I was just writing about the Slate, the bare-bones electric pickup that Jeff Bezos is bankrolling. A brand-new truck with crank windows, no paint, and a $24,950 starting price is the kind of number that makes you do a double take.
It turns out Slate isn’t the only startup chasing the cheap-truck crown anymore. A company called REO Industries wants to undercut it, and it’s doing it with gasoline.
REO’s pitch is the opposite of Slate’s. Where Slate went all-electric, REO’s slogan is “build it like it used to be.” That means a gas engine, a six-speed manual, and real four-wheel drive.
The starting price is $21,500, which lands it among the cheapest new vehicles you can buy in America, pickup or otherwise.
Mechanical 4WD
4,500 lb towing
~600 mi per tank
Rear-wheel drive
1,000 lb towing
~205 mi range
Available AWD
Up to 4,000 lb towing
Gas, no charging
Starting prices exclude taxes and destination. REO figures are company targets for a truck not yet in production.
Who is REO, anyway?
If the name rings a faint bell, it should. REO isn’t a startup invention. The company was founded back in 1905 by Ransom E. Olds, the same man behind Oldsmobile.
Here’s the part most people get backwards. Olds started Oldsmobile first, got pushed out of the company that carried his own name, and only then founded REO. The letters stand for Ransom Eli Olds.
REO is often credited with helping invent the American truck segment in those early years. The good times didn’t last, though. The company hit financial turbulence in the 1950s, got merged with Diamond T to become Diamond Reo Trucks in the late 1960s, and quietly faded out.
The badge now belongs to Zach De Bernardi, a Dallas-based real estate entrepreneur who locked down the trademark. His background is in real estate, not car-building, which is either a red flag or the whole point depending on how you see it.
The Runabout is gloriously basic
REO’s plan starts with three vehicles, none of which exist yet. There’s a regular-cab truck called the Runabout T4X, a crew-cab version called the T4C, and an SUV named the S4C.
The T4X is the headliner at $21,500. It’s a body-on-frame pickup, around 180 inches long, which is roughly the footprint of a Honda Civic. That makes it six inches longer than a Slate and a full 20 inches shorter than a Ford Maverick.
Power comes from a yet-unnamed four-cylinder gas engine and mechanical four-wheel drive, bolted to either a six-speed manual or a six-speed automatic. De Bernardi has described the project as asking “what’s the definition of a truck,” then building a smaller, cheaper version of the answer. He calls the class “Ameri-Kei,” borrowing the spirit of Japan’s tiny, no-nonsense Kei cars.
On paper, the numbers punch above the price. REO lists a max towing figure of 4,500 pounds and a 1,200-pound payload. That’s 3,500 pounds more than a Slate can pull, and 500 pounds more than even the Maverick manages.
Then there’s range, which is where a gas tank quietly wins. REO is targeting more than 600 miles on a single fill, roughly three times what Slate’s 205-mile battery delivers. No charging stops, no range math in your head.
The basics really are basic, mind you. The cheapest configuration may ship without a radio, or even finished door cards, with the nicer stuff sold as optional extras.
Built to be fixed in your own driveway
The durability claims are where REO gets ambitious. The company says it’s engineering the truck to run past 500,000 miles, with repairs simple enough to handle yourself.
It’s leaning hard into right-to-repair. REO claims every panel comes off “in under five minutes with common tools,” diagnostics run on a $30 scanner, and there’s a public parts catalog it says it will guarantee for 20 years.
There’s also no parts-pairing, the practice of locking replacement parts to a single vehicle’s software so you’re forced back to the dealer. REO says it’s putting that promise in writing, and selling the trucks direct online with no dealer markups.
The cabin follows the same logic. You get analog gauges, physical switches, and one small screen for diagnostics and CarPlay. No subscriptions, no feature locks.
5,500 reservations in six days
The early response has been loud. REO opened refundable $25 reservations on its own website and racked up 5,500 of them in under a week, with no Super Bowl ad anywhere in sight.
The backdrop helps explain the appetite. Slate originally floated an “under $20,000” sticker, but that figure assumed the $7,500 federal EV tax credit, which has since been scrapped. With that gone, a $21,500 gas truck and no charger to worry about starts to look like sharp timing.
That reservation velocity is the real story. There’s clearly a slice of truck buyers who’ve watched their segment drift into $50,000 touchscreen territory and want out, which raises a fair question about whether the electric pickup is even the answer here.
REO is also piling into a field that already includes Ford’s $30,000 electric pickup and a revived Scout. The difference is that REO is the rare new name doing it with gas, not batteries.
The timeline is the catch. REO is aiming for a full reveal in the fourth quarter of 2026, pilot builds in 2027, and first deliveries in late 2028. That’s a long road for a company that hasn’t built a single truck yet.
And the startup truck graveyard is well populated. Getting one vehicle to market is hard enough. Building it at scale and turning a profit is a different beast entirely.
Still, the demand signal is tough to ignore. If REO holds to its plan, the cheapest new truck in America might not be an EV after all.
