Startup Lightship today launched the first purpose-built travel trailer with an electric self-propulsion system that enables near-zero range or mile-per-gallon efficiency loss for the vehicle towing it.

Billing itself as America’s first all-electric recreational vehicle (RV) company, it is taking a clean-sheet approach to building an aerodynamic, battery-electric trailer with its L1 in the hopes of disrupting the established RV makers as Tesla did with automakers. Led by Tesla alumni, the Lightship team seems to have the expertise to do just that, with others from Rivian, Proterra, Lucid, and Zoox providing new thinking from the innovative automotive EV development space.

The L1’s hyper-efficient design is three times more aerodynamic than a traditional travel trailer for a longer range and greater efficiency. An electric powertrain and up to 80-kWh of onboard battery capacity allow the trailer to propel itself and achieve near-zero range or efficiency loss for the tow vehicle. This means that a 300-mi range EV (electric vehicle) used to tow the L1 remains a 300-mi range EV, and a 25-mpg gasoline truck remains a 25-mpg gasoline truck, according to the company.

Its battery system can provide a week of off-grid power without charging. With up to 3 kW of solar power, the RV is engineered to power the living needs of its occupants and eliminate reliance on propane and other fossil fuels. An ecosystem of electric appliances, connected features, and modern amenities is intended to provide a seamless camping experience.

 

The idea

Founded in 2020, Lightship is on a mission to reimagine the recreational vehicle experience for the electric age. Based in San Francisco and Boulder, CO, it will sell its products direct to U.S. consumers on the company’s website: https://www.lightshiprv.com/. Co-founders Ben Parker, CEO, and Toby Kraus, President, saw an opportunity in the RV industry that reminded them of the early days while working at Tesla. They spoke with Futurride before the L1’s reveal.

Parker and Kraus met through the Tesla network after working there.

Kraus joined in 2009 as the first finance analyst hired to work on Tesla’s IPO, “which was an interesting time, two of the big three had filed for bankruptcy,” he said. “And for some reason, I was like, let’s go to work for a startup automotive company.”

It was a 400-person company at that time. He led the finance team there for a few years, and then was a product manager for Model S 1.0—the one with the “big black fish mouth.”

He left Tesla in 2015 for Proterra.

Parker was at Tesla from 2015 and 2020, right out of school, as a battery engineer working on the Model 3 program, spending a lot of time in Reno, NV in “production hell.” He “learned a lot about how to build high-volume batteries and how not to, first probably more the how not to then ultimately how to.”

Once the Model 3 was in high-volume production, he went back to Palo Alto headquarters to work on the next-generation battery design that is going into the Cybertruck and other future Teslas.

“I had had a little bit more time on my hands at that point being out of the fire of production,” he said.

Lightship began as a pet project to electrify “all the food trucks in the [San Francisco] Bay area.”

“My coworkers and I would all eat at the food trucks that would come to the headquarters,” he explained. “We were all kind of ticked off by all the running gas generators back-to-back. The generator from one was spewing into the order window of the next. I was like, I have to do something about this. I know that battery technology exists to electrify these things.

He worked on that on the side for nine or ten months with a friend.

“I kept going at it, and I would tell people about it, and RVs always came up in conversation with that project because there are a lot of similar needs,” said Parker. “You want clean, quiet onboard power on both of these types of vehicles, and so I looked into RVs. I’ve always loved road-tripping in the outdoors.”

And then COVID began.

“I got up the gumption to quit at Tesla, I rented a Winnebago motorhome, and I took it for I think three months and about 6000 mi around the whole west,” he said, getting a better feel of key RV needs. “Toby and I both have been thinking about what the next wave of electrification looks like in transportation because it was clearly underway in automotive. There are a lot of adjacent industries to automotive that are going to adopt the same technology and the products can really be improved.

 

The EV pickup towing challenge

The key was tackling the challenge of a 300-mi range electric vehicle towing a traditional travel trailer that typically sees about a 2/3rd range loss, so only 100 mi, Kraus explained.

So Lightship engineers designed a vehicle to be efficient from first principles, and that means instead of going from 300 to 100 mi, “we go from 300 mi to about 200 mi. We make up about half of that gap just passively from a vehicle design standpoint. And then we do put an electric power system on it.”

Lightship designed its drive and battery system that effectively closes the gap back for “near zero range loss.”

According to Parker, that was a key factor in addressing the primary catalyst for the creation of Lightship—enabling a better towing experience for the millions who have pre-ordered EV pickup trucks.

“These programs are coming to market,” he said. “They’re going to become ubiquitous over the next decade. You have to make a product that meets the need there—that allows a long-range, really satisfying electric towing experience. [Otherwise], it’s going to be nearly impossible to do RV road trips with an EV pickup truck.”

“We already know that America has a love affair with trucks,” he continued. “What we’re doing is a response to this huge investment and interest from the public in electric pickup trucks. We stand a good chance to be an enabler for the growth of that vehicle segment.”

That opportunity was recognized by investors. Lightship completed a Series A funding round in the summer of 2022 led by Victoria Beasley of Prelude Ventures and a seed funding round in 2021 led by Andrew Beebe of Obvious Ventures. Other Lightship investors include Congruent Ventures, My Climate Journey, HyperGuap, Alumni Ventures, Climactic, and Tony Fadell’s Build Collective.

