

The eyebrow raiser in the Slate’s base configuration is that it doesn’t come with any audio systems: no radio antenna/tuner, no speakers. It remains to be seen how upgradeable the base configuration is for audio, how involved of a task it will be to install speakers in the dash or doors, installing antennas (especially for AM, which are tricky for interference from EV systems), etc.
I’d imagine that most people would choose to spend few thousand on that audio upgrade up to the bare minimum expectations one would have for a new vehicle, so that cuts into the affordability of the package.
That’s not even supported by the underlying study.
Google’s emissions went up 48% between 2019 and 2023, but a lot of things changed in 2020 generally, especially in video chat and cloud collaboration, dramatically expanding demand for data centers for storage and processing. Even without AI, we could have expected data center electricity use to go up dramatically between 2019 and 2023.