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?
$250K? Uh. I’ll take a new Airstream 22FB and an F250 for about half that.
At that price, just buy a fucking cabin and “camp” there.
This is what I do not understand about any camper that gets into high 5 figures and into 6. Just buy a cabin for fucks sake. At the very least it’s going to be sold for what you bought and in reality will appreciate. This will just lose value at alarming rates.
I agree. For vacation purposes, stay in a cabin, motel, hotel or slum it in a tent. I personally do the ‘Big Tent’ thing.
But having said that, I see some use cases that the cost can be worth it… like on a movie shoot site or for stuff like oil/gas/mining exploration… where the places you might be won’t have cabins, motels or even electricity.
The battery pack and solar panels means you won’t have to keep a noisy generator running… nor will you have to do fuel runs to a gas station that might be far away.
Are there still plans to provide power to food trucks? A large number of them have and external portable unit and a battery designed for such usage would be welcome. Also it could replace genearators that ICE RVs use. A patch until RVs are hybrid.
No, just no.
This company seems to be chasing a tiny sliver of a Venn diagram of overlapping population who own EVs, like camping, and are exceptionally stupid with their money.
So many concerns:
-$250k! GTFO
-Matching EV tow vehicle range? If it needs 100kWh battery to go 300 miles, how on earth does an 80kWh achieve that same range for what is likely a heavier “vehicle”
-Hi/Low style impacts storage and wall integrity (not to say regular constuction is anything to write home about).
-“Charge at campground”, yeah, there’s already signs everywhere not to plug in EVs
-Unless everyone can start affording these things, you’re still going to hear generators…..
Now, if this thing can decouple and then drive itself into a parking spot, that might be a cool party trick.
I see where you are coming from. But if you will allow me to provide counter perspective to your first two points.
-$250k is a lot of money. However, $20 billion of RVs were sold last year. This is a huge industry and there are no shortage of rigs sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Lightship will likely sell a modest number of units their first year. I will not be surprised if they can easily find demand for those units at $250k for new technology like this.
-While the trailer will likely be heavier than the tow vehicle, a vehicle’s efficiency is based on many factor. At highway speeds the dominating factor is aerodynamic drag. The trailers ability to tuck in behind the tow vehicle gives it a distinct advantage and likely explains why they are claiming it has efficiency of 3.9 mi/kWh (300 mi/77 kWh) which is higher than any potential tow vehicle.
I think a better solution is to have the trailer’s battery just be a supplemental battery for the tow vehicle. As others have stated, engineer it so it can also be used to power your home. This would bring down the cost (no motor, no sensors and less software) . This would accomplish the exact same thing as their “pushing RV”, but with a lot less hassle and expense. I feel sorry for the investors that will lose on this dud.
“I feel sorry for the investors that will lose on this dud.”
I don’t.
This exactly. Like if you’re going to have the trailer be self propelled, it’s not a big leap to just say screw it, add steering and make it an EV RV and ditch the tow vehicle entirely. And your suggestion would probably be more efficient since you can drop all the excess weight of the extra motors/drivetrain and get more range from the same battery pack (I think? Unless there’s somehow some electric usage efficiency factor from having more motors work less hard vs having fewer motors working harder?)
Just pay someone to bring your personal trailer to wherever you’re going.
Seems like a far easier way to deal with this, and still claim to be camping.
Or just pay to rent an already set up camper wherever you’re going, and avoid all of the hassle of having your own. No tow vehicle needed, no parking/storage, etc. It would have the downside of a lot less flexibility, but optimally there would just be more services in high use areas where you could book out, and have a camper delivered to wherever you’re going, and packed up when you leave.
Personally, I’ll just stick with a tent, and occasional hotels, and avoid the hassle of camper trailers entirely.
At some point, you might as well just rent a cabin in the woods.
