Hands on and first ride in TELO’s tiny electric truck that’s as big as a Mini
TELO gave us an exclusive opportunity to get up close and personal with a pre-production version of its tiny electric truck, slated to ship its first units later this year.
We first learned about TELO back in 2023, when the company announced it was planning to build an electric truck the size of a Mini but with a bed the size of a Hummer’s.
it sounds impossible, but there’s a lot of wasted space in vehicle designs these days, especially trucks where automakers consider an enormous front hood as an important part of design (despite the inherent deadliness of this design decision).
TELO went another direction, focusing on a truck with maximum utility and minimum footprint – and says it will be able to offer utility on par with today’s mid-size pickup trucks like the Toyota Tacoma, but in a package that’s only 152 inches long (for comparison, tiny Japanese kei cars are 134 inches long maximum).
Now, less than two years later, TELO has completed its first full pre-production driveable vehicle, and we were invited out to have a look and take a ride. Previously, TELO had only made a design mule and a go kart-like chassis, but now it’s got something that actually looks like a real car (and includes the recent design/aero changes from when the truck got its configurator and $41k base price).
The design changes are mainly aerodynamic, including a more rounded roofline and moving the “pill” design element near the front wheel well, where it now helps airflow around the exposed front wheel, reducing turbulence. TELO says it was able to improve aerodynamics significantly through the use of CFD aerodynamic optimization software, saving on expensive wind tunnel time.
But we also got a first look at some features we hadn’t seen before.
For example, the mid-gate. The bed is normally 62 inches long and 49 inches wide (between the wheel arches, so you can fit a sheet of plywood), but when folding down the rear seats, that gets extended even further. The bed is also covered with L-tracks all around, making it easy to tie down gear.
That said, we’ve seen a lot of truck prototypes that promise a mid-gate, and then they don’t end up on the production vehicle. So we’ll put an asterisk on that feature for now.
And note: that bed is half a foot longer than the bed of a Rivian R1T and the same size as a Hummer EV’s bed, despite TELO being nothing close to the size of those trucks.
Another neat storage feature is one that seems to have been cribbed from Rivian’s “gear tunnel,” a long, lockable storage space underneath the bed and the passenger compartment which is useful for dirty gear that you don’t want to bring inside the cab, but don’t want to leave in the bed. TELO has a similar (but smaller) space, which it dubs the “monster tunnel” – because, like a monster, it’s… under the bed (hiyoooooo!).
On the interior, there isn’t exactly a lot of space, but there’s enough for normal-sized people – and even abnormally-sized ones. One of the journalists in attendance was 6’10”, and he said “I fit fine.”
Both front and rear seats had plenty of headroom and good foot room, owing to the floating seat design which allows rear seat passengers to put their feet under the front seat.
The knee room was perhaps a slight limitation, especially on rear seat ingress, as the door aperture is taller and more narrow than most. Same with the driver seat, my knees could have had a little more room, but we didn’t get a chance to fiddle with seat and steering wheel adjustments, so this is probably a solvable problem.
And while we didn’t sit inside the truck for long, it’s certainly no less comfortable than other working vehicles we’ve tried (step vans, box trucks and so on) despite being a fraction of the overall size.
The cockpit area includes a wide center touchscreen and several gauges in the driver instrument cluster, though none of this was anywhere near final. Some were static screens, some could be interacted with via remote, but the touchscreen wasn’t working yet.
Then, I got the chance to be the first journalist to ever take a ride in TELO’s pre-production vehicle.
It was just a quick ride around the block in the industrial part of town, but it proved that this isn’t just a design project.
TELO says the truck will have options for either a 300hp single motor or 500hp dual motor configuration. While the truck we rode in had two motors, they were limited to 40% of power for the time being. So the truck got around fine, but nothing exceptional.
The next question is whether a tiny truck even needs 500hp to begin with, but that can wait for another day – perhaps until we’re able to put it to payload/towing tests. TELO says it has a payload capacity of 1,600lbs and towing capacity of 6,600lbs.
TELO also could branch out into offering some sort of off-road package, and pointed out its nearly 90º approach angle, given that the front tires go all the way up to the very front of the vehicle.
