Toby Kraus has a theory about why electric vehicle sales are stalling in the United States — and it’s not just that President Donald Trump abruptly eliminated the Biden-era tax credits that kept prices lower.
“I firmly believe it’s because we haven’t actually built the products for all of the demographics of people,” Kraus told Latitude Media.
After spending the first decade of his career at electric carmaker Tesla and the now-defunct heavy-duty truck battery manufacturer Proterra, Kraus set out to serve a market that played to the one thing he had spent more of his life doing than working on automotive electrification: camping. In 2021, he and his co-founder Ben Parker launched Lightship, a manufacturer of towable electric RVs that look like a cross between a classic Airstream and a Rivian R1S SUV.
Now, the company is planning to use the same battery platform that powers the RV for a whole separate line of trailers that could provide portable energy storage in different contexts. The product, which Lightship has dubbed the “PowerSled,” would allow companies such as utilities or landscaping businesses to swap the system in for an extra diesel truck.
“If you live in a coastal urban place, and you’re mostly driving to the grocery store, that problem has been pretty well solved. But in the United States, the top-selling vehicles every year are trucks; it’s the Ford F-150, the Chevy Silverado, the Dodge Ram,” Kraus, Lightship’s chief executive, said in an exclusive interview. “Those are really hard-to-electrify segments because people have different expectations — they want to carry a bunch of bricks, they want to haul their boat to the lake — and EVs don’t really do that well.”
To meet this segment of demand, one option for automakers would be to build bigger and bigger electric trucks capable of tugging more and more weight behind them — much like how Ford’s F-Series pickup truck scales up in engine size from the F-150 to the F-450. But most drivers don’t need that hauling capacity all the time. Instead, Lightship’s RV and PowerSled will each be equipped with their own battery systems that both provide stationary power on the go, and help propel themselves on the road so as not to drain the power of the vehicle to which they’re hitched.
“We put a motor on the rear axle,” Kraus said. “It’s kind of like an e-bike. It compensates for its own mass and drag.”
Recreational vehicles, or RVs, are “the largest market in terms of unit volume for things that are towed,” he added, “so this is the right beachhead market.”
The ghost of Moxion
Lightship is far from the first company to enter the towable battery storage market. One example, Moxion, is a specter haunting the company’s plans. In 2022, the portable battery startup raised $100 million as the market for a cleaner alternative to trailer-mounted generators. Two years later, however, Moxion declared bankruptcy.
Kraus raised the comparison himself. Unlike Moxion, which aimed to meet a specific market need with towable batteries from the get-go, he said Lightship began “at our core as a recreational vehicle company designing for a market that just happened to be electric.” As a result, the company’s formative months and years were spent engineering something that didn’t yet exist on the market, as opposed to using new materials to meet an existing demand.
“What we have developed is more like a platform versus at Moxion, where they said, ‘This is a product that is a mobile power product, and we are going to sell that as our only business,’” Kraus said.
That difference comes with both advantages and disadvantages, he said.
“You could argue that the disadvantage is that we haven’t developed something that is exactly perfect and application-specific,” he said. “We’ve designed something that is a great technology platform for the electrification of a towable thing.”
The advantage, Kraus said, “is that we picked a strategy of developing this platform into an industry that has the units, volume, and revenue to create a sustainable business.” With the PowerSled, he added, “we have a technology that can be extensible to other things.”
“The pitfall of Moxion is that they went straight at a very utilitarian application with a very specific product,” he said. “We are intentionally going for a very high-end consumer application that allows us to develop a platform that we can scale and go broadly with.”
The PowerSled market
Buyers of a PowerSled may be homeowners or emergency responders who want a mobile power source during storms or wildfires, or else motor sport enthusiasts who want to charge electric dirt bikes or all-terrain four-wheelers in remote places. But Kraus said Lightship is already in talks with a utility that’s looking at the possibility of using the PowerSled for power line repairs, which typically involve at least two trucks, one hauling equipment and the other towing a diesel generator.
Meanwhile, Lightship secured as its first customer for the PowerSled the agricultural drone manufacturer Exedy Drones, which plans to use the trailer as a mobile charging and field operations hub when flying its aircraft over remote farmland. In a statement to Latitude Media, Exedy said the PowerSled “means all-day power without the constant noise, exhaust fumes, or compromises that have historically come with mobile energy.“
“It is a cleaner, quieter, and more capable solution built to support how modern fleets, like ours, operate,” said Scott Binder, Exedy’s vice president of engineering, operations, and technology.
