Slate has hired several senior executives directly from Lucid Motors in recent months and years, as the startup prepares to unveil production pricing for its low-cost electric pickup.
David D’Amato is among the latest senior departures from the Saudi-backed EV maker to land at the startup funded by Jeff Bezos.
He has recently joined as Senior Manager of Plant Vehicle Engineering, after more than five years at Lucid‘s manufacturing complex in Casa Grande, Arizona.
D’Amato’s arrival makes him the latest in a run of leaders the Indiana-based company has taken straight from Lucid this year, as it races to turn more than 160,000 refundable reservations into customer deliveries.
At Slate, D’Amato leads the plant vehicle engineering team tasked with improving launch quality and accelerating engineering changes on the company’s FN truck platform.
That brief mirrors the discipline he ran at Lucid, where he spent five years and two months across three engineering posts — finishing as Head of Resident Product Engineering from October 2025 until his exit, and before that serving more than three years as Senior Manager of Plant Vehicle Product Engineering.
A Direct Line From Lucid
Adam Backhaut, whom Slate hired as a senior manufacturing leader in May, reached the startup by way of Ford, having left Lucid in early 2025 for the Dearborn automaker before moving on.
Head of Legal Bernadette Lussier likewise worked at Lucid — as Director of Legal and then Associate General Counsel — but joined Slate in late 2023 after a year at teleoperation firm Phantom Auto, making her an early hire rather than a recent catch.
Weeks before D’Amato, Slate hired Lucid’s former head of North America sales, Lynn Yeager, as its head of sales, taking her straight from the EV maker on April 24.
A LinkedIn search shows at least 17 current Slate employees previously worked at Lucid, spanning engineering, legal, supply chain, manufacturing and sales.
Leaving a Company in Flux
The hiring comes as Lucid works through a leadership exodus that has run for more than two years.
Lucid, majority-owned by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, has lost at least 14 C-suite officers, senior vice presidents and vice presidents since October 2023, including its chief executive, chief financial officer, general counsel and chief engineer.
Founder-era CEO Peter Rawlinson stepped down in February 2025, and Lucid named Silvio Napoli its permanent chief executive only this spring, ending a 14-month search.
A senior Lucid product-management director also departed for General Motors before the midsize Cosmos unveiling, underscoring how widely the talent has scattered.
Sharing an EV report on a recent Lucid engineering and software departure, he wrote on LinkedIn that the exodus of Lucid executives was “telling about the culture” of the business.
Staffing Up for the Launch
The company plans to reveal official pricing and open preorders for the pickup on Wednesday at an event in Los Angeles, where it will also show the production version of the truck.
A figure of $24,950 appeared in code embedded in Slate‘s website before being deleted, The Autopian reported, though the company has not confirmed the number ahead of the reveal.
Earlier guidance had ranged from below $20,000 — a figure that assumed the now-expired US federal tax credit — to about $27,500 once that incentive lapsed.
Slate, backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has marketed the two-seat truck as a stripped-down, heavily customisable vehicle in the mid-$20,000s, with manual windows and no standard touchscreen.
Designed around fewer than 800 parts and a factory that needs no paint shop, the truck lets buyers cover the body in wrap films rather than paint and reconfigure the pickup into an SUV, running on a lithium iron phosphate battery rated at up to 150 miles of range.
Founded in 2022 and public since April 2025, the startup plans to build the truck at a former printing plant in Warsaw, Indiana, with capacity for up to 150,000 vehicles a year.
Slate closed a $650 million funding round earlier this year led by TWG Global, lifting total backing to roughly $1.4 billion, and installed former Amazon executive Peter Faricy as chief executive in March.
First customer deliveries are targeted for the year end.
Buying Launch Experience
D’Amato helped stand up vehicle engineering at a plant that launched the Lucid Air and began building the Gravity SUV, the kind of zero-to-production experience Slate now needs at its Indiana factory.
Yeager brought direct-to-consumer sales know-how from the same source, ahead of a launch that will rely on online orders rather than a dealer network.
Slate intends to sell the truck online and service it through independent repair shops rather than franchised dealers, an unconventional model that places a premium on leaders who have run direct sales and lean factory operations.