Long time trailer owner and plan on retiring into a 5th wheel. This thing is absolute NONSENSE. All that glass? It will be a sauna in the summertime. Its practicality is basically non-existent with that layout. It’s setup as a vanity piece. Nobody is going to be able to use that with a 4-6 people in it with any sense of being comfortable. And having it “push” sounds great until the software doesnt catch you hitting the brakes or some other bug that jack knifes you. When I’m pulling, I am in charge and I want to keep it that way at all times. Which brings it to the important part, that $250k price tag. That thing is going to fall to pieces way before you could ever possibly make back that cost vs towing with a ICE vehicle and fuel concerns. And if you are thinking, how can you put a price on saving the environment? Well, I didn’t think I could but here we are. I know you have to start somewhere but this isn’t it.
While I agree in general this thing is dumb dumb dumb, to be fair on the point about glass, seems like those flip-out solar panels would both provide shade and provide power, so presumably in scenarios where it would potentially become a sauna, it would have the ability to just run the AC full blast to negate it?
I am so tired of ‘founders’ and their bullshit self-crafted inspiration stories.
“Those food trucks were kept online with loud, smoky generators.”
There may be an exception or two, but food truck generators run on propane. Not smoky. Did founder man ever bother to walk anywhere near the food trucks, or did he see them and make assumptions that he could solve a problem he imagined could possibly exist?
“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 you’re surrounded by other people in expensive luxury RVs running their generators, are you ‘boondocking?’
I even doubt this guy ever asked RV-ers anything about what they want. His sales pitch probably works fine for stupid investors. It won’t find as much success in the market place.
No worries, he’ll fabricate another lighbulb moment about the next non-problem he can halfway solve for three times the price the market will tolerate. We’ll be reading about this a-hole’s nonsense for years to come – a long line of failure wrapped in bullshit.
Thank you. As someone who’s been in the food business for the last 30+ years this shit got me. I basically read this as ‘poor people having to eat annoyed me, so I though there has to be a better way for them to annoy me less”.
His next project is a $900 battery-powered Aerogarden that can grow three bunches of parsley per month to help the poors with those grocery prices they’re always complaining about.
I just think it’s gross to watch people invest so much money to solve problems that no one has instead of investing that money to solve problems people do have. Do you know how many people I could feed with the money this guy invested in this pointless excersize in vanity? Good lord think of the good that money could do to help people
I’ve worked off and on again in the industry for around the same period of time. I love the work, but the hours eventually cause problems at home with a wife who works a 9-5.
That’s why after years and years of working in fine dining serving rich folks, I finally started working at a school (feeding their kids). The slightly lower salary is offset by a week off for Thanksgiving, 2 for Christmas, 1 for Spring Break and pretty much the entire summer off. It is absolutely the best, if you’re a salaried manager. Can’t believe I didn’t make this move sooner.
Did corporate catering for a few years. 6am-2pm M-F. Myself and one other guy who I got along with very well unless we had a larger event. That was during the internet boom and a lot of our business was with the companies in an incubator.
Catering IPO parties back then was crazy. People were just watching the stock ticker announcing that if it went up another point their options would pay off their houses. Most of the companies (including the incubator) didn’t last long enough for them to sell their shares.
I like your passion man but every food truck around here is run by a diesel generator, which are very loud because they buy the cheap ones. Sure they have propane to cook the food, but the diesel generator runs the refrigerators if there’s no shore power to connect to.
Really? That’s kind of gross. I don’t think I’d be too hungry for anything after waiting for my food in ground-level diesel exhaust.
Do they run exhaust stacks to at least get the diesel exhaust out of customers’ faces?
Nope, they usually just hang off the back or front of the truck itself, they just chain them up real good so the junkies can’t steal them.
One assumes that the buyers of this RV are extremely well to do, so I assume they will have indoor storage space and can reasonably install a charger where they park it. But for this technology to go mainstream, people would end up installing chargers just off the side of their house I guess? Or you have to drag it dead to a public charger before you go camping? Maybe the use case is low enough that most people would be fine just leaving it hooked up to their regular outlets?
