Ex-Tesla Engineers Hope To Fix The EV Towing Problem With This Promising Camper

Despite the progress the world’s automakers have made in electric vehicle technology, there’s one thing that EVs still suck at doing, and that’s towing trailers long distances. Test after test has shown that even the best EVs lose a ton of range towing even a light trailer, let alone a fancy camper. Former Tesla and Rivian engineers think they have an answer.

Towing a heavy trailer with any vehicle, regardless if it’s powered by internal combustion or through electricity, means taking a hit to your range. In my experience, some ICE vehicles may lose around half of their fuel economy when hitched up to a heavy enough trailer. Countless tests have shown that EVs aren’t much better. Most of today’s popular electric trucks see their range drop into the low 100-mile range when towing a large trailer.

The result, regardless of what fuels your tow vehicle, is that you have to stop more often for fuel. However, at least ICE trucks can counter fuel economy losses with a sizable fuel tank that can be refilled in minutes. An EV is stuck with the battery it has and even if you do just 30-minute charging stops, those stops add up quickly if you’re stopping every 100 miles or so. At the same time, most public charging stations are still singular stalls, which require a tow vehicle to decouple from their trailer prior to charging. Thankfully, pull-through charging stations are quickly spreading across America, but for some, the best solution is to not have to visit a fuel station or a charging station as often in the first place.

How do you achieve that? One solution is to have the trailer do some of its own hauling, therefore reducing the load on the tow vehicle and restoring most of the range that’s otherwise lost when towing. This is exactly the thinking of RV makers, and we’ve seen self-propelled trailers by the likes of Dethleffs, Airstream, Lightship, and Pebble. Sadly, an Airstream representative recently told me that the Airstream eStream will no longer see a production version. Meanwhile, the European Dethleffs E.Home also appears to be just a prototype camper.

That means the established brands sputtering out, leaving the two tech startups in the running: Lightship and Pebble. Whether they realize it or not, both of these companies are racing each other to come to the market with the first production travel trailer that’s capable of doing some of its own hauling. Lightship says its first customer trailers will hit the road in summer 2025 and tomorrow, I’m going to see the real deal for my own eyes.

I wrote about Lightship last year and I’m happy to say that the project has not stalled out. Lightship, a company decked out in former Rivian and Tesla engineers from top to bottom, tells me it’s ready to show the world what its camper looks outside of renders. For Tesla alums and Lightship founders Ben Parker and Toby Kraus, this is the future of how EV owners and maybe some ICE owners go camping.

The Camper

When we wrote about Lightship’s debut trailer in 2023, the camper was called the L1. Now that we’re edging closer to production, the Lightship team has given the trailer a new name. It’s now called the AE.1, but it’s otherwise pretty much the same trailer you saw last year. Personally, I liked the old name more, but I do love how the company is now leaning heavily into space themes.

The AE.1 is supposed to do several things differently than your typical travel trailer. For starters, The AE.1’s design is sort of a futuristic version of what is known as a Hi-Lo camper. These clever trailers try to combine the aerodynamics of a pop-up trailer while retaining the hard walls and safety of a traditional travel trailer. Like a pop-up, a Hi-Lo compacts into itself. When you tow it down the road it’s not like hauling a brick through wind. When you get to your campsite, push the button and you have an instant typical travel trailer.

The Lightship AE.1 is just that, but with the optimization cranked up to 11. Parker and Kraus told us in 2023 that when the Lightship trailer is in travel mode, it is three times as aerodynamic as your typical travel trailer. We still don’t know the coefficient of drag of the unit, but we’ve been told that the trailer’s shape was created after thousands of hours of real-world towing testing with several different vehicles. The profile of the trailer is meant to work with as many trucks and SUVs as possible.

The aero should be good for a trailer, but probably not as slippery as it could be. As we’ve seen with other trailers, a super slippery camper is also not one that’s great to sleep in. Back in 2023, the Lightship team stressed that compacting the height of the trailer is crucial to the mission of saving range and fuel economy.

