The Slate Pickup Can Fit Pretty Much Every Motorcycle In Its Bed

Slate announced its barebones electric pickup last week, and it was immediately met by the same dumb chorus as every small truck: The bed’s too little, it’ll never fit anything, you have to get the Ferd Fteenthousand instead if you want to do any real work. I’m here to say the opposite. The Slate’s bed can haul just about any motorcycle on the market today, and that makes it perfectly useful in my eyes. 

The Slate pickup has a 60-inch bed with the tailgate closed, which doesn’t sound like a lot. Opening that gate, though, gives you 81.6 inches of space front to back — as well as the whole world of open air to play with behind your truck. That’s enough to fit many bikes, including mine, straight into the Slate’s bed, but we can do one better. By putting a bike in the truck diagonally, you can fit just about anything. 

At about 1 a.m. on launch morning, I sat down with a pen and an envelope and I started running the numbers. The overall bed length with the tailgate down is 81.6 inches, and the width outside of the wheel wells is 54.9 inches. That gives us two sides of a right triangle, and some quick Pythagorean theorem gives us a diagonal distance of 98.35 inches — that’s a massive amount of space to throw a bike into. All 85 inches of my Suzuki GSX-8R would fit handily, and a current Honda Gold Wing would only stick a few inches off the tailgate. Those inches are totally acceptable, though, when you consider that both tires will still be on solid metal. Who cares if a bit of fairing is in the breeze?

Of course, we know a Gold Wing fits lengthwise, but what about its 36-inch width? That’s a hurdle, to be sure, but one we can overcome. Unfortunately overcoming it means getting into some really intricate math, so I did the next best thing: Made quick and dirty scale models of a Slate truck bed and a Gold Wing in my 3d modeling software, and just shoved ’em together. Occam’s razor, baby. 

Yes, I know the models are rough. There’s an amount of time I’m willing to spend on this, and it’s exactly as long as it takes to get this level of refinement. Just know that everything’s dimensionally accurate enough, and there’s still plenty of room on that tailgate to fine-tune the angle of the Gold Wing in case my models don’t perfectly match reality. Which they do. For sure. 

The last concern with carrying a bike is weight, and Slate estimates a 1,400-pound payload capacity for the little pickup. That’s more than enough for even the heaviest motorcycle I can think of: The Harley-Davidson Road Glide Limited, which weighs a truly absurd 932 pounds “in running order.” So long as you don’t have some comically long chopper, the Slate pickup should fit your bike just fine — or your next bike, that Marketplace project that just needs a little love.