- The Telo MT1 is a tiny electric pickup truck being developed by a California startup.
- Now we know more about its charging speed.
- The Telo will recharge at 400 kilowatts, the company announced on Wednesday.
EV startup Telo is working on an electric truck that’s small in footprint, but big on capability. Having spent most of my life in New York, the worst place to park on the planet, that mission is what attracted me to the MT1 all the way back when it was announced in 2023. A do-almost-anything vehicle that also fits anywhere a Mini Cooper does? Sign me up.
(That’s also why I’ve always had a soft spot for the short-lived two-door Toyota RAV4 and the Suzuki Samurai, but that’s another talk show.)
Telo’s tiny electric truck is about the size of a Mini Cooper and is designed for cities.
The Telo is also shaping up to be a solid contender when it comes to core EV specs. On Wednesday, the company announced that the MT1 will be able to charge at an impressive 400 kilowatts. That caliber of charging power is still rare in the U.S. EV market and is really found only in the latest luxury SUVs, like the BMW iX3, Volvo EX60, and Lucid Gravity. Mainstream Teslas, like the Model Y, max out at 250 kW.
“This is all part of tring to get as much capability into a small footprint as possible, and also trying to optimize for the infrastructure that exists today,” Forrest North, the company’s CTO, said in a video announcing the news. Given Telo’s focus on urban car buyers, who are less likely to have a garage or driveway to charge in, the high-powered charging makes sense.
The Telo truck is full of party tricks, like a Rivian-style gear tunnel and a collapsing midgate to help fit longer items.
Telo says the truck’s battery pack will operate at 800 volts, which helps boost charging speeds. It means the EV will require less current to achieve the same charging power as a 400V EV would. But the truck will also be able to utilize 400V chargers through a split-pack design. Essentially, the truck’s battery can act as two 400V packs in parallel, or one 800V pack when those sections are connected in series.
North noted that Telo went with the split-pack architecture because most 800V EVs end up being “compromised at 400-volt chargers. And because there are more 400-volt chargers out there than there are 800-volt chargers, that’s too big of a limitation for our customers.” There are a few ways to make an 800V compatible with 400V chargers—which most Tesla Superchargers are, for example—and using a split pack is one of them.
The Porsche Taycan, for example, uses a DC-DC converter to step up the voltage and allow for 150 kW charging at 400V stations—far less than its peak capability. Hyundai’s E-GMP cars use a clever rear-motor design to achieve a similar effect of around 135 kW at Superchargers and the like. (They can hit well over 200 kW at 800V-capable stations.)
Telo didn’t specify the max charging power of the MT1 at 400V stations, but it’s often around half the peak charging rate in split-pack EVs. The company also said it will announce charging times at a later date. But Telo claims the 400 kW peak won’t happen for just a moment at the start of a charging session.
“We know it’s about sustained charge, that’s what brings the actual charge time down, what people care about is charging time,” North said. “We will be able to charge at 400 kilowatts, sustained.”
Telo aims to produce around 5,000 pickup trucks per year through a contract manufacturer.
The stubby MT1 is 152 inches long, has five seats, and comes with a 60-inch bed. Range, according to the company, will come in at anywhere from 260 miles to 350 miles, depending on configuration and whether you choose a single- or dual-motor truck. The base model will cost $41,520.
Now Telo has to actually get the thing to market, which, if history is any guide, isn’t easy for any EV startup. The company is aiming to be a niche player—not a mass-market Tesla rival—and aims to produce about 5,000 trucks per year through a contract manufacturer. It has raised some $30 million, a far cry from the hundreds of millions or billions other EV startups have pulled in to get production underway.
Last week, Telo shared that it had selected a partner to manufacture the body-in-white, which is a vehicle’s basic structure that everything gets attached to. Telo says it will start producing the MT1 by the end of this year.
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