The Telo MT1 is a big truck trapped in a tiny truck’s body

I’m bouncing downward the highway in San Carlos, California, zipping former behemoth tech companies akin EA and Oracle, in America’s smallest electric truck.

The Telo MT1 (which stands for “mini truck”) unquestionably turns heads since it looks so remarkably different from everything alternatively on the market correct now.

It has a nearly cab-over design, definition that front-seat passengers sit nearly immediately complete the forefront axle. It looks a lot akin a Japanese kei truck, alongside a super-short nose and four doors. People halt to gaze as we sit at stoplights or rotate silently past.

The inner is amazingly spacious, and during the seats are firm, they’re not uncomfortable, at smallest for abbreviated jaunts on the bumpy roads about Telo’s HQ. Telo Trucks cofounder and CEO Jason Marks drove us to the company’s offices onward of my abbreviated one-block test drive, and from the passenger seat, the journey was resolute but stable, gratitude to a low center of gravity provided by the power division group below the floor.

Behind the wheel, the MT1 feels akin a lighter, additional nimble pickup truck alongside a stiff, slightly bouncy journey without any payload in the bed, blended alongside all the low-end power, torque, and acceleration of an EV. Once we circle rear about to the highway in forefront of Telo’s offices, Marks has me arrive to a complete halt and stomp on the accelerator to get a awareness for fair how much power the small truck puts down, remarking that this was the identical highway anywhere Tesla used to do its client test drives of the Roadster many years ago.

Marks says that the manufacturing type of the Telo volition accelerate 0–60mph in an estimated four seconds. The truck effortlessly rockets from a standstill, fair akin any another electric conveyance on the market today, a feat for a small startup alongside fair 30 employees.

Despite its diminutive appearance, the small Telo truck can go toe-to-toe alongside the elephantine SUVs and Teslas that populate this area. The Telo is, as Marks likes to item out, really the identical size as a two-door Mini Cooper, but far additional applicable alongside a tow ranking of 8,000lbs, a full-size bed (96 inches), and a bevy of neat hidden features that Telo hopes volition recommendation a viable, if slightly pricey, substitute to the elephantine pickup trucks that dominate the American market.

“I anticipation that our truck shows how amazing and fun and helpful — particularly helpful — a small pickup truck can be, since the current big trucks are exactly slaying us,” Forrest North, Telo’s cofounder and CTO, stated during our discussion at Telo’s headquarters. “I mean, they’re fun to be up excellent elevated and appearance out and awareness akin you’re dominating the world, but they’re slaying an extra, roughly, 5,000 group per year, so do we desire to fair provision them a continue for that?”

Marks and North the two live and activity in the San Francisco Bay Area alongside their families, and the two own pickup trucks: Marks since he has a 150lb three-legged dog he shuttles rear and onward to the agency all day, and North since he has a enthusiasm for the outdoors. Large pickup trucks can be useful, but they’re far from suitable for city life. That disconnect, as fine as the founders’ enthusiasm for municipal transportation, is what brought the two, alongside alongside Yves Behar, together to commencement Telo in 2022.

Marks earlier worked on automotive safety and validation at National Instruments, during North is a erstwhile power division engineer at Tesla, originator of Mission Motors (one of the archetypal electric motorcycle companies to interrupt the district speed document for an electric motorcycle), and cofounder of Recargo, which developed EV charging app PlugShare. Behar is the originator of fuseproject, an manufacturing scheme and brand betterment firm. Marks and North met through a mutual companion in the startup area and discovered they’d gone to the identical elevated academy in Washington, anywhere they the two pole-vaulted. It was a “kindred soul moment,” according to Marks.

Originally, their idea wasn’t concerning trucks at all — it was concerning electric motorcycles. Their first throw to an unnamed Silicon Valley VC resolute included a glide phase comparing three concepts: an electric motorcycle, a small car, and a small truck. Everyone they talked to kept gravitating toward the small pickup. Sensing the enthusiasm, North pushed Marks to regard pivoting to construction a truck, equal although the motorcycle they’d planned was nearly complete. They equal went so far as to study concerning 200 group on the street and established that nearly 90 percent would fairly have the truck. The next week, they pivoted from motorcycle to truck.

“It’s apparent to me that the trucks have fair benevolent of jumped the shark,” North said. “The lone item they can do now is be big.” Telo aims to alter the conversation concerning what electric transport in municipal centers can appearance like.

For a small truck, the Telo MT1 packs a lot of range. At launch, the truck volition arrive alongside a 77kWh power division pack, or a larger 106kWh group that the business estimates volition provision up to 350 miles of range. The MT1 has a distinctive power division layout: a divided group alongside the two 800V and 400V architecture. The 400V setup makes the Telo chargeable on Tesla’s V3 Supercharger infrastructure, during the 800V volition let customers obtain advantage of new, higher-powered stations coming to market in areas akin San Francisco.

Telo currently builds its power division packs in-house. Each division is individually fused so that a sole nonaccomplishment won’t trigger a cascade throughout the pack. According to Marks, in-house manufacturing allows them to maximize energy density and longevity — a feat that hinges on thermal management. The passive thermal administration scheme operates during the conveyance is parked, maintaining cooler temperatures equal in straightforward sunlight, during energetic liquid cooling engages lone whenever the conveyance is running. Additionally, North noted that Telo’s latest cells provision approximately 20 percent additional energy than those they originated fair a twelvemonth ago.