There’s going to be 77kwh of battery capacity sitting unused for 50 weeks of the year. There doesn’t seem to be any ability to transport the gear you may need for outdoor activities. Hell, there’s not even high cabinets for dishes.
If you plan on biking, canoeing, kayaking, fishing or anything more than sitting in a somewhat self-propelled fishbowl, this may not be the camper for you.
I hate to rain on an RV start-up’s parade, and especially one that appears to care about design and materials.
Aside from people who full-time in their trailers, travel trailers spend a lot of time in storage. It would be wonderful to put the batteries in these trailers to use as Powerwalls. By that I mean if the homeowner can choose demand-sensitive, real-time pricing, use the trailer’s battery in prime-time and recharge the battery and run the house during off-peak times.
Or, allow the batteries to be modular and easily removable to allow the owner to leave the batteries at home for Powerwall use and store the rest of the trailer elsewhere.
I brought this idea of powered trailers up here before. I’m glad to see someone listened.
😉
These could make a lot of sense for a full timer RVer, but not a lot for someone like me that is out camping for around 25-30 days a year.
The big battery bank in the RV has a lot of other benefits, like fully running the trailer when off-grid. As for me, as a part timer, I run off (2) 12V lead acid batteries and hook up an inverter generator when I need to run the AC off grid.
It’s kind of a shame the eStream is not moving forward. I think Airstream has seen pretty good success with the Trade wind, which has about 10kwh of lithium storage, but none of the driving assist. It’s just there to run the AC on battery and be off grid for a while in comfort.
At least with any of these, you have a nice place to wait inside in comfort while you charge up.
The only downside? Cost. Holy shit the cost…
I was looking for the cost, went to their site, 250k… Dang just buy a nice class A diesel pusher…
The EV powered trailer has commercial application in a powered converter dolly under the front of the rear trailer(s) of a multi trailer commercial vehicle like doubles and triples rig. Add regenerative braking and on moderately hilly roads the 2nd and 3rd trailers would almost ride along for free. Add steering and it solves the problem of long doubles trailers not being able to make turns in the available roadspace. The steering converter dollies are being used in Australia, looks like the turning algorithm software runs on a PC but must be pretty complex as the price of the self steered converter dolly was around $150K!
This is a super cool looking trailer. I’ll take mine without the two tons of batteries and electric motors and software and all the other heavy and expensive nonsense please.
Not a problem. Just keep your trips to 100 miles or so and you’re good.
Hot dog! Now I get to charge TWO vehicles on my road trip!
If the entry point is 250k, at what point do they just buy the Thor hybrid RV instead? Or a fully loaded, fully tricked out diesel truck and a 5th wheel? Fuel costs are negligible at that price point.
That being said, I know the tech has to start somewhere before it can get cheaper.
Does it, though? Trailers have been reducing fuel economy literally since the first one was hitched to a tow vehicle.
Has any recreational trailer with its own fuel tank and propulsion engine ever been successfully marketed?
None that I know of, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be viable one day. Even one that charges purely through regenerative braking that can boost on hills would be enough to make towing better. They’re almost there in commercial applications.
We’ve still got trailers with Mansfield bars that crumble when a bicycle taps them, so I’m not expecting it to catch on too quickly there (unless the trailers allow them to remove drivers).
Depends on the carrier. There’s lots of guys on the cutting edge, while others are running duct taped ’95 Freightliners. We’ve already adopted mandatory aero skirts. Everyone is chasing those MPG gainz
In my experience towing my Bayliner with my wife’s Sienna, I lose maybe 10% of my fuel economy. How anyone loses HALF is beyond me.
It depends greatly on the size and weight of what you’re towing as well as the terrain.
Boats are more aerodynamic than an enclosed cargo trailer or camper and a boat falling in the slipstream of a minivan is probably one of the most aerodynamic towing setups possible. If you’re a truck pulling a heavy 5th wheel camper through the mountains I can see the 50% hit.