And here you can hear the wonderful quiet of electric mobility… before any sort of dumb noisemakers get added and spoil the fun:
Despite being small, the truck is still rather hefty with a 4,400lb curb weight, regardless of battery option (the larger option uses newer, denser cells to pack more energy in a similar weight). This is still thousands of pounds less than other electric trucks (~6-7k lbs), but (understandably) quite a bit more than the Mini SE (~3,200lbs), and even not far off from the Toyota Tacoma (~4,500lb) to which TELO compares itself.
Speaking of that comparison – the TELO truck is a full five feet shorter than the “compact” Toyota Tacoma or four feet shorter than the Maverick, to say nothing of other enormous vehicles in the US. TELO gave us a live demo of what the truck looks like next to both a Mini Cooper SE and a full size RAM 2500 pickup.
This really underlines how much of our space we’ve given up for something that doesn’t really offer a whole lot more utility (that you probably won’t use anyway). And how many of our lives we’re giving up for those pedestrian-murdering truck front ends.
Because, as trucks and SUVs keep getting larger, and automakers keep pushing more and more people into them, and emissions and pedestrian deaths keep rising, the US desperately needs more small vehicles – and needs a company that will actually try to sell them, instead of ignoring they exist and pushing people towards bigger.
So we here at Electrek are quite excited for what this TELO truck represents – finally, the advent of a reasonably sized utility vehicle. They’re available in Europe, they’re available in Japan… but this would be the first available here, at least in a very long time.
TELO offers a really compelling argument here: a vehicle that’s capable but isn’t impossible to park, isn’t excessive in terms of material inputs, and doesn’t contribute to the ever-rising plague of pedestrian deaths from oversized vehicles. If you occasionally want a truck for truck things, but otherwise want an efficient vehicle that actually fits places, this seems like a good option.
And TELO’s $41k base price and 260 miles of range compare favorably to the most popular commercial EV: Ford’s E-Transit, with an 89kWh battery, 159 mile range and $51k base price (which is now the same as the gas version). That’s a much larger vehicle, but for a company that doesn’t need that much space but still wants to do intra-city deliveries, tradesman work, etc., this could be a great option
All in all, despite TELO not being all that old of a company (or that large – it only has 11 employees to date, with one cofounder being Forrest North, an early Tesla employee, and the board including Marc Tarpenning, a Tesla founder), it has produced a pretty neat vehicle which seemed pretty well put together – at least for the few minutes we got to ride in it.
It’s an important milestone given that TELO says it will ship its first vehicles by the end of this year. That’s a very close timeline – though it’s only expecting to ship maybe 100 cars this year, and will do so through contract manufacturing, which keeps startup costs low.
You may remember another EV startup that used contract manufacturing – Fisker. That didn’t go so well, but one thing Fisker did do was come out almost on time (it was unveiled in 2020 with a 2022 release date, and the first Ocean was delivered in May 2023 – a pretty tight timeline, as far as car manufacturing goes). So, hopefully TELO doesn’t let its timeline slip too much here.
I still think it’s optimistic that this truck will ship this year, because there is still a lot to be done before this truck is production ready. But TELO is at least not overstating its volume ambitions. It only expects to ship in very limited numbers at first, and will scale manufactuirng later through its contract manufacturing process. Though it hasn’t yet announced a volume production partner, it says it’s in discussions with several different well-known manufacturers, and we’ll learn more about which one they’re working with once ink hits paper.
You can view the TELO configurator here, where you can also make a $152 refundable reservation (the same as the length of the vehicle in inches). TELO says it has 5,000 reservations already – up 1,300 from the last time we checked in December.
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Tesla filed for a patent which looks like it could be the promised “SpaceX package” which it will supposedly include on its oft-delayed next-gen Roadster. But will the system let the Roadster “fly,” as CEO Elon Musk has promised?
In 2017, at Tesla’s Semi unveiling, Tesla pulled one of its few-ever Jobsian “one more thing”s and unveiled the next-gen Tesla Roadster, which caught everyone by surprise.
The idea, at the time, was for the Roadster to provide a “hard-core smack down to gasoline powered cars,” and our speculative technical analysis of the announced specs suggested that this could certainly be the case. The car was slated for a 2020 release.
However, 8 years later, you may have noticed that you have not seen a next-gen Tesla Roadster on the road yet. So we will have to wait to see if all those promised statistics will bear out, or if it’s all just smoke and mirrors.
