Electric cars pose special challenges when towing a trailer. Especially with Tesla, you often have to uncouple or trick because of the supercharger arrangement, with all brands, the decreasing range means that the charging breaks accumulate over long distances and are lengthened.
Low weight and good aerodynamics mitigate this effect, but even then the reduction in range is noticeable. Former Tesla employees therefore now want to go much further: They are planning an efficient camping trailer that will store energy for driving and other uses in a large battery and, if necessary, can also supply a house with its own solar modules.
Trailer battery as in Tesla Model 3
The company behind it is called Lightship and was founded in 2020 by two former Tesla employees, according to its LinkedIn profile. There you can also find a video in which the two explain the idea and the motivation for the startup. Once they drove from Colorado to California in a Tesla Model X with a trailer and everyone had to use the superchargers on the way.
Nevertheless, they had to park the trailer once on the way and pick it up again after charging, because otherwise, the electricity would not have reached the next station, says Toby Kraus, who was with Tesla for five and a half years, but only until 2015.
As an antidote, one should imagine a caravan that “is developed like an electric car,” explains the second founder, Benjamin Parker, who after Kraus worked at Tesla until 2020: completely electric, with a modern, networked interior with a large touchscreen and “on nothing but solar on the roof”. The video shows a dark computer image intended to show a concept study (see photo above).
Not much can be seen on it apart from a solar module apparently folded out to the side on the roof. On the Lightship website, there are no caravan pictures yet, but more information about them. Even efficiency and aerodynamics should be better than anything else on the market.
The photovoltaic roof mentioned in the video should also be suitable for supplying other electric cars or houses. And the Lightship trailer should have its own electric drive. According to a report by TechCrunch, a battery comparable to that in a Tesla Model 3 is intended for this purpose.
Full electric car range and extra power
As a result, nothing should be lost from the range of the electric car without a trailer, and the advantages of own solar power and the large mobile battery for this are added. The Lightship website vividly describes how generators and handling gas can disrupt the camping experience in idyllic locations.
With your own product, this should also become unnecessary. Lightship has not yet given a price for its livable energy unit to pull – it should not be low because of the large battery. But the first model is slated to hit the market next spring, and the company just closed a $23 million funding round.
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