It’s fun times to watch the automotive design space, as EV architecture allows startups with no design legacy to jump into the game. Starting from a fresh sheet of paper, with no pre-existing expectations, designers are free to imagine new, funky forms.
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The Telo, designed by Yves Behar and fuseproject, is a micro pickup truck EV headed for production by a startup also called Telo.
While the vehicle has the same 152″ overall length as the MINI Cooper…
…it also has the same 60″ bed length as the short-bed Toyota Tacoma. And it has a crew cab. The bed is also 60″ wide, and there’s at least 48″ of clearance between the wheel wells. The Telo has been designed with the space efficiency of a Japanese apartment.
Strangely, the company doesn’t mention which wheels get power. I assume the vehicle is not a 4×4 and is FWD.
The newish form is aimed at a new customer, as opposed to existing pickup owners. While the company boasts of the vehicle’s 500hp output (and the bed size for bragging rights), they don’t mention the payload capacity, a crucial stat for folks who regularly haul stuff. Instead the “urban adventure vehicle” and its 350-mile range appear to be aimed, as the Rivian is, at city folk who travel to do outdoorsy stuff on the weekends; people more likely to be carrying mountain bikes rather than bags of concrete.
That being said, the bed has been designed to fit a full 4×8 sheet of plywood (or an 8′ surfboard) with the tailgate up, by extending the cargo area into the second row via a folding midgate.
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There’s also a “storage tunnel” running laterally across the bed, just aft of the midgate. This tunnel also features on the Rivian, but on the Telo it does double duty: A third row of seats can be mounted in the bed, and the tunnel then becomes the footwell for that row.
The company will offer a sliding tonneau cover and a bed cap as options.
Another feature urban buyers will love: The diminutive footprint means it’s darn easy to park.
The Telo’s base price is $50,000. The company is taking pre-orders now, and expects to deliver in 2025.
Source: core77