Other than a few spottings of Franz von Holzhausen taking the Roadster prototype out in public or a model parked at the Petersen museum, all we’ve ever heard about the car is that it’s “in development” or “close to finalized“, over and over and over again. Heck, even Tesla seems to forget about it sometimes.
But today, we got the first positive verification of progress on a probable Tesla Roadster performance improvement that we’ve seen in a long time – or maybe ever.
It comes in the form of a patent filed with the US patent office which seems to show something somewhat similar to the “SpaceX package” that CEO Elon Musk has referred to repeatedly, claiming that the car will use “cold gas thrusters” to “fly.”
How Musk described Tesla’s “SpaceX package”
The point of the SpaceX package was always to add additional performance that is not attainable by traction alone.
Currently, a lot of electric cars have so much torque that they are “traction-limited,” which is to say, their tires cannot possibly accelerate them in any direction any faster than they currently do. You can add more power or bigger brakes, but it doesn’t matter, the limiting factor is the tires (and the weight…).
So you have to find other creative ways to get more performance. Lots of cars do this with aerodynamic surfaces like wings/spoilers to add downforce, which pushes the car to the ground so the tires can work a little harder. But there are limits to how much downforce you can add, and what speeds it works at.
This is where the SpaceX package would come in – it would presumably add additional thrust in a given direction, adding acceleration in whichever direction you choose.
The way that Musk has described it in the past, using “cold gas thrusters,” made it seem like there would be thrusters strategically placed around the vehicle to provide either forward or lateral acceleration, or deceleration in order to help the car stop.
However, Musk also described the car as being able to “fly,” which makes no sense whatsoever.
As mentioned above, downforce is an effective way to get more performance out of a vehicle when you are otherwise traction-limited. But flying would take upforce, not downforce, and that’s not a term anyone uses because it’s totally useless for any performance benefit and there’s absolutely no reason anyone would ever want to do that to a car – unless you’re trying to play a trick on Mark Webber or something.
(Yes, I’m aware of the jumping Yangwang U9. That’s a demo of active suspension, which does add performance benefit, and using that system to “jump” doesn’t add any unnecessary weight or complexity to the active suspension system, unlike downward-pointed thrusters which would be wholly unnecessary beyond providing a demo).
Thankfully, someone who knows how physics works showed up and reason has prevailed, and it looks like the system, as proposed, doesn’t do any of that nonsense Elon Musk was talking about. Instead, it does what it should have done all along – it acts as a “fan car,” a concept that has existed in automotive circles since the early 1970s.
Tesla’s actual patent shows old “fan car” tech, with a twist
There have been several “fan cars” or “ground effect cars” in the past, which operate with powerful fans to blow air out from underneath the vehicle, combined with side skirts underneath the car to reduce the amount of air that can replace it. This creates a low-pressure vacuum effect, and “sucks” the car to the ground (more accurately, ambient air pressure from above pushes the car to the ground, physics teachers please do not email me about how nothing sucks in physics).
Tesla’s patent shows a design that looks very similar to concepts that we’ve seen before in the automotive realm, but with some new tech applied. Have a look:
It has the fans and the side skirts, just as one would expect. And it shows the rough design of what the system might look like – a hexagonal-ish shape underneath the vehicle, with fans presumably at the rear of the vehicle to exhaust air to create the vacuum effect.
Tesla goes on to say that these skirts and fans could be controlled automatically by vehicle systems in order to offer different performance benefits in different situations. This is where we start to see the new tech – like adding the modern concept of active aerodynamics to the concept of fan cars.
Rather than deploying the skirts the same way in all modes, there could be different modes for a prepared track surface which is known to be high quality and flat, or for a more uneven road surface where you might not be able to create as secure of a seal with the maximum-downforce configuration.
This is an issue with fan cars – they only work on the right kind of surface. If air leaks in to the vacuum region under the vehicle, you can’t really create as much negative pressure as you’d like. That’s why the side skirts are necessary, but of course that doesn’t work if there are potholes, unsecured manhole covers, and the like.
Tesla also says the system could have different configurations for low- and high-speed operations, adjust the skirts based on vehicle weight transfer, or potentially detect upcoming road conditions and modify configuration based on what the car sees ahead. And mention of deploying the skirts based on GPS position lends itself to the idea that Tesla could create specific settings to optimize performance for track use, or even individual corners on tracks.