Makes sense, but this trailer in the article is nothing like a 5th-wheel.
It does seem like aero makes a bigger hit EVs than weight, which usually impacts ICE more.
Granted, I’ve only towed some fairly light popups and U-Haul trailers with my hybrid, but it still averages well above 50mpg on the highway, which seems almost within the margin of error with an EPA rating of 60
I pull a 12k 5th wheel with my Ram 2500 HD. At 72 mph, I average a little over 11 mpg. Thats about 40% loss of MPG compared to normally highway driving. Literally for every mile/hour faster, I start losing about 1 mpg. That’s my sweet spot. And have to say, I don’t even know it’s back there it pulls it so easy.
Geez, what if you were trying to let your truck roll back a little bit on purpose. Will the trailer freak out and start pushing you?! There’s a lot of stuff I’d want to test with this.
It will likely be in constant communication with the car to act as a single unit.
I actually highly doubt that, trying to make the trailer interface with every possible tow vehicle would be a nightmare. Vehicles don’t data interface through a typical 7-blade trailer connector.
So add more blades. You can even have it plug into the OBD2 system.
I’m sure it can read how fast it’s going, what the ground level is, all sorts of stuff that will help it make decisions. I think it will be pretty hard to ‘fool’ it. I also doubt it will be hooked up to many manual transmission vehicles.
This trailer kinda-sorta drives itself, albeit only behind a vehicle, right?
At what point does it become a vehicle itself? And an autonomous one, to a dgree, at that? With all the requisite crash testing, etc?
Good question! The trailer does require the tow vehicle for directional control as well as to determine how fast it could go. But I do wonder about the legality of all of this. I’ll be sure to ask about it.
If I had to guess I’d say when it contains humans.
I assume one of those numbers is wrong, unless this thing’s going to do some pushing 😉
I do think combining a hi-lo and self-propulsion is good. I hope it works as well as they claim.
Fixed at least a few minutes before you commented! I guess I now know that our dedicated readers do read these things from top to bottom. 🙂
Sorry, I was writing a comment right away, but work got a little busy. I should have refreshed before commenting! Easy mistake and I’m glad you fixed it quickly!
Mercedes, we do. I don’t think we respond with too much snark; I have seen more often some version of “Hey, I don’t think this is right, you may want to fix it” or “This didn’t make sense as written, is it correct?”
It is a good indicator of the culture here. Based on where I work and the people I associate with, culture eats process for breakfast (to paraphrase Jack Welch, I believe). In short, I believe you should look at the suggestions as thoughts from people who care. (Which is also not to suggest that you do not do so already)
🙂
No worries, I wasn’t mad or anything! 🙂 You dear readers push us to be our best selves!
We have internal metrics that show how long people spend in an article on average. A lot of the short stuff? We’re talking less than a minute before the person flips to the next page.
My stuff? The average reader seems to spend 3-5 minutes. People reading only the headline was sort of a thing at the old site. So, my comment is more amazement that this site’s metrics appear to be accurate! I love that.
I just can’t see this being a success. It costs more than my house, and it doesn’t appear to be a truly four-season trailer. Maybe it’s a sign I’m getting old, but everything is too expensive now. Cars are too expensive, houses are too expensive, recreation is too expensive, boo.
There’s pretty much no way this thing succeeds. It’s way too expensive, way too complicated, will depreciate like a rock, and the industry as a whole seems to be reconsidering the “EV Everything” mentality.
At that price I don’t see this thing succeeding either.
BUT I do foresee a cottage industry of camping enthusiasts salvaging the go bits of older EVs to make powered trailers, perhaps RVs as well.
How does fast charging work if you need to charge both the trailer and the tow vehicle? Do pull through stations have two chargers that can charge both simultaneously, or do you have to charge the vehicle for 30 minutes and then pull up a few feet and charge the trailer for an additional 30 minutes?