Traditionally, the pitch for electrified transportation and appliances is one focused on what the products don’t use: fossil fuels. While the climate benefits of swapping one individual vehicle for an electric model are limited and politically parochial, the promise of avoiding fuel price swings and guarding against increasingly long-lasting blackouts has broad appeal, Kraus said.
The price-tag, however, is high. A Lightship RV costs a minimum of $157,500, while a basic new Airstream can cost as little as one-third of that, though the latter also requires a generator when used off-grid. But that’s just using the trailer for its primary intended purpose. During the many days of the year when a Lightship RV is just parked in a driveway or garage, its 77-kilowatt-hour battery becomes a backup power source for the house.
“Much has been said about electric vehicles backing up your house. But the reality is, if it’s your daily drive, it’s probably not there to back up your house when you need it,” Kraus said. “Whereas an RV is; you can almost guarantee you don’t need it when you’re not out on a road trip.”
That said, the best battery chemistry or cell shape for a vehicle may not be the ideal mix for stationary batteries, said Isshu Kikuma, the lead storage analyst at the consultancy BloombergNEF. “Automakers will need to manage some challenges, as mobility and energy storage businesses are quite different,” he said via email.
Among them: competition. “In battery manufacturing, Chinese battery manufacturers are already leveraging scale and cost-competitiveness while targeting overseas markets,” Kikuma said.
Open road, open market
Lightship takes its name from co-founder Parker’s hometown of Nantucket, the brine-sprayed vacation getaway off Massachusetts’ Cape Cod. Growing up on an island steeped in the history of the fishing and whaling industries, Parker had heard of a lightship: a brightly illuminated vessel that essentially became a mobile lighthouse in choppy waters in places where the land lacked a stationary beacon. It’s a good metaphor for a product designed to cart power to places without wired plugs; less so for a market with other players.
“Globally, the energy storage market is growing quickly and that’s why many market players including automakers are now tapping into energy storage businesses, especially given slower-than-expected EV market uptake,” Kikuma said, adding that the trend is driven by factors like falling equipment costs, renewable co-location mandates, and new applications at data centers and EV charging facilities.
Accordingly, Lightship will have some competitors. Harbinger Motors, for example, is selling electric and hybrid chassis for box trucks, tractor-trailer cabs, and the kinds of step-vans used for package delivery. And Range Energy has designed battery-equipped trailers to help solve the efficiency problem dogging long-haul electric trucking.
And still others are pursuing similar strategies. Slate Auto, the secretive Jeff Bezos-backed electric automaker, has billed its Ford Bronco-like vehicle as a platform that buyers can mix and match into different pickup- or SUV-based setups. Meanwhile, Ford Motor’s new stationary energy division, Ford Energy, just inked a deal with the French utility giant EDF to sell its battery systems to back up the power grid.
“At a high level, what you’re starting to see is the evolution of a commercial electric vehicle space taking electrification into new areas of the automotive economy,” Corey Cantor, the research director at the trade group Zero Emissions Transportation Association, told Latitude Media. “It’s all widening the boundaries of what electrification can mean. Because it’s all quite new, there’s no guarantee of what the future is going to look like — but there’s a promise of batteries and innovation that’s far wider than just the light-duty vehicle space.”
On the one hand, commercial vehicles have always been a tougher market to crack because “you’re trying to make hundreds of thousands of units per year, so you can build up the larger supply chain and ride the cost curve down,” Cantor said. On the other, pitching a corporate buyer on the benefits of a novel but more efficient technology avoids “the psychological aspect of light duty vehicles,” namely having to convince customers that the nation’s nascent charging network is sufficient to meet all their needs on the road.
Until the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act phased out electric vehicle tax credits last September, the federal government offered a $40,000 incentive for qualifying battery-powered trucks, much like the also-defunct $7,500 credit for electric passenger cars. Still, states such as California and New York offer vouchers to help bring down the cost of electric truck purchases.
For now, Cantor said, the market is wide open to new entrants. “It’s the same challenge we saw playing out in the light duty space, with a much more open playing field,” he said. “You haven’t had companies solidify market leadership yet. That means some of these new guys could be leaders in the future.”
Kraus is hoping that Lightship’s products will widen the EV market by reaching customers who may otherwise be turned off by the traditionally climate-focused advertising around battery-powered vehicles.
“We want this to be like a bridging product. Maybe you don’t think EVs or heat pumps are applicable to you, but you loved the RV and got this product and you’re like, ‘Oh, and it has an induction stove and electric heat. They’re rad, I like them in my Lightship, so maybe I’ll put them in my house,’’ he said.
The company hasn’t publicly released its sales figures. But the RV on its own is selling. “We have at least a year of backlog,” Kraus said.