Is this the “SpaceX Package,”or something else?
Tesla has said for years that the Roadster would have a “SpaceX package” to increase the performance even further than the specs it mentioned in the original unveiling event. This was meant to use expertise from SpaceX, another company Musk runs, and whose primary facility is sited on the same Hawthorne, CA property as Tesla’s Design Studio.
At least one of the designers listed on Tesla’s “fan car” patent, David Lemire, worked at both Tesla and SpaceX in the past, before leaving and then returning to Tesla as a senior engineer on Tesla’s “new programs” team.
However, there is no mention in the document of “fly,” “flight,” “thruster,” “rocket” or “lift.” Nothing like the “cold gas thrusters” package that Musk has spent years telling us will make the car fly – and in fact, the exact opposite, as this will suck the car to the ground, not make it fly at all.
This could mean that Tesla has another idea in mind which will use thrusters, and will be applied in addition to this “fan car” idea.
Theoretically, adding lateral thrusters around the car could still add a performance benefit over and above the fan car idea, so these could be used in tandem, though it would add a lot of complexity to the vehicle. But these may or may not be worth the added weight – and they definitely wouldn’t be worth the weight if they’re directed in such a way to make the car able to “fly.”
Or it could be that the “fan car” patent will be applied to cars like the Model S Plaid, which has set racing records, and Tesla has another trick up its sleeve for the Roadster.
Or… this is what the SpaceX package was all along, and Musk was just running his mouth about the car flying. Which would be the best option, to be honest, because it’s dumb to pretend that flight would add any performance benefits to a sportscar.
Regardless, the fan car idea is an actual interesting performance idea, and it would actually work, unlike some of the previous public statements made by Tesla’s CEO. So it’s nice to see some sort of progress that could be applied to a performance car, after so many years of waiting.
But… does it matter anymore?
With so many performance EVs, does this matter?
The problem is that in the intervening 8 years since the Roadster was first introduced, some other electric cars with truly wild specs have already hit the road, and have delivered the “hard core smack down” that Tesla promised.
We’ve got the Rimac Nevera R, a 2,078hp electric car that can hit 300km/h (186mph) a full 3.5 seconds faster than a Bugatti Chiron Super Sport. We’ve got the Lotus Evija X, which set the third-fastest Nurburgring lap ever, only beaten by two one-off, track-only, purpose-built racecars (one of which is a hybrid, the other is electric).
And in the realm of actual consumer-available vehicles, we have the Xiaomi SU7 Ultra – made by a smartphone company, mind you – with 1,548hp and record-setting performance of its own.
So anybody who tells you these days that EVs aren’t fast is just… embarrassingly wrong. They’ve had their head in the sand for at least 19 years. It’s honestly a bit boring at this point.
So, what’s left for Tesla to do? The smack down has been delivered, and delivered by many other companies, startups and otherwise. I mean, heck, we’ve got a company that went from making phones to beating Porsche on its home track in the course of less than three years worth of development. Everyone is aware of how easy it is to beat complex, inefficient gas engines at this point.
A fan car seems like it could be a worthy addition to this menagerie, another way to deliver the smack down, as none of the above EVs have leveraged this particular type of active aerodynamics for a performance benefit, so Tesla could have something unique here….. oh, wait.
It turns out that someone else has done an electric fan car already. The McMurtry Spierling already has this idea, and it’s an absolute beast. It’s already the fastest car ever at Goodwood thanks to the 2,000kg of downforce that it makes with the huge fans underneath the roughly 1,000kg vehicle, even at 0mph where traditional aerodynamic surfaces provide no benefit whatsoever.
And if it seems interesting that one of those numbers is bigger than the other, well, yes, McMurtry has done that too – it briefly drove the car upside down just to show off how much downforce its fans can make, which we would say might qualify as “the most epic demo ever.”
That said, the Spierling is just one application of the idea, and it’s not like more cars can’t try something similar.
Also, it looks like Tesla’s solution would add a lot of adaptibility that McMurtry’s doesn’t have. Not only is the Spierling a purpose-built, track-focused single-seat racecar whereas the Roadster would be a regular roadgoing sportscar, but also Tesla’s flexible solution described in the patent would allow travel on less track-prepped terrain.