This trailer looks cool. It is obviously cost prohibitive for most buyers at the moment, but presumably costs will come down over time.
Many of the pull-through stations I’ve seen thus far are like a gas station where there are multiple “pumps.” Depending on where the charge port is, you might be able to charge both truck and trailer at the same time. Though, I do wonder how other EV owners would feel to see this beast taking two chargers at a time.
Of course, the bigger issue I see is that the availability of pull-through stations is still pretty spotty.
I don’t think I have ever actually seen a pull through charging station. They don’t appear to exist where I live, at least. I presume they could be built if EV assisted trailers become common in the future.
Also, one other question. Can the solar panels be used to provide electricity to your home when parked? It would be nice to have an RV that is useful when not in use (i.e. when parked in your backyard). Obviously, this would never get close to offsetting the cost of the trailer, but it would be nice to lower utility bills and provide supplemental power during outages.
I know someone makes this comment every time, but it holds up: $250,000 (or even $150,000+) buys a lot of hotel rooms and airfare. The trailer looks very cool from a design and engineering perspective; but even if I come into some f/u money, it will be spent on first class tickets and luxury lodging.
You forgot to add in the cost of storing and maintaining the trailer. More hotel nights! Or at least better hotels.
This is a toy for people for whom $250K is a small fraction of what they avoided paying in taxes
I’ve written this before in response to people who say, “$X for an RV buys a lot of hotel rooms.”
RV’s are a lifestyle choice. There are no hotel rooms where I want to go. Allow me to steal Mercedes’s thunder; there are no hotel rooms available at Gambler events and fly-ins. To expose my ignorance of Gambler events, but here I go anyway, I would imagine a significant fraction of the appeal of Gambler events is socializing at night with the other Gambler participants. Difficult to get that in a hotel room.
And, related, most hotels, including big name chains, have really gone down the tubes the past 4 years. Housekeeping standards have relaxed, maintenance is nonexistent, renovations are being deferred, you can’t rely on your room not being dirty and beat up anymore, even staying at reputable places (a lot of it is also due to variability of the franchise model). But you control all aspects of the environment if you travel with your own bedroom on wheels
I’m agreeing with OverlandingSprinter. It’s a choice. Where I like to go, there are no hotel rooms. The other nice thing is knowing it’s yours and being able to make it the way you want. Hotels don’t have that option.
“being able to make it the way you want”
Can you though? We have no idea what kinds of modifications are able to be made to these. If the average RV is a PC (able to swap parts and software at your leisure), this looks more like a Mac (very limited ecosystem for hard/software).
Maybe not this particular one. My point was about RV’s in general.
I can remember when a quarter mil bought a pretty nice house and a couple wooded acres around it. As a matter of fact it’s the one I’m living in.
This is obviously the #1 trick of this thing, but also the potential I see for the biggest risk. Is it smart enough to sense if the tow vehicle is slipping or if the trailer itself is swaying? Because any force pushing the truck at the wrong moment has a real chance to make a situation go from bad to really really bad very quickly.
I’d need to see some actual demonstrations of handling non-perfect situations before I trusted anything like this.
Oh you bet that’s the first thing I’d test if I’m ever allowed to test one of these things. Maybe I can convince the Lightship people to let me take a spin tomorrow…
I hope so!
That’s just what I posted a similar point about. First thing that came to my mind… Good call. Non-perfect happens a lot.
Part of me is imagining the trailer pushing the truck at the wrong time and starting to jack knife the truck, then the trailer notices something is wrong and slams on the brakes trying to yank the truck back straight
When you are pulling, you are in charge. When she’s pushing, the back is going to pass the front real fast. Sorry but I envision the controlling self driving software to work about as well as Teslas. It’s one thing to be able to jerk the wheel because FSD almost drove you into a ditch. But you dont have that luxury if you get on the brakes and the trailer decided it wanted to keep pushing.