The real party trick of the Lightship AE.1 is the drive system, which Lightship is now calling the TrekDrive. In the L1, this consisted of an electric motor and a battery. The base trailer would have a 40 kWh battery with an option to upgrade to an 80 kWh unit. When equipped with the 80 kWh pack, the trailer is able to help pull itself up to 300 miles per charge. Lightship gave no further details about the exact components of this system. The latest release tells us you get a NACS connector, the top battery is now 77 kWh, and the trailer can fast charge from completely dead to full in an hour.

That said, Lightship did tell us how it worked. You would hitch the trailer up to your tow vehicle and the trailer would constantly use its sensors and computer systems to determine how much assist it would need to provide from its motor. The goal is that the trailer doesn’t push all of its own weight, but just enough so that the coupler between the trailer and the tow vehicle remains taut, but the load on the tow vehicle goes down tremendously. Picture it as the tow vehicle going from towing a massive 8,300-pound trailer to now only having to tow something only a portion of the weight.

The goal, Lightship told us, is that if you hitch up to a 300-mile EV, it should still get pretty close to 300 miles. This benefit extends to ICE vehicles, too. If you hitch up to a fancy F-250 Power Stroke that gets 20 mpg unloaded, it should get pretty darn close to 20 mpg when pulling a Lightship.

The Lightship is pretty much a typical EV in itself. It can recapture energy through regenerative braking and the computers onboard will work to ensure the trailer is stable as it goes down the road. Last year, Lightship told us that also means it will not out-accelerate the tow vehicle nor out-brake it. The trailer should tow like any other trailer, but reduce a whole lot of strain on the tow vehicle.

Last year, Lightship also recognized that pull-through stations might take a while to show up. In response, the company is considering charging alternatives such as allowing the motors to be used as generators to charge the trailer as it goes down the road and maybe also by developing a special high-output alternator for ICE tow vehicles. For sure, the trailer will be able to charge itself from campground shore power and it’ll also fast-charge from a public charging station. The trailer’s roof is also covered in solar panels good enough for an additional 3 kW of energy.

Inside

We know more details about the interior than Lightship was willing to give out last year. All of the interior equipment is all-electric and the interior is designed around making the space seem larger than it actually is. Here’s Lightship’s comment on the interior:

The battery and integrated, full-solar roof design deliver an all-electric camping experience without the noise of a generator or the hazard of onboard propane tanks. With power capacity built for off-grid living, the AE.1 sleeps four, brings the comfort and refinement of an automotive-grade HVAC system, a spacious, fully outfitted bathroom, and a Galley Kitchen equipped with a dishwasher, refrigerator, microwave, convection oven and induction cooktop.

The AE.1 gives its sleepers a panoramic view of the outside world thanks to its distinctive mostly glass upper shell. We’re told production versions of this trailer will offer guards and shields to protect this glass while the trailer is on the move. But, when you’re parked, the idea is to give you an unparalleled view of the outside and to create what’s quite possibly the most “airy” camper ever conceived. The huge windows pop open, too, so you can get that fresh outside air inside of your AE.1.

Now that Lightship has the interior figured out, the interior photos now have way better detail. I’m concerned about how much glass this thing is covered in. I totally get the idea of a sleek, sexy, and panoramic camper, but there are so many ways glass can fail and ruin a trip. Glass also isn’t really end-user repairable, either. I’ll be sure to examine the production version tomorrow.

In terms of exact equipment specs, Lightship says the air-conditioner is 20,000 BTU and that the fresh tank is 50 gallons while the gray tank is 35 gallons and the black tank is 30 gallons.

At any rate, you get all of this in a trailer measuring 27-feet long, 6 feet, 11 inches tall when in road mode, and 10 feet tall when in camp mode. The trailer is said to have a ground clearance of a foot and a departure angle of just 9 degrees, so don’t take it off-road. Fully loaded, it weighs in at 8,300 pounds (dry weight is 7,450 pounds) and it sleeps 4 to 6 people depending on the configuration.

