An exclusive look inside Telo’s new compact EV truck

[ResidentialBusiness]

The first thing anyone will notice about the new electric pickup from Telo Trucks is its compact form. Snubnosed and sporty, the five-seater has a bed the size of a typical pickup but an overall footprint the size of a Mini Cooper. When it goes into production next year, it will offer a radical counterpoint to the gargantuan trucks that dominate the U.S. automobile market.

Today, Telo is unveiling the first drivable preproduction model of its new truck, the MT1, and Fast Company has an exclusive look at the innovations inside the truck that make its seemingly impossible size possible.

[Image: Telo]

The key to the Telo truck’s interior design efficiency is its focus on what’s known in the automotive world as the H point—the location of a driver’s hip inside the vehicle—which becomes the main parameter that determines the size of a car’s interior. Telo aimed to get about the same volumetric interior space as a crew cab Toyota Tacoma, the top-selling midsize pickup in the U.S. “A lot of the special sauce as to how we get five people and a 5-foot bed into the footprint of a two-door Mini Cooper is packaging, and people are the most important part,” says Jason Marks, Telo cofounder and CEO.

From left: An MT1 compared with a Tacoma; a Mini Cooper [Image: Telo]

Telo’s focus on the H-point ended up shaping the entire truck, inside and outside. “We knew we had the right amount of space that people were used to having. And then what the designers did within that space was they had a lot of free reign,” says Forrest North, Telo cofounder and CFO.

That led to an exterior design with a short, frunkless nose, and a truck bed that can expand inward into the truck’s cab with an innovative folding midgate. That makes it big enough to haul a sheet of 4-by-8-foot plywood, giving the truck both utility and a compact size for urban settings.

[Image: Telo]

The interior design of Telo’s cabin space manages to compete with other trucks by repositioning how passengers sit. The driver and passenger seats were designed with an uncommon pedestal base that puts them higher up from the base of the floor. This height, and the lack of the typical twin mounting rails that sit on the floor beneath most front seats, creates more space underneath for the feet and legs of passengers in the back seat.

“The way that we built the front seats, it’s almost like they’re hovering in the air,” Marks says. “The angle of your thighs moves down, your back angle wants to be slightly more upright, and so it lets you actually occupy less horizontal room, even though you occupy more vertical room.”

[Image: Telo]

Ditching the frunk in favor of a larger truck bed and shorter overall vehicle length meant that these front seats are positioned very close to the front of the truck. North equates it to the experience he had driving his first car, a 1975 Volkswagen bus. “One of the great things about that is you know exactly where the front of the vehicle is. Parking and moving around in urban areas is much easier,” he says.

[Image: Telo]

But to carve every cubic inch of waste out of the interior, the design had to account for the necessary safety features that exist in passenger vehicles, including crash structures, crumple zones, and a firewall. Having the front seats up on a pedestal cleared room beneath them for feet to swing in and out of the vehicle, which allowed those front end safety structures to sit closer to the people inside.

“That had to be designed in a very surface contoured, three-dimensional way that optimized for both how you enter and exit the vehicle and how the vehicle performs,” Marks says. “So that was a big part of how we do what we do in our vehicle.”

[Image: Telo]

Industrial designer Yves Behar’s company Fuseproject led the truck’s design. (Behar is also an equity partner in Telo and serves as its chief creative officer and cofounder.) He says this pedestal seating approach is rare in car design, but has opened more space within the vehicle for human-centric design.

“It’s a funny feature to talk about because it’s like talking about the underside of a chair. Nobody ever sees the underside of a chair, but that’s really what this design is about,” Behar says. “It’s about designing the things people can’t see to deliver more comfort, more ergonomics, and more spaciousness in what I would say is an extremely small vehicle overall.”

[Image: Telo]

Other space-efficient design elements are scattered throughout the cabin, from its two compact glove boxes to a smaller-than-usual center console bin to cupholders that slide out of view when not in use to a specific place to store sunglasses. “It’s actually a lot of storage but that feels more dedicated rather than just a big bin that you put all your random stuff in,” Behar says.

Because it’s an electric vehicle, the Telo truck’s battery was also a big design parameter that shaped its interior design. North, who previously built the battery for the Tesla Roadster, says making the battery as thin as possible helped create more space inside the vehicle without compromising aerodynamics and range. “You want to reduce any millimeter you can from your from your roofline,” he says.

For Telo, size is everything. But in contrast to most trucks out on the market today, bigger is not better, according to Behar. “What I think pickup trucks have really embraced in the past 20-plus year is this notion of massiveness and masculinity and silly bigness,” he says. “That has essentially turned pickup trucks into dangerous and less utilitarian vehicles.”

---

View the full article