Can I confide something to you? I can trust you, right? Of course I can, who am I kidding, it’s you. Okay, so here’s the thing: I think battery-electric RVs and motorhomes and campers are a pretty stupid idea. There, I said it. At the moment, there really aren’t any BEV campers on the market, but there are some in development, like Winnebago’s eRV2. The problem with all-electric RVs and motorhomes is that the inherently limited range of an electric RV is counter to the very core mission of an RV: to go places, any places, places that may be far away from where you live, places away from charging stations, that kind of thing.
But with EV campers and RVs having ranges of barely over 100 miles – if you’re lucky – and long charging times, it becomes clear that battery EV campers and RVs just aren’t the answer. But there are definite advantages to electrification, which means that there is one possible solution: hybrids.
Yes, hybrids! The powerful alliance of combustion engines and electric motors, each one’s strengths helping to compensate for the other’s weaknesses, is a potentially game-changing setup for big, heavy RVs and motorhomes. So far, there are no hybrid motorhomes on the market, but that’s about to change, because THOR Industries and Harbinger have teamed up and built what they claim is the world’s first hybrid Class A Motorhome, the THOR Test Vehicle. I can’t prove this, but I heard the person who came up with that name got a huge bonus and a trip to the Maldives!
The THOR Test Vehicle is built on Harbinger’s medium-duty electric truck chassis, adapted from it’s all-electric incarnation to include a fuel tank and a combustion motor in a series-hybrid configuration (meaning the combustion engine is just used to charge the batteries, and never directly drives the wheels, sort of like a BMW i3 with a range extender) in the rearmost battery bays, and the rest of the battery bays are filled with batteries totaling 140 kWh. The combined range of the batteries and the combustion motor is claimed to be about 500 miles, which is much better than battery power alone would be, and has the significant advantage of being able to be refueled quickly at any gas station, which, as I’m sure you know, are pretty much everywhere.
The electrical system has an 800 volt architecture that allows for rapid charging at DC charging stations, and since I mentioned that it’s worth making clear that this is a plug-in hybrid, so given the right circumstances of charging locations and distance, the THOR Test Vehicle (let’s just call it the TTV because typing THOR in all caps is a pain, even though TTV is also all caps, just go with it, please) can run on just battery power and not have to kick on the ICE at all.
Of course, having that ICE is the game changer here; yes, it’s the electric motors that offer the options of running in near silence and having more torque than a conventional combustion motor, but the combustion motor is what, ironically, makes electrification viable for RVs. You can’t get out and really explore and wander and enjoy an RV like it’s meant to be if you’re stopping every 80 miles or so for an hour or more to charge. Battery technology and the charging infrastructure are just not there yet.
While there was a lot of needless purity in the electrification community, where hybrids were shunned because they weren’t entirely electric, that mentality is changing as reality smacks us all around with its big paws and everyone realized that just battery electric power maybe isn’t a solution for everything. Electrification adds a lot to a motorhome – this motorhome can power a house in an emergency or put energy back into the grid if needed. There’s solar panels on the roof that I don’t imagine make all that much difference when it comes to range unless you’re camping in a treeless expanse of desert in the middle of summer, but it likely will help keep equipment humming along while camping.
Tomorrow morning I fly out to South Bend, Indiana, the former home of Studebaker, to see this thing in person and get to drive it, though there’s a good chance “drive” will just mean I get to take it around the little course you see in this video, or something like it:
Will they even let me try out the bathroom? That’s how I really like to test an RV, by taking my bowels for a nice, informative spin.
A hybrid motorhome is really a great idea, and in hindsight it’s kind of nuts it took this long to develop one. The Harbinger platform has always struck me as a robust and clever bit of engineering, so it seems like a good place to start for something like this.
Hopefully I’ll know a lot more when I see this thing in person tomorrow, so stay tuned!
Is the ICE powertrain big enough and/or the operating procedure optimized so that the battery doesn’t run itself dry and you’re stuck going 25 mph up a long hill with the ICE screaming at full-tilt like an i3 REX?
I love the idea of this, even though I don’t love motorhomes. Once you set up camp, where’s your car to go and see the sights?
Three hours ago I returned from a 500-mile Colorado trip, including two high passes on I-70 and a couple ascents of Grand Mesa, “The World’s Largest Flat-Topped Mountain.” Towing a 3300-pound Scamp fiberglass trailer behind a Mercedes GLK 350, it was a master class in compression braking. Squeezing the left hand flappy paddle spared my brakes and made descents calm easy. But how much better if I had been cranking a generator rather than a gas-starved engine. My Ford Hybrid gives me 10 miles worth of EV power on the 14-mile descent into Summit County.
My current rigs gives me 17 mpg, about the same as the Tiguan did, and the underpowered Forester before that.
Absolutely, what every motorhome needs is more road-hugging weight! LoL!
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This is so exciting! I have some questions if you happen to get the chance:
-Does this thing still use propane for heat / fridge / cooking?
-Who makes the I4?
-How hard is it to service the range extender in its little nook?
-Any chance Thor is thinking about making the beauty an Air Stream?
-Can you coerce them into making an AWD version for ski area parking lots?
-How much does this bad chicken weigh?
-Is there also a 12V architecture or are the big batteries tied in as house batteries?
-What chemistry are they using for the batteries?
-Any insights on a realistic go-to-market cost?
All good questions! I’d love to hear the answers, too.
This is the first that would actually make me think about a motorhome (ever). Curious why the didn’t directly go with a generator like, since that’s what is closest to this use case