“One in 10 American families own an RV, but the RV industry hasn’t experienced innovation for decades,” said Parker. “Inefficient, unreliable product designs and a power experience that relies on smelly, noisy, gas or propane generators fundamentally hinder the amazing experience of traveling in the outdoors.”

“With 90% of the market comprising towable RVs, we began by creating an all-electric travel trailer that is unlike any RV available today and that is just the beginning,” added Kraus. “We are leveraging our expertise in automotive EV development and design to build a brand that creates delightful outdoor travel experiences for everyone and brings even more people into the pastime of RVing.”

 

New from the ground up

Lightship is building an engineering and design team, currently more than 30 strong, many of which are from the automotive industry, the EV sector in particular. With a relatively small staff, the company is focusing on the highest-level systems engineering.

“We don’t have the luxury or the ability to go deep, designing every component from scratch,” said Parker. “We have to be more selective about what and where we are doing truly custom.”

The engineering and design team is creating an all-new architecture down to the subsystems.

“Many of the subsystems are built to work within the comprehensive concept for the product,” said Parker. “That’s really unique for a vehicle in this space.”

At a high level, the 7500-lb trailer is maxed out with batteries and electronics, so the team had to shed weight in other parts of the architecture. A lot of the lightweighting focus is on materials and design engineering.

“Although, you can’t go too exotic on the materials because the cost goes up too much,” cautioned Parker. “It’s the structural integration effort, making sure that you’re not wasting mass in any one area at the interfaces between subsystems. It’s making those interfaces between the different structures in the vehicle as efficient as possible so that you shed as much mass as possible to get to that mass target overall.”

What Lightship has done is integrate an EV powertrain with a residential solar system, but the requirements of the solar panels are a bit different.

“Because we’re starting from scratch and designing the vehicle to be super-efficient, that means our battery and our drive system can be much smaller,” said Kraus.

A traditional travel trailer company addressing the 300 to 100 mi range-reduction issue “would have to throw batteries and drive system at that problem,” said Kraus. “That means a massive battery and drive system, which is a costly problem for sure, but it’s actually more than that. With most travel trailers, you’re hitting a weight limit. Nobody wants to sell a travel trailer that can’t be pulled by a half-ton truck. For us, one of the fundamental innovations is that we can have a right-size battery and right-size drive system.”

A trailer doesn’t need a powerful drive system because it’s a vehicle that’s being towed: “Fortunately, most trucks or full-size SUVs have plenty of power electric or otherwise,” added Kraus. The approach that we’ve taken is we want to take energy out of the battery, we want to put it on the road to minimize the tow force. You never want it to be zero or pushing, and that’s it.”

 

Breakthrough aero and solar

The L1’s design is futuristic rather than retro or a silver jelly-bean shape, according to Parker. Vehicle aerodynamics figured heavily in the efficiency equation, but he wasn’t ready to talk absolute numbers, and the actual results vary based on the tow vehicle.

“Actually, different tow vehicles when combined with our trailer will lead to a different coefficient of drag on the whole system,” he elaborated.

The team did a lot of aerodynamics development at the outset, even before any design work commenced.

“We did maybe a couple of thousand hours of CFD work at this point, with some on-road testing too with a true representative exterior on a mule vehicle,” said Parker.

“If you want to put a small enough battery on board, the only way you can do that is to start with drag,” he continued. “You’ve got to be passively efficient to make up enough of that typical range loss so you don’t have to add too much battery to get back to the near-zero range loss point.”

To maximize the shape for aerodynamics while also enabling greater interior space for camping, the team developed low Road and tall Camp vehicle modes. The road mode is all about reducing the frontal area to tuck into “the shadow” of the tow vehicle and keep the pressure on the front of the trailer low.

The from-scratch design approach also helped with solar design.

Traditionally, the roof of a travel trailer has held add-ons like HVAC systems, but that’s a problem for aerodynamics and ultimately solar energy capacity.

“Our entire roof is just solar,” said Kraus. “That means we can get up to 3 kW of solar, which is vastly greater than on some of the others out there.”

 

The path to production

The L1 starting price announced at launch is $125,000, or $118,400 after an available tax credit. It is available now for a $500 reservation at www.lightshiprv.com.

The travel trailer is 27 ft (8.2 m) long and 8 ft, 6 in (2.6 m) wide. It has a height of 6 ft, 9 in (2.1 m) in road mode, and 10 ft (3 m) in camp mode. The sleeping capacity is 4-6 people, depending on the configuration.

At the launch, Lightship showed its Alpha concept vehicle.

“It’s not made off of a production manufacturing process,” said Kraus. “It is the full production concept though, [with] an exterior, interior, power system [that are] all functional.”

From the Alpha, Lightship has a couple more phases of product development, the next Beta phase flowing into pilot production and production vehicles. Ultimately, the company aims to launch limited series production at end of 2024 in Colorado.

“The nice thing about the RV industry and the approach we’ve taken is there’s not like a billion-dollar car plant or something in our future,” said Kraus. “A lot of what we’re doing is really focused around integration and final assembly. We’re literally spooling a lot of that up as we speak.”

The near-term goal is determining the demand for the L1.

“We feel like we’ve gotten as far in the product development as we can to show something that is very real and working,” said Parker. “Now we need the public to see this and for people to be really excited about what we’ve built—and help us show how much demand is there.”

That will determine to ultimate route to production.

As a finalist in the 2023 SXSW Innovation Awards design category, the Lightship team will be in Austin to show the prototype of the L1 to the public from March 11 through 13.