I’m bouncing down the road in San Carlos, California, zipping past behemoth tech companies like EA and Oracle, in America’s smallest electric truck.
The Telo MT1 (which stands for “mini truck”) unquestionably turns heads because it looks so remarkably different from everything else on the market right now.
It has a nearly cab-over design, meaning that front-seat passengers sit almost directly over the front axle. It looks a lot like a Japanese kei truck, with a super-short nose and four doors. People stop to stare as we sit at stoplights or roll silently past.
The interior is surprisingly spacious, and while the seats are firm, they’re not uncomfortable, at least for short jaunts on the bumpy roads around Telo’s HQ. Telo Trucks cofounder and CEO Jason Marks drove us to the company’s offices ahead of my short one-block test drive, and from the passenger seat, the ride was firm but stable, thanks to a low center of gravity provided by the battery pack beneath the floor.
Behind the wheel, the MT1 feels like a lighter, more nimble pickup truck with a stiff, slightly bouncy ride without any payload in the bed, combined with all the low-end power, torque, and acceleration of an EV. Once we circle back around to the road in front of Telo’s offices, Marks has me come to a full stop and stomp on the accelerator to get a feel for just how much power the little truck puts down, remarking that this was the same road where Tesla used to do its customer test drives of the Roadster many years ago.
People stop to stare as we sit at stoplights
Marks says that the production version of the Telo will accelerate 0–60mph in an estimated four seconds. The truck easily rockets from a standstill, just like any other electric vehicle on the market today, a feat for a small startup with just 30 employees.
Despite its diminutive appearance, the tiny Telo truck can go toe-to-toe with the giant SUVs and Teslas that populate this area. The Telo is, as Marks likes to point out, actually the same size as a two-door Mini Cooper, but far more practical with a tow rating of 8,000lbs, a full-size bed (96 inches), and a bevy of neat hidden features that Telo hopes will offer a viable, if somewhat pricey, alternative to the giant pickup trucks that dominate the American market.
“I hope that our truck shows how amazing and fun and useful — especially useful — a small pickup truck can be, because the current big trucks are literally killing us,” Forrest North, Telo’s cofounder and CTO, said during our interview at Telo’s headquarters. “I mean, they’re fun to be up super high and look out and feel like you’re dominating the world, but they’re killing an extra, roughly, 5,000 people per year, so do we want to just give them a pass for that?”
Marks and North both live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area with their families, and both own pickup trucks: Marks because he has a 150lb three-legged dog he shuttles back and forth to the office every day, and North because he has a passion for the outdoors. Large pickup trucks can be useful, but they’re far from suitable for city life. That disconnect, as well as the founders’ passion for urban transportation, is what brought the two, along with Yves Behar, together to start Telo in 2022.
Marks previously worked on automotive safety and validation at National Instruments, while North is a former battery engineer at Tesla, founder of Mission Motors (one of the first electric motorcycle companies to break the land speed record for an electric motorcycle), and cofounder of Recargo, which developed EV charging app PlugShare. Behar is the founder of fuseproject, an industrial design and brand development firm. Marks and North met through a mutual friend in the startup space and discovered they’d gone to the same high school in Washington, where they both pole-vaulted. It was a “kindred spirit moment,” according to Marks.
“I hope that our truck shows how amazing and fun and useful — especially useful — a small pickup truck can be, because the current big trucks are literally killing us.”
— Telo cofounder Forrest North
Originally, their idea wasn’t about trucks at all — it was about electric motorcycles. Their initial pitch to an unnamed Silicon Valley VC firm included a slide deck comparing three concepts: an electric motorcycle, a small car, and a tiny truck. Everyone they talked to kept gravitating toward the tiny pickup. Sensing the enthusiasm, North pushed Marks to consider pivoting to building a truck, even though the motorcycle they’d planned was nearly complete. They even went so far as to poll about 200 people on the street and found that nearly 90 percent would rather have the truck. The next week, they pivoted from motorcycle to truck.
“It’s clear to me that the trucks have just kind of jumped the shark,” North said. “The only thing they can do now is be big.” Telo aims to change the conversation about what electric transportation in urban centers can look like.
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Battery, range, and layout
For a small truck, the Telo MT1 packs a lot of range. At launch, the truck will come with a 77kWh battery pack, or a larger 106kWh pack that the company estimates will deliver up to 350 miles of range. The MT1 has a unique battery layout: a split pack with both 800V and 400V architecture. The 400V setup makes the Telo chargeable on Tesla’s V3 Supercharger infrastructure, while the 800V will let customers take advantage of new, higher-powered stations coming to market in areas like San Francisco.
Telo currently builds its battery packs in-house. Each cell is individually fused so that a single failure won’t trigger a cascade across the pack. According to Marks, in-house manufacturing allows them to maximize energy density and longevity — a feat that hinges on thermal management. The passive thermal management system operates while the vehicle is parked, maintaining cooler temperatures even in direct sunlight, while active liquid cooling engages only when the vehicle is running. Additionally, North noted that Telo’s latest cells deliver roughly 20 percent more energy than those they sourced just a year ago.