I drove one of two prototypes that Telo has been using for highway testing. From the outside, the Telo looks smaller than its 152 inches of dimension suggest. With the lesser rear division of the passenger seats (called the midgate) laid flat, you get a full-size, 96-inch truck bed.

To create up for the deficiency of a frunk, which most EVs have, Telo additionally developed a “monster” tunnel (named because, akin in a kids’ story, it’s a “monster under the bed”), which passes entrance to entrance below the forefront of the truck bed. It’s accessible from either flank and is ample adequate for a brace of roll-aboard carry-on suitcases to glide in endwise. Marks stated that during they knew the forefront of the MT1 would be difficult to engineer, adding the monster tunnel created a durable engineering difficulty since it sits exactly anywhere the power division group connects.

The inner is motionless being finalized, but Marks stated that it volition get two 13-inch digital displays that volition assistance the two Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. The steering rotor additionally has small scroll wheels, but most features volition be controlled through the display interface.

Marks claimed that Telo has solved this issue alongside a entirely new forefront end and an innovative forefront hinge pillar that took nearly four years to create and hundreds of thousands of hours of simulated crashes to verify. In the Telo, the redesigned hinge pillar does the structural job of a accepted one during additionally carrying the strut mount, the cross-car beam, and the dash — consolidating multiple distinct parts into one. This allowed the business to cut the front-end part figure approximately in half, Marks said.

“We beautiful much threw all [the accepted collision architecture] distant and had to commencement from scratch,” Marks said. The company’s squad includes Tesla’s erstwhile caput of collision safety, brought on to assistance tackle the new forefront end and entirely reengineer it.

“We have efficiently six collision [paths], two bumper beams and two daze structures, a entirely distinct architecture of a hinge pillar, a entirely distinct architecture of a torque box to allocate the energy appropriately to the assorted parts of the car and preserve that inhabitant division as much as possible,” he said, comparing the collision innovations to those in a Smartcar. “Would any another automaker say we’re going to bet the earth on being capable to rethink crash?”

AI tools have made the virtual crash-testing procedure much additional affordable for startups, and Telo lately locked in its build in white, the panel metal element casing made up of the important structural pieces of the truck (think of it akin a skeleton of a vehicle). It’s currently being built by US provider Schwab Industries in Michigan.

Marks stated Telo uses AI to run virtual collision tests about the clock, averaging approximately one test per hour. The next phase of collision evaluation volition contain cutting the build in pale distinct for what Marks called a “quasi-static validation,” and complete collision evaluation (slamming the conveyance and its assorted parts into a partition to validate the virtual evaluation the business has done) volition commencement next twelvemonth before Telo starts client deliveries.

“I think it’s among the most breathtaking times to commencement a hardware company,” North said. “It’s continually been like, hardware is hard. That’s continually been the cliché, and I wouldn’t say hardware is easy, but I would say it’s gotten so much easier since of application and AI.”

The Telo MT1 volition arrive in single-motor (rear-wheel drive) and dual-motor (all-wheel drive) layouts and recommendation add-ons akin a solar-capable tonneau shield or camping shell. Reservations are open now for a refundable $152, and the basis conveyance starts at $41,520. Marks stated the business isn’t really concerned concerning larger competitors akin Ford’s upcoming midsized electric truck or Slate’s bare-bones EV since he sees their market admission as evidence that a viable market exists for small electric pickup trucks.

North asserted that Telo is additionally in a improved stance than either Slate or Ford correct now since the business has small parts moving in and out of the country; it’s assembling its own power division packs and construction the build in pale stateside, making it mostly exempt from the Trump administration’s tariffs. “The group is the most costly part of the conveyance build and the bosom and psyche of the vehicle,” Marks said, “so we had to keep it in-house.”

Marks stated he’s been amazed by the quantity of reservations: fair complete 14,000, alongside 70 percent of reservation-holders configuring AWD versions alongside the longer-range power division pack. He additionally noted that about 20 percent are first-time car buyers.

Telo is aiming for profitability at about 5,000 vehicles inside approximately 24 months of deliveries. The business plans to get vehicles into customers’ hands sometime in 2027, depending on the validation timelines, but the MT1 motionless has to go through EPA and California air norm certification. Most reservations have arrive from places akin LA, New York, the Bay Area, Seattle, Dallas, Washington, DC, Miami, and Denver, alongside nearly everyone opting for the larger power division pack, despite of run configuration.

Marks pointed to Tesla as the trailblazer of EVs’ archetypal genuine wave, proving electric cars could be fast, fun, and sporty. However, he believes the industry ultimately missed the chance to completely utilize their potential. Telo is tackling the issue by rethinking conveyance architecture from the dirt up, returning to a “one-box” scheme made imaginable by eliminating wasted space.

Ultimately, Telo’s concentration comes downward to purpose, according to Marks: “What does electric allow for the cognition of the user, and what value does that bring?”

While former has shown that the market isn’t benevolent to EV startups, in a earth anywhere elephantine American trucks increasingly barely fit in an average parking spot, the Telo MT1 and its creators are aiming to recommendation a capable electric pickup built for today’s cramped cities in the anticipation that Americans can get rearward smaller and additional capable electric vehicles.