The Engineers Behind The Camper

In case you’ve forgotten where this company has come from, I’ll give you a quick recap:

The Autopian’s EIC David Tracy and I got to interview Ben Parker and Toby Kraus. Parker built hybrid-electric racecars in his university years before spending five years as a battery engineer for Tesla, developing a new manufacturing process and getting the Tesla Model 3’s battery out of production hell. Kraus also spent five years at Tesla, where he led Tesla’s finance team and was a product manager for the first production Tesla Model S.

Kraus left Tesla in 2015 for Proterra, an electric vehicle equipment manufacturer perhaps best known for powering Thomas Built Buses Saf-T-Liner C2 Jouley school buses. Working with Proterra, Kraus led the business unit that applied platforms to commercial vehicles, where Proterra was the electrification provider for companies like Mercedes-Benz’s commercial vehicle division.

Parker told us that Lightship’s origins were in an entirely different industry. During Parker’s tenure at Tesla in California, he often found food trucks parked outside of the factory. Those food trucks were kept online with loud, smoky generators. Of course, those loud generators aren’t heard just at Tesla, but Parker told us that food trucks are all over the Bay area with their loud generators roaring. At first, this sparked a pet project to take EV technology and implement it into a quiet food truck.

Parker left Tesla in 2020 and embarked on a cross-country road trip in a Winnebago. It was during this trip he discovered the loud and dirty side of RV life. If you boondock someplace that’s frequented by other travelers, you better be prepared to listen to generators piercing your ears at every hour of every day. If the gathering of RVs is large enough, the air also becomes a bit saturated with the fumes of dozens of generators constantly roaring.

I’ve experienced this all over America from various Gambler 500 rallies and every single visit I’ve done to EAA AirVenture Oshkosh every single year. If you get into a large enough gathering of RVs, you will hear a loud generator interrupting otherwise beautiful and natural scenes. Firms like Honda do make quiet generators, but these are often so expensive that people just go with the loud option, anyway.

A lightbulb turned on in Parker’s head and he began asking RV owners what they wanted to see in future rigs. As it turned out, other RV owners are just like you and me. They also hate hearing generators at every hour and they also hate flipping to their tow vehicle’s MPG gauge and seeing a big fat 7 mpg. Meanwhile, EV truck owners would love to have their range back. It sort of makes you just want to stay home.

Once Parker talked with enough RV owners, he returned home with a new plan. Instead of EV food trucks, he was set on building the next generation of RVs. Kraus didn’t have an inspirational story about an RV road trip. Instead, he’s fed up with the lack of innovation coming from the big RV companies in Indiana, so he joined Lightship to bring new ideas into the RV industry.

In January 2024, Lightship got investors to commit $34 million in Series B funding, which has helped the company get to where it is today.

What Happens Next

The launch edition of the trailer is the Cosmos Edition, which is said to have a plush, sustainable interior and two different colors. Lightship wants to sell 50 of these units for $250,000 and says they’ll be hitting the road in summer 2025, going out to early reservation holders.

“With the limited-edition Lightship AE.1 Cosmos, we’re delivering a dream travel experience for sustainable travelers, tech lovers and EV enthusiasts,” said Ben Parker, Lightship Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer. “Our mission is to bring RVs into the electric age with the AE.1. The Cosmos Edition is the first premium realization, and we have other trims to fit travelers’ needs coming quickly down the road.”

Once the Cosmos Edition sells out, the AE.1 will be sold in Atmos, Panos, and Terros trim levels with varying price points to fit the needs of different RV buyers. The Atmos is $184,000, the Panos will cost $151,000 and the Terros is the entry-level model at $125,000. The Panos, with its smaller battery, will go only 140 miles on a charge while Lightship gives no range estimate for the Terros. It would appear the Terros doesn’t have a drive system at all. All of these are slated for release in 2026.

Tomorrow, I will be meeting the Lightship team in person and will be able to tour the production trailers. I have so many questions, including the exact specifications of the drive motors to how the company plans on making this trailer last longer than a stick build from Indiana. What do you want to know from the Lightship team?