timeline actually works
Three distinct stages, and they get conflated constantly:
1. Preorder. You reserve through Slate’s configurator with a $300 refundable deposit, credited toward the purchase — $250 if you already hold an active reservation. This holds a place in line. It does not lock a configuration, a price, or a date. Preorders opened June 24, 2026 and drew roughly 10,000 within hours.
2. Buy. Slate converts reservations into build slots in reservation order. When your slot comes up you finalise the design and accessories — Slate calls this stage “buy,” and it opens starting late 2026. This is the point where the build becomes real and accessory decisions turn into money. Budget the $1,450 destination charge here; Slate says it is the lowest of any US pickup.
3. Delivery window. Once configured, you’re assigned a window within the late-2026-to-2027 range. Slate hasn’t published how far ahead that window is communicated.
The practical implication: reservation date is the only lever anyone has, and for the earliest slots it has already been pulled. If you’re reserving now, you are realistically looking at 2027 — though we’d rather say “realistically” than print a date Slate hasn’t given.
Why the wait is genuinely useful
This is not consolation. The gap between reservation and delivery is the only period in which you can make build decisions with complete information, and the information is still arriving.
Consider what changed in just the five weeks between our July 6 and August 10, 2026 catalog captures: the Open Air Kit went from unpriced to $3,950. Slate Logo Body Decals went from $59.99 to $199.99 with no announcement. Slate restructured the entire store around Starter Packs. Thirteen Slatelets are still unpriced, as are the lift and lowering kits — meaning anyone who budgeted for a lift at reservation time is budgeting against a number that does not exist.
Every one of those is a decision you’d rather make late than early. The order now or add later guide works through which choices genuinely have to happen at order time — the short answer is: the vehicle, and very little else.
What to do while you wait
- Track what’s still unpriced. 30 of Slate’s 209 accessories have no published price. If your build depends on one of them, your budget is provisional. The price database flags every one.
- Don’t budget from forum numbers. Bolt pattern, curb weight, ground clearance, lift height, 10–80% charge time — all unpublished, all confidently stated somewhere. The specs pages mark exactly which figures are real.
- Price a Starter Pack against its parts. If a Starter Pack is your entry point, work out what its accessory content actually costs before assuming the bundle saves money. Slate doesn’t advertise that it does.
- Watch the payload budget. 1,550 lb for the truck, 1,263 lb for the SUV bodies. It’s the constraint that decides which accessories can coexist — see dimensions and weight.
How this page gets updated
We re-crawl Slate’s configurator and diff each capture against the previous one, so catalog and pricing changes get logged rather than silently absorbed. Delivery-schedule information comes from Slate’s own announcements, and this page carries a “last updated” date at the top so you can tell how stale it is.
Nobody has taken delivery of a Slate yet — deliveries have not started — so anything you read about how these trucks behave in the real world, here or anywhere else, is research rather than experience. When that changes, it will be obvious, and we’ll say so.
[VERIFY current delivery estimates, deposit terms, and any published production figures against slate.auto]