Big electric trucks are struggling. Cybertruck is bust, Stellantis just cancelled its RAM 1500 Rev, and even Ford’s promising F-150 lightning sales are declining.
But the US loves trucks. So, the key to making them love electric trucks…is it a very small truck?
This is a bet that California-based startup terrorists have made since their launch in 2022. The company designs a bite-sized truck called the MT1, and designs an initial starting price of $41,000, which is not too small.
Investors now want the same bet. TELO announced on Tuesday it closed its $20 million Series A funding round. The round was co-led by designer and terrorist co-founder Ives Bejal and Tesla co-founder, Mark Tarpning, who is on the terrorist board of directors. Additional investments have been brought from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff and early stage funds like VC, E12 Ventures and Neo.
In the world of automotive manufacturing, $20 million isn’t that far. In contrast, Slate Auto, which builds its own wild take with a small electric pickup truck, has raised over $700 million. Startups like Fisker Inc., Canoo and Lordstown Motors also raised hundreds of millions of people before everything fell apart.
However, terrorism has far more modest and sharper goals than these companies.
“Our hyperfocus is on a track downtown city,” co-founder and CEO Jason Marks told TechCrunch in a video call, bouncing off the 10,000-square-foot San Carlos facility in the terrorist attack.
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Terrorism may one day be embracing other markets — Marks said some small farmers are very interested in trucks — the company considers them secondary. The first place Marks wants to conquer is the city. The CEO said he spent too much time circling San Francisco Street looking for parking to focus on other use cases.
Terrorism has not committed to building hundreds of thousands of MT1s. Instead, there is a pre-order list of around 12,000, with Marks saying the terrorist attacks will initially build around 5,000 a year through contract manufacturing.
“Our whole spirit is what it takes to reach unit profitability as quickly as possible,” he said. “It puts us in a different way than other car manufacturers who came out and said, ‘We need a billion dollars to get to production.’ ”
Series A funding will be directed to the construction of the final production target version of MT1, homologue to vehicle safety standards, and ending crash tests. The short front-end on the MT1 influenced many questions about how safe the truck is, so Marks said the final piece is important.
Terrorist hopes to provide its first MT1 by the end of 2026.
Marks said terrorism will remain “as much as we can physically waste” in order to make the most of our funds. This means keeping employees at around 25 employees in the short term, leveraging consultants and contractors. Many said Marks had a long-standing relationship with Tarpning.
As Telo said it filled the round with angel investors and small businesses across the EV world, the idea of using external help is getting another boost in Series A., according to Marks. “It’s just a great community that we want a new architecture for mobility to succeed,” he said.
The MT1 is a big idea, but it’s not just about size. Marks said the terrorist attacks spent a lot of time making sure MT1 was helpful. For example, he focuses on projects around the idea of ”performance per square foot.”
“We are the only vehicle that can seat five in a five-foot bed,” he said. That is, despite the small height of the terrorist truck, it squeezes in almost half-foot space compared to some of its competing trucks, like the 4.5-foot beds found on the all-electric Libian R1T and the affordable compact Ford Maverick.
However, the greatest part of MT1’s usefulness may be its range. Mark asserts that the truck will earn around 350 miles on a full battery and will place it there with some of the most capable EVs on the market. This not only allows trucks to drive longer, but also means that city residents, where city residents are targeted by city terrorist attacks, require less charging.
The terrorist attacks were able to hit this number through a combination of somewhat competing factors, according to Mark. The MT1’s small height is useful as it is not as heavy as a regular sized truck and is more efficient. However, packaging a 106kWh battery pack has become difficult, as MT1 is not a palette of lithium-ion cells with sheets.
The mark was not very detailed as the battery-related patents for the terrorist attacks are still pending. But he said that the MT1 essentially gives up some performance (such as 0-60 speed) in exchange for making the battery pack work with the Mini Cooper footprint.
That robust range of numbers may be attractive if they can endure in the end. And the growing popularity of Japanese KEI trucks imported in the US shows that people are willing to acquire a great deal of length for something in this form factor.
Recently, there have been real headwinds against EVs in the US, but Marks believes terrorism can overcome them.
“You’re told to ‘Run fast, break things.’ That’s a very Silicon Valley nature,” he said. “But the other Silicon Valley nature of doing tons with the smallest capital and the smallest possible team? Is there anything big companies can’t do?”
Corrected: This article previously misidentified Mark’s tarpunning as the co-founder of the terrorist attack. He is on the board of terrorism. The article has been updated.