For a small truck, the Telo MT1 packs a lot of range
I drove one of two prototypes that Telo has been using for road testing. From the outside, the Telo looks smaller than its 152 inches of length suggest. With the lower rear section of the passenger seats (called the midgate) laid flat, you get a full-size, 96-inch truck bed.
To make up for the lack of a frunk, which most EVs have, Telo also developed a “monster” tunnel (named because, like in a kids’ story, it’s a “monster under the bed”), which passes door to door beneath the front of the truck bed. It’s accessible from either side and is large enough for a pair of roll-aboard carry-on suitcases to slide in endwise. Marks said that while they knew the front of the MT1 would be difficult to engineer, adding the monster tunnel created a tough engineering challenge because it sits exactly where the battery pack connects.
The interior is still being finalized, but Marks said that it will get two 13-inch digital displays that will support both Android Auto and Apple CarPlay. The steering wheel also has small scroll wheels, but most features will be controlled through the screen interface.
How the Telo stacks up against the big trucks
Japanese kei vehicles became a White House talking point late last year when President Donald Trump invited the tiny trucks to be built in the US. But making that actually happen is far more complicated because kei vehicles don’t meet US crash safety regulations.
Marks claimed that Telo has solved this problem with a completely new front end and an innovative front hinge pillar that took nearly four years to develop and hundreds of thousands of hours of simulated crashes to verify. In the Telo, the redesigned hinge pillar does the structural job of a conventional one while also carrying the strut mount, the cross-car beam, and the dash — consolidating several separate parts into one. This allowed the company to cut the front-end part count roughly in half, Marks said.
“We pretty much threw all [the conventional crash architecture] away and had to start from scratch,” Marks said. The company’s team includes Tesla’s former head of crash safety, brought on to help tackle the new front end and completely reengineer it.
“We have effectively six crash [paths], two bumper beams and two shock structures, a completely different architecture of a hinge pillar, a completely different architecture of a torque box to distribute the energy appropriately to the various parts of the car and save that occupant compartment as much as possible,” he said, comparing the crash innovations to those in a Smartcar. “Would any other automaker say we’re going to bet the world on being able to rethink crash?”
The company’s team includes Tesla’s former head of crash safety
AI tools have made the virtual crash-testing process much more affordable for startups, and Telo recently locked in its body in white, the sheet metal shell made up of the major structural pieces of the truck (think of it like a skeleton of a vehicle). It’s currently being built by US supplier Schwab Industries in Michigan.
Marks said Telo uses AI to run virtual crash tests around the clock, averaging roughly one test per hour. The next phase of crash testing will include cutting the body in white apart for what Marks called a “quasi-static validation,” and full crash testing (slamming the vehicle and its various parts into a wall to validate the virtual testing the company has done) will start next year before Telo starts customer deliveries.
“I think it’s one of the most exciting times to start a hardware company,” North said. “It’s always been like, hardware is hard. That’s always been the cliché, and I wouldn’t say hardware is easy, but I would say it’s gotten so much easier because of software and AI.”
Pricing, delivery, and other features
The Telo MT1 will come in single-motor (rear-wheel drive) and dual-motor (all-wheel drive) layouts and offer add-ons like a solar-capable tonneau cover or camping shell. Reservations are open now for a refundable $152, and the base vehicle starts at $41,520. Marks said the company isn’t really worried about larger competitors like Ford’s upcoming midsized electric truck or Slate’s bare-bones EV because he sees their market entry as proof that a viable market exists for small electric pickup trucks.
North argued that Telo is also in a better position than either Slate or Ford right now because the company has fewer parts moving in and out of the country; it’s assembling its own battery packs and building the body in white stateside, making it largely exempt from the Trump administration’s tariffs. “The pack is the most expensive part of the vehicle build and the heart and soul of the vehicle,” Marks said, “so we had to keep it in-house.”
Marks said he’s been surprised by the volume of reservations: just over 14,000, with 70 percent of reservation-holders configuring AWD versions with the longer-range battery pack. He also noted that around 20 percent are first-time car buyers.
Telo is aiming for profitability at around 5,000 vehicles within roughly 24 months of deliveries. The company plans to get vehicles into customers’ hands sometime in 2027, depending on the validation timelines, but the MT1 still has to go through EPA and California air quality certification. Most reservations have come from places like LA, New York, the Bay Area, Seattle, Dallas, Washington, DC, Miami, and Denver, with almost everyone opting for the larger battery pack, regardless of drive configuration.
Marks pointed to Tesla as the trailblazer of EVs’ first real wave, proving electric cars could be fast, fun, and sporty. However, he believes the industry ultimately missed the chance to fully exploit their potential. Telo is tackling the problem by rethinking vehicle architecture from the ground up, returning to a “one-box” design made possible by eliminating wasted space.
Ultimately, Telo’s focus comes down to purpose, according to Marks: “What does electric enable for the experience of the user, and what value does that bring?”
While history has shown that the market isn’t kind to EV startups, in a world where giant American trucks increasingly barely fit in an average parking spot, the Telo MT1 and its creators are aiming to offer a capable electric pickup built for today’s cramped cities in the hope that Americans can get behind smaller and more capable electric vehicles.