As I sat in the cab of the pickup truck and manually rolled down the windows, I closed my eyes and, for the briefest moment, flashed back to opening the windows on a cold, winter day in my dad’s 1975 Ford Ranger to let more cigarette smoke escape. I opened my eyes and looked through the windshield at a wall in the Slate Customer Experience Center studded with bright color chips.

Last week, in a former Tesla store staffed by some former Tesla employees, Slate opened its first showroom. Located in the Fulton Market District just northwest of the Chicago Loop, the Slate Experience Center is a place for would-be buyers to poke around a prototype, check out customization options, buy some Slate merch, and even preorder a new Slate Truck with a $300 deposit.

Designed for the American obsession with pickup trucks, the Slate Truck is a bare-bones electric pickup truck retailing for $24,950. It sports plastic panels, a minimalist interior design sensibility, actual window winders, and a projected range of 205 miles. Ars went for a ride in a Slate Truck over the summer, but we haven't had a chance to shop for one. So I stopped by the Slate Experience Center so I could, er, experience the Slate.

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When Ars launched in 1998, there was one way to read it: in a web browser on a PC (or Mac). Your screen of choice was either some massive CRT or a very expensive LCD monitor (or, in my case, the less-expensive grayscale, passive-matrix LCD on a PowerBook). Either way, it was butt in chair, chair at desk.

One of the first perks we offered subscribers way back at the turn of the millennium allowed them to read Ars without a browser. Articles were available as formatted PDF files, so you could print out John Siracusa's Mac OS X Public Beta review and read it on the subway or build your own searchable archive of your curated Ars content. Another option was full-text RSS feeds—instead of getting a two-paragraph summary, subscribers could browse Ars in their favorite RSS reader.

It's 2026, and while screens have proliferated in size and portability, ArsPro subscribers still get PDFs of every article and full-text RSS feeds, because sometimes the web isn't always the ideal place to read the web.

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