The Slate Truck and the Men Who Build: Why Right to Repair Matters
A Truck That Lets You Get Your Hands Dirty
There is a new pickup coming to market called the Slate. It is electric. It costs about $25,000. And unlike almost every vehicle sold in America today, you can fix it yourself. As Wired reported, the truck is designed from the ground up to be owner-serviceable.
Slate Auto built this truck around an idea that used to be standard and has become radical: the owner should be able to repair their own property. It comes with an open-source service manual. The company encourages owners to do their own warranty work. If you do not want to turn a wrench, you can take it to one of roughly 4,000 independent repair shops instead of being funneled into a dealer service center that charges $200 an hour.
That philosophy matters to the kind of man who builds things, fixes things, and refuses to accept that he needs permission to maintain what he owns.
That includes your beard.
What the Slate Truck Teaches Us About Ownership
The right to repair movement has been fighting for years against a simple injustice: manufacturers design products so that only they can fix them. Apple glues batteries to cases. Tractor companies make you use their software to diagnose a dead engine. Car dealers lobby to keep independent mechanics from accessing the same repair data they have.
The result is a world where you do not really own what you paid for. You license it. You rent it, on terms set by someone else.
The Slate truck rejects this approach entirely. Its battery pack is modular. Its components use standard sizes where possible. The company publishes wiring diagrams and torque specs. If a sensor fails, you can find the part number, order it from a supplier, and replace it in your driveway without an appointment or a $200 diagnostic fee. The full specs are on Slate Auto's website, and they make for refreshing reading if you are tired of being told what you cannot fix.
This is the same spirit that keeps a man maintaining his own tools, changing his own oil, and building his own workbench instead of buying a flat-pack from a big box store. It is the belief that competence is not obsolete.
Why This Matters for Your Beard Care
You might be wondering what a pickup truck has to do with beard oil. The answer is the same philosophy applied to a different product category.
The mass market grooming industry works on the same model as the dealership service center. Large brands spend heavily on marketing, distribute through big retailers, and formulate products with cheap base oils and synthetic fragrances. They tell you what your beard needs. You buy it at the store. You hope it works.
Balboly works the other way. We tell you what is in the bottle, why each ingredient is there, and how to use it. Our Airman unscented beard oil uses jojoba oil because it closely mimics the sebum your skin naturally produces. It uses vitamin E for cell regeneration. It uses no synthetic fragrance because we do not believe in covering up your natural scent with something manufactured in a lab.
You do not need a middleman to tell you whether a beard oil works. You can read the ingredients, understand what they do, and decide for yourself. That is the right to repair applied to grooming.
The Independent Shop Ethos
Slate's decision to support 4,000 independent repair shops instead of forcing owners into dealerships is not just a business model. It is a statement about who should control the relationship between a person and their tools.
Independent mechanics survive on reputation. They have to be better, faster, and more honest than the dealer because they have no brand loyalty keeping customers coming back. A bad job means a lost customer, not a trip to a different dealer under the same corporate umbrella.
The same applies in grooming. Small brands like Balboly cannot afford to put out a mediocre product and rely on shelf placement at a national retailer. We have to earn every customer. That means better ingredients, honest labeling, and a product that actually does what it promises.
When you buy from an independent brand, you are not just buying a product. You are buying into a relationship where the maker stands behind what they make because they cannot hide behind a logo.
A Modular Approach to Everything
The Slate truck's modular battery pack lets owners replace individual cells instead of the entire battery. That is the kind of design thinking that saves money, reduces waste, and respects the person who will eventually maintain the product.
At Balboly, we take the same approach with our product line. Our unscented Airman beard oil is a standalone product that works with any other grooming routine you already have. It layers with mustache wax, beard balm, or nothing at all. You choose the parts that fit your needs instead of buying a prepackaged system.
That is modular thinking. It is the idea that you, not the manufacturer, should decide how things fit together.
What This Means Going Forward
The Slate truck has not shipped yet. It takes time to build a vehicle from scratch, especially when you are fighting against an industry that prefers you not be able to fix your own stuff. But the fact that it exists at all is a signal. There is a market for products designed with the owner in mind, not just the shareholder.
That market includes beard care. It includes tools. It includes software, appliances, and tractors. And it includes the growing number of men who have realized that being able to maintain what you own is not just economical. It is a form of independence.
The right to repair is not really about repair. It is about ownership. If you cannot fix it, you do not really own it. You are just renting it until it breaks.
A beard oil from a small brand that tells you exactly what is inside and why works the same way. You get to know what goes on your skin. You get to choose something made with care instead of something made for volume.
So whether you are waiting for a Slate truck to arrive or just looking for a beard oil that respects your intelligence well enough to explain what is in it, the principle is the same. Buy from people who trust you to make your own decisions. Skip the ones who do not.