If you remember phone numbers because you have owned phones that didn’t, this story is for you.
If the first car phone you ever saw had a cord, this story is for you.
If you owned cassette tapes, and maybe something that came before cassette tapes, this story is for you.
If the phrase “overhead projector” brings to mind the smell of pencil shavings and the anxiety of your first exposure to algebra, you might want to consider a 21st-century electric vehicle (EV) for nostalgic reasons.
The hand-crank window is coming back.
Slate, a startup automaker partly funded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has won some media coverage with its attempt to build America’s least expensive new vehicle. The 2027 Slate Truck (yes, that’s its name) is a bare-bones EV pickup with a target price in the mid-$20,000 range, though the company once hoped to sell it for even less before the current presidential administration ended a $7,500 EV tax credit.
It will get there with the help of that most old-fashioned of tools, the hand-crank window.
Disappeared Just Recently
The last hand-cranked window left the American market for the 2025 model year, when the base-model Jeep Wrangler lost the feature.
It will come back for the 2027 model year, and engineers have spent time making sure it feels just right. Slate head of interior design Aaron Gould told Motor Trend, “We want to make sure that when you turn the window crank down, it feels great, because it’s one of your main interaction points. It’s more than just a mechanical piece. It’s a signal of what it means to drive a Slate.”
Should cranking your own feel too retro, however, Slate has a power option for you. It’s just not the one you’re expecting.
The company has worked with conceptual artist Matty Benedetto to design its own electric window solution – a fake hand that cranks the window for you.
Benedetto tells InsideEVs the company has no plans to sell the device…yet.
