Your Slate Qs, A'd
Plus: How to sell an EV, and how to buy one, too.
Good morning to you. Writing again from home, where I arrived much later than scheduled thanks to some Lufthansa shenanigans that saw me delayed out of Frankfurt and the recipient of the world's longest tour around the tarmac on an airport shuttle bus. (If I never see another COBUS again, it'll be too soon.)
I'm sorry to say I can't speak much about what I was doing out there, at least not for another few days, but I can say that I flew to Europe after spending a lovely 36 hours in lovely Aspen, Colorado, driving Audi's new A5 and Q5. (Pictured above is the sportier SQ5.) No, I can't talk about the pair of them yet either but stay tuned on that front as well.
What can I talk about? Well…
Your Slate Qs, A'd
After my initial Slate write-up for The Verge, my inbox lit up. Seriously, I haven't received that many messages about something I wrote since I said the Tesla Model Y was fundamentally unsafe. Thankfully, there was a lot less profanity in those missives this time around. I mostly received respectfully presented questions and concerns from folks wondering about this supposed $20,000 wündertrück. (Is that too many umlauts?)
Questions like: Will Slate track my driving data? Why doesn’t it have DIN slots for audio? Will it really be $20,000? So, I gathered them up, plus a lot more from folks at The Verge, and chased down all the answers I could.
How to sell an EV
Okay, this one was published a few weeks ago, but I plain forgot to include it here. Forgive me for that. I've been more than a little sleep-deprived lately. Anyhow, the idea was to provide something of a guide for sales folk who'll be selling EVs and who are maybe not totally enthused about it -- a sad state common in many dealerships that I believe is a major factor slowing EV sales today. But I've heard from many kind readers since then that this is simply a good guide for folks who are themselves pondering an EV purchase and don't know the right questions to ask.
Either way, I hope you enjoy it. Oh, and if you run a dealership and think the sales folks on your team could use a little personal guidance on how to sell EVs, drop me a note. I'm happy to present to personnel personally.
This Is How You Sell An EV In 2025 at InsideEVs
Subaru WRX tS full review
Finally, this week, we have my full review of Subaru's new WRX tS. Yes, I already shared my first impressions of this thing a few months back, but it's always so much nicer to get some quality time on familiar roads in a car. I've crossed the roads around here hundreds of times in my myriad own Subarus. Yes, I've owned quite a few, which I believe makes me extremely qualified to say that the new tS is extremely good. Ignore the haters who won't stop bemoaning the lack of a proper STI in the lineup (and who will probably hate the thing when Subaru finally releases a new one). This is quite simply an excellent Subaru for a lot of people.
And that's all for me this week. The weather has been awful lately, but it looks like it'll be clear today, just in time for me to take my own Subaru and head out to CT to meet up with some like-minded fans of the blue and gold. Maybe I’ll see you there.
Until next time, be well and do good.