Yves Béhar has spent his career shrinking problems down to size — making laptops lighter, office chairs more ergonomic, and technology more user-friendly. (Just ask customers of Jimmyjane, whose waterproof dildo(opens in new tab) was designed by Béhar.) Now the Swiss-born industrial designer is tackling America’s largest excess of all: the colossal truck. 

His latest creation is a petite electric truck called Telo. It presents a bizarre optical illusion. At just 12.5 feet, it is the same length as the standard two-door Mini Cooper but has a truck bed bigger than a Rivian R1T. The five-seat interior has more space than a Toyota Tacoma cab, and Telo has a more efficient battery and lower price than most electric trucks on the market. The only thing it’s missing is a front: If Telo were a dog, it’d be a snub-nosed pug. (Sorry, frunk lovers.)

“From a design standpoint, you really need to create iconography,” Béhar said. “My inspiration is always what people need — the idiosyncrasies of modern life.”

With financing from local tech titans Marc Benioff of Salesforce and Tesla cofounder Marc Tarpenning, Telo positions its debut truck as a small yet mighty alternative to electric pickups from Rivian, Tesla, and Ford. 

“When you see the car, you can’t help but react in some way,” Tarpenning wrote in a blog post last year, comparing Telo’s rise to that of Tesla, though with far less time, money, and manpower.

But with the EV market colder than an expired lithium battery, Béhar and his team face a precarious time in the industry. We visited Béhar’s design studio to see why he thinks he can make Americans fall in love with small, idiosyncratic electric trucks at a time when they seem to want everything bigger.

‘I want the truck now’

Three engineers were on their hands and knees, combing over the epoxy floor of Fuseprojects, Béhar’s design firm in the Potrero Flats, searching for a screw that belonged to a motherboard they were tinkering with moments earlier. Dressed in sweatpants and with hay-colored, unkempt hair, Béhar strode beside them to shake my hand.

Charming and a bit of a dude, Béhar grew up in Lausanne, Switzerland, with his German mother and Turkish Jewish father. Though the family visited museums and archeological sites across Europe, Béhar didn’t learn about design at home, he said. Rather, his sensibilities were shaped by two industrial-era movements: those of the American modernists Charles and Ray Eames and the Italian modernists Joe Colombo and Achille Castiglioni, celebrated for their future-oriented experiments with how people live among everyday objects.

After moving to California in the late 1980s, Béhar created products and companies that helped shape the look and feel of contemporary technology. He went on to implement his passion for the Eameses in his Herman Miller Sayl chair, now a fixture of modern workplaces. His OLPC XO laptop, a Y2K-era device designed to make computers more accessible to low-income students, incorporated the Italians’ idea that objects could be instruments for new ways of living. (The laptop is one of several Béhar-designed pieces in SFMOMA’s permanent collection.)

“I believe in humanistic technologies,” he said. “It’s important for us to show not just where tech can go but should go, because I’m a little puzzled by what some of these tech companies are doing.”

Béhar lives in Cow Hollow with his wife, the art dealer Sabrina Buell, daughter of Democratic Party megadonors and San Francisco socialites Susie Tompkins Buell and Mark Buell. Béhar and his wife also have a home in Bolinas, beside a cliff overlooking the Pacific.

“We have never been fazed by the elements,” Buell told the Nob Hill Gazette in 2018 after she and Béhar got married on Burning Man’s alkaline playa. 

At Fuseprojects, products and design awards are plopped around the foyer. Among these is a cardboard model of the Mission motorcycle, an electric two-wheeler that Béhar and Forrest North, Telo’s chief technology officer, worked on in 2008. It set the land-speed record for electric two-wheelers at the time, reaching 150 mph, but the company folded after years of financial strain, infighting, and the loss of key engineers to Apple(opens in new tab).

In 2022, Béhar and North reunited, this time with Jason Marks, now CEO of Telo, to discuss the idea of developing another electric vehicle. They figured they’d try another motorcycle, North said.

“We kept showing the slide to people that showed the motorcycle, a small car, then a small truck, with the whole idea of mobility for the city,” North said. “Every time they would say, ‘Oh, I want the truck now.’”

The group listened, founding Telo in 2022 with the goal of delivering a tiny, electric truck.

A difficult time to come to market

When Telo was founded, the EV market was flying high. While gas-powered car sales plummeted during the pandemic, EV sales skyrocketed at a rapid clip, thanks in large part to the momentous success of Tesla, government incentive programs, and an expansion of charging infrastructure.

In 2021, President Joe Biden clambered into a hulking Ford F-150 Lightning in Dearborn, Michigan. “Anyone want to jump in the back or on the roof?” Biden asked reporters. “These suckers are something else!”

That year, global sales for EVs hit a high point, surging more than 160% from 2020 to roughly 6.5 million vehicles — leading Ford, General Motors, and others to announce that they would phase out gas-powered cars in the coming decades. 

But that was then. In the years since, the market has cooled. The cost of EVs continues to rise. President Donald Trump nixed federal credits that offered up to $7,500 in tax breaks for EV buyers. And the AI boom has vacuumed nearly all available funds for startups, making it a difficult time to raise money for hardware.

Ford is reportedly considering halting production(opens in new tab) of the F-150 Lightning, its flagship EV, which Biden so enjoyed.

Still, plenty of people want EVs. “At the end of the day, it’s an affordability issue, not a demand issue,” said Stephanie Valdez, director of industry insights at Cox Automotive. “There’s a market [for Telo], but there’s a lot of headwinds.”

Telo isn’t the only tiny electric truck on the horizon. Slate Auto, which has backing from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, made waves this year when it announced an electric truck with a $20,000 price tag. Telo’s truck is priced at $41,000, still well below the roughly $60,000 for EV cars and for conventional trucks. Its 350-mile range is exceptional for an electric pickup, and its positioning as a city-friendly vehicle could prove compelling for urban drivers.

Many high-profile San Franciscans have shown interest. Last week, Béhar’s friend Mayor Daniel Lurie arrived at Fuseprojects to test-drive the Telo. Lurie climbed into the driver’s seat, his hulking security guard fitting in the back, while the designer hopped up front. The crew sped off up Potrero Hill.

Political stunts, it seems, might not be disappearing from the EV marketing playbook anytime soon.