This would make the concept of a fan car much more practical for real life – as long as you’re not somewhere where you wouldn’t want to spray high-velocity pebbles out of the back of your vehicle. Maybe there’s a reason nobody has done this on a consumer vehicle yet (that said, Tesla includes a filter to stop the spray of dust and pebbles in the patent).
But in terms of real-life applications, there is also the consideration of driver skill. Drivers of performance vehicles get used to their car’s limits and learn where those limits are. But with a presumably enormous amount of adjustable downforce, those limits could change drastically based on road conditions.
We could see this being a dangerous situation if drivers think they’re in max-downforce mode but aren’t, and suddenly find mid-turn that the car is a lot less capable than they thought it was. So we’ll have to see if this mode is track-only or what.
For now, the main question is whether Tesla will ever make this thing, given that it’s already five years late. Any takers?
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Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI attends the annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley Media and Technology Conference at the Sun Valley Resort in Sun Valley, Idaho, U.S., on July 8, 2025.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
OpenAI is in talks with investors about a potential stock sale at a valuation of roughly $500 billion, according to two sources with knowledge of the matter.
The talks are in early stages and would involve a secondary sale with shares sold by current and former employees, said the people, who asked not to be named because the discussions are confidential. Thrive Capital, an investor in OpenAI, could lead the potential round, the sources said.
Bloomberg was first to report on the latest talks.
OpenAI’s valuation has been on a continuous upswing since the artificial intelligence startup launched ChatGPT in late 2022 and quickly established itself as the leader in generative AI. The company announced a $40 billion funding round in March at a $300 billion, by far the largest amount ever raised by a private tech company.
Last week, OpenAI announced its most recent $8.3 billion tranche tied to that funding round.
OpenAI released two open-weight language models on Tuesday for the first time since it rolled out GPT-2 in 2019. The models aim to serve as lower-cost options that developers and researchers can easily run and customize, OpenAI said.
The company said earlier this week that ChatGPT was about to hit 700 million weekly active users.
OpenAI rival Anthropic, meanwhile, is in talks to secure between $3 billion and $5 billion in new funding led by Iconiq Capital at a potential $170 billion valuation, up from $61.5 billion in March.
CNBC previously reported that OpenAI’s annual recurring revenue is projected to top $20 billion by year-end, up from $10 billion in June.
![Chevy Bolt EUV goes full Boat Mode in Texas floodwaters [video]](https://i0.wp.com/electrek.co/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2025/08/bolt_flood.png?resize=1200,628&quality=82&strip=all&ssl=1)
Electric cars don’t have intakes and exhausts, so they can’t get hydrolocked in deep water the way ICE-powered cars can – but that doesn’t make them amphibious. Nobody told this Texan Chevy Bolt EUV owner that, and when they got caught on the wrong side of the floodwaters, they licked the stamp and sent it!
The recent catastrophic flooding in Texas has brought unimaginable tragedies and hardships to thousands of people who unquestionably deserve better, and living through something like that can lead people to make some rash decisions (I made it through the aftermaths of Hurricanes Andrew and Katrina, AMA). Rash decisions like pulling up to a tunnel flooded in nearly three feet of water, and deciding to stand on the gas.
Think I’m exaggerating? Watch this Chevy Bolt EUV go full “Boat Mode” as its driver decides that dealing with whatever unseen obstacle or deadly live wires concealed by the floodwaters are less annoying than having to find an alternative route for yourself.
Submerging an EV that wasn’t designed for it (or even a Cybertruck, which allegedly was), isn’t exactly advisable. In addition to the underwater threats, submerging the skateboard in water could damage sensitive electrical connectors, compromise battery seals, and cause shorts in circuit boards over time.
“Even more critically, water ingress into high-voltage systems can pose serious safety risks, including electrical faults or, in rare cases, thermal events,” writes Jonathan Lopez, over at GM Authority. “Although the Bolt EUV in this instance completed its soggy journey successfully, long-term effects may still emerge.”
In other words: don’t try this at home.
Electrek’s Take
Like, don’t try this at home … but it’s pretty awesome.
SOURCE | IMAGES: stormchaserhtx, via GM Authority.
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