“Nobody,” Tisha Johnson declared, in a careworn voice betraying three consecutive days of jet-lagged speech-giving, “wants a bunch of tech in their car.” Not exactly what you’d expect to hear from a senior executive of any Amazon-backed firm, let alone one devoted solely to the production of a controversial new electric vehicle, but the audience didn’t seem worried. Hundreds of them, mostly automotive industry employees and media personnel, had come from around the world to the “Car // Design Event” in Munich. While there was plenty of eye candy on offer, from an irreplaceable 1972 BMW Turbo supercar prototype to the global premiere of a new subcompact bearing the infamous Yugo name, most of the attention was on Johnson and two hastily 3D-printed, shoebox-sized models of the electric pickup she’s designed. It’s called “Slate,” and it’s already generated more than 100,000 $50 deposits from eager would-be customers.

As with Ben Franklin a full 249 years ago, Johnson’s task in Europe is significantly different from what she faces back home in America. Stateside, the very idea of a $20,000, after taxpayer subsidy, as is par for the course with electric vehicles, electric pickup with room for just two people and a modest amount of cargo in a tidy 5-foot bed is a bit heretical. As a red-blooded Ohioan, your author drives a pickup that could carry one Slate crosswise on the pickup box while towing a string of four more Slates behind it, and I’m a long way from having the most serious truck on my street. This country hasn’t been particularly excited about compact trucks since the debut of the 1982 Chevrolet S-10. Many people believe this lack of enthusiasm to be the direct fault of the aforementioned S-10.

Our continental cousins, by contrast, are a little different as car consumers. Many of them have already been browbeaten by a witches’ brew of regulation and taxation into ownership of a battery-powered, golf-cart-sized penalty box. For them, Slate needs no apologies for its size or even for its unimpressive standard range of 150 miles between charges. So here in Germany, rather, the challenge facing Johnson was a little snobbier: Why buy an electric pickup from an Amazon-affiliated startup when we have dozens of EV options from the established brands?

It turns out that while the questions........

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