Continuously serving Kosciusko County since 1854
Plenty has changed over the last few years inside the former RR Donnelley & Sons plant, 2801 W. Old 30, Warsaw, now occupied by Slate Auto.
To highlight the work that’s been done and is being done to the building in preparation for the manufacturing of the Slate Auto customizable EV, area media were given a tour of the facility Friday morning.
The company also will be hosting Family Day on Saturday, Sept. 19 for workers’ families to see what’s happening.
It’s about year two for Slate Auto at the factory.
Jeff Jablansky, Slate head of public relations and communications, said, “Last time we talked, we were still in the reservation stage where we’re asking people to put $50 refundable toward a reservation. Between April 2025 and May 2026, we got 180,000 of those. So, those $50 refundable reservations moved in to the next stage in June 2026. That was for a $300 order deposit, where you’re basically saying, ‘I want my place on line,’ it’s non-refundable.”
In the first two hours of the order deposit, Slate took over 10,000 of those, and since then have taken “quite a few more.”
The price of the truck is $24,950, so a person’s $300 gets applied toward that. First deliveries will start before the end of the year, he said.
“This truck is meant to be affordable, personalizable and something you could love. It upends the industry because we asked what could you take out of a car, instead of continuing to add features,” he said. “Fewer things to go wrong, fewer things you don’t need that the auto industry is forcing you to buy.”
When Slate got to Warsaw, Jablansky said it was essentially a ground-up renovation of the building.
“So the space where we are right now is an indication of the level of work we had to do, and when you go into the factory - which we’re going to take a tour of the full factory today - it was an empty building because it had closed about 2023, so there was a period of about a year, year and a half, where it was completely empty,” Jablansky said.
Over 500 full-time employees currently work at Slate Auto, plus there were more contractors at the plant Friday working just on construction.
“So, the ramp is exactly the way we planned it for hiring here. We still plan to have 2,000 people here at full capacity, but having 500 now ahead of the start of production, we are on track to add, I think it’s a couple hundred more, before we start before the end of the year,” he said.
What Slate is doing now is putting everything together, training employees how to assemble the vehicles and all parts of the business are there, including the builders and the service team.
“The anticipation (here) is huge because in the days before, when we were in stealth, we all knew what we were doing and we couldn’t wait to tell everybody. Now that we’re in this period between everybody knows it and few people have seen one on the road, it’s really cool to see how excited everybody is to start building, to start getting on the road. Something that was literally a sketch 3-1/2 years ago ... this is a culmination of something really big, but ... people are really excited,” Jablansky said.
He said Warsaw has been a great choice for the Slate Auto plant.
Friday’s media tour, after an update on Slate and safety presentation, included both buildings.
“When we take the tour today, you’ll notice we’re not showing you the paint shop because we don’t have one. And that’s intentional. This reduces our overall costs and it also allows people to wrap it as they want to at any point. You can wrap, unwrap, change the color, change the way the truck looks and feels,” Jablansky said.
For anyone who took the tour of Slate Auto last year, he said, “You saw a factory that was cleaned up but fairly empty. Today, you’re going to see a factory that is full and basically ready to start building.”
Jablansky said they’re in a phase right now with their Design Validation Vehicle (DVV). “That’s our protoype stage where we’re one step ahead of building production vehicles. We’re doing this to find out, first of all, does everything fit, and then to make sure everything is road worthy as we start to build this series production.”
Dan Tasiemski, Slate head of manufacturing engineering, said they took down roughly 3-1/2 miles of wall. The first shovel in the ground was in July 2025.
“When you were out here (last time), we were still doing the concrete. It looked like the surface of the moon out there. Walls were still coming down. We had heavy equipment inside there,” Tasiemski said.
The DVVs are built at the Warsaw plant. The next step is the process validation, and those vehicles also will be built here.
“The Slates are being built here. Not ready for public sale, but they’re here. You may see some of the line right now, but because of our phase-in, you won’t see much product on the line right now and that’s because we’re going to the next phase of things, but the robots are moving,” he said.
In November, they started adding their robots into the system.
The robots do have some A.I. (artificial intelligence). Tasiemski said, “There’s also simulation in the robots. A lot of times in the industry you’ll take a cell, build in an integrated shop, test it there and then install it.” He said a lot of the robots were done with simulation programs in 3D, simulating building the vehicle up, utilizing a bit of A.I. to make sure it was OK where the robot is or if it needed moved or changed. “We take that and utilize that simulation with a bit of A.I. in it in order to do things that we’ve done at the speed that we have.”
In just the body shop alone, there’s 374 robots. An additional 20-plus will be added, so in one building alone there will be over 400 robots, with a handful next door. Right now, Slate Auto has about 575 people working.
The facility is set up with a west and east plant, body shop, coatings, bonding process and general assembly. “We went from an empty building to this,” Tasiemski said.
Outside of the building is the BSR (buzz, squeak, rattle) track where vehicles are ran over bumps, a cobblestone section and rumble strips and at various speeds for testing purposes. It’s as much for engineering durability as it will be for the finished vehicles.
The finished goods yard is where trucks, and eventually rail, will pick up vehicles for deliveries.
Also on the outside is the extension to facilities that Slate is doing. Tasiemski said it’s roughly 130,000 square feet being added to the building. The expansion of the general assembly building should be up and ready by November or December for production.
“One thing that we do is, we don’t wait for Task A to be done before doing Task B before doing Task C. We do the whole alphabet at once, so it’s moving in parallel. Very good communications between the groups in order to do it,” Tasiemski said.
Some of the factories where Tasiemski worked in the past were 3-5 million square feet. Slate’s Warsaw plant is 1.4 million. “Again, we don’t have a stamping facility. We don’t have a paint shop. That knocks the square footage down. And we also went with the simplicity of build, so without the infotainment and the other things that we don’t have in this vehicle. We’re down to roughly 900-ish parts, as compared to several thousand with a typical vehicle,” he said.
With the size of the vehicle, not as much space is needed to manufacture it.
Stacy Burk, head of plant human resources, said Slate is currently hiring their first crew, which should be completely hired by the end of the year. Starting mid December, she said they’ll work on filling the second crew. She said they have everything from hourly, people working in the general assembly, to salaried employees, who will be programming the robots, to engineers.
“We need and we want those local candidates and those local people to be a part of this team,” she said. “My goal, and I think a lot of the leaderships’ goal here, is to create a generational place for people to work, and I want to see in another 15 years, we’ve got two or three generations of the same families working here.”
Jablansky said, “We’re really excited that we have the reservations to prove this is the truck that America wants, and then the pre-order holders who are getting excited when we take the truck on the road and you’re standing in the place where we’re going to build them. And when people’s trucks come off the line, people are going to know they came from Warsaw.”
Tasiemski said when he first came to Warsaw in April 2025, he got his first Slate shirt and would wear it out after they came out of stealth mode. He couldn’t go anywhere wearing his Slate shirt without someone asking him questions about it.
“Personally, this is my fourth start-up and I’ve never been accepted in a community before like I have here. It’s just great being here. It’s great working with our people in the community, whether it’s KEDCO, the local government or just the other services and schools around here. Ivy Tech. Warsaw Public School System. Just great working with everyone. We want to be a part of the community, we’re embedded in it,” he stated.
