U.S.-based car startup Telo plans to build a new minitruck that goes completely against the trend of large, fat E.V. trucks currently dominating the American market. The namesake Telo, the company’s first vehicle, is a truck with “the work capabilities of a Toyota Tacoma and the footprint of a Mini Cooper.”
The new truck’s design takes advantage of the allocation of space enabled by electric car technology. Batteries are installed inside the floor, while motors are housed around the axles, allowing for a compact structure. The Telo truck boasts a quick acceleration (0-60mph) in 4 seconds and a top speed of 125mph. Despite its small size, it offers seating for five and a five-foot bed, with options for carrying larger items or adding a third row of seats.
Its weight is nearly equivalent to a Tesla Model Y, and it’s powered by a 106kWh battery that offers a 350-mile range, with a fast charge capability of 20 to 80 percent in just 20 minutes.
So far, the car is still in the development stage. The company says it will soon show a prototype, and after that, the vehicle will undergo “its validation and homologation process.”
The first Telo trucks will be hand-built as a limited edition of about 500 units and are expected to be ready by 2025, with mass delivery expected by 2026.
Many E.V. startups have come and gone in the last few years. We sincerely hope Telo could be one of the good ones. The E.V. market is due, especially in the U.S., for a full-on reckoning about the average vehicle size. There is no reason for electric trucks to be oversized if not just for cultural and marketing reasons.
It’s time to change that and to accept once and for all that monster cars have no reason to exist on the road and especially in cities, if not for very limited, work-specific use cases. Telo has a good chance to do that and convince even Americans that small can be nice. And if all else fails in the U.S., there’s always the European market. We can already appreciate small electric cars here in the Old Continent, especially when, like the Telo, they’re so kawaii they look like they came straight out of a Manga.