"It's part of Americana. One in 10 American families owns an RV," Kraus said.
That must include people who live in trailers. No damn way that many people own RVs.
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2025
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A quick search says it's more like 8-10 million total, so closer to 1/40 people. Avg household size of 2.5 gets that to 1/16 households.
Maybe one in 10 dream of owning an RV lol
Because that's me. I'd love to have a solar-charged EV-RV and just van-life life it across North America in my retirement years.
I mean yeah I get it. Then I think of the reality, which is cramming it into KOA parking spots and watching kids ride bikes around the parking lot.
If you can go off grid, you can stay in a lot of national forests for 14 days. Big campgrounds, and especially private campgrounds, really don't do it for me.
150-180k, yep definitely going to get mass adoption
That's pretty typical for a large RV. They aren't mass market items
Lightship is manufacturing the country's first self-propelled towable RV in Broomfield.
Wait.. What? Now I have no idea what were looking at.
From the article:
"We really are developing what I would consider a new class of vehicle," Kraus said. "We do something that's a little bit wild, which is we actually put a motor in the vehicle. So even though it's towed, it's also self-propelling. It's supporting its own drag and its own mass."
It would also do regenerative braking. I've wanted to do the same for a bike trailer, but there is no regulation anywhere that would call it a legal vehicle/combo. Regulations tend to be based on "this is a legal vehicle that is allowed to be on this road" Technically, all motor standup scooters are illegal everywhere that is a public road.
Yeah, this stumped me too. FWIW, their website is garbage. But digging around a bit, I'd say this is a travel trailer, not an RV. It does have it's own motor however, and it helps push when you're going uphill. So in theory, you could tow a larger trailer with a smaller vehicle. Or perhaps this would help if you were towing with an EV and needed the additional range?
That makes some sense. I get it now. Thank you
Really? We've had electric cars for 15 years but we never bothered to build an electric RV? I find that suspicious and false.
Probably range-based. A pure electric RV probably would've had <100 miles of charge even 5 years ago.
It’d also be murderously heavy if it had any serious range. And one of the primary points of an RV is to have serious range.
I'd also expect they need standby power capacity to run AC/electrical devices overnight in a way a sedan doesn't.
This is one of the reasons RVs have serious range. That’s just another way of saying they have a ton of extra power/reserves, by design.
But RVs have a much larger roof space that could be used for solar panels and battery charging. Maybe this could give you plus x % range on a sunny day?
A lot of RVs already use that roof space for solar panels and battery charging. For the house batteries.
An electric car makes sense; the majority of the cars in the United States are used to drive a double-digit number of miles in a day, are not expected to provide a significant amount of energy for anything else, and they sit parked most of the time. You can run that mission on batteries.
RVs are expected to drive hundreds if not thousands of miles, then be a house for a week, and then drive hundreds if not thousands of miles back. A large RV will be equipped with a main engine for highway propulsion, an APU for recharging batteries or running HVAC, a bank of deep cycle batteries for power when no engines are running, and a bottle or two of propane to run the stove and refrigerator. Solar panels on the roof are often used to extend the parked "boondocking" endurance, as running the APU (or in some RVs especially those that aren't built on tour bus chassis, the main engine) consumes motor fuel, making it possible to strand yourself.
That does assume "boondocking" or parking somewhere without utilities. A lot of RVs are driven from socket to socket and all of the house systems are run from 240V mains electricity and the batteries may see mere minutes of use, but even then while traveling you want the fridge to stay cold and the lights to work while you're parked at a rest stop in Oklahoma having lunch on your way to the Grand Canyon.
An RV is perhaps the last vehicle I want to fully electrify.