00:09 Josh
Road trips are not all about gas guzzling campers anymore. New wave of electric RVs are making their way into camp grounds. a new RV startup called Lightship, co-founded by a former Tesla battery engineer offers trailers that power themselves on the road and run on battery and solar at the campsite. Join me now, we got Lightship co-founder and chief product officer, Ben Parker. Ben, it is great to see you on set. So maybe start big picture, Ben, just for the the uninitiated who are listening right now. Explain a little bit about Lightship,
00:41 Josh
the problem you all are solving for, what makes you sort of different than the competition? What separates you?
00:48 Ben Parker
Yeah, I mean, well, Josh, nice to Good to meet you man.
00:51 Josh
Good to see you.
00:51 Ben Parker
Thanks for having us. We uh I I would say that the RV is uh it’s an American icon, the you know, it’s a passtime that so many Americans love. 10% of the country, believe it or not, uh own an RV. So this is this is huge, you know, huge part of Americana. And yet RVs in a lot of ways have not changed in 20, 30, maybe 40 years. And so I thought, my co-founder thought, um he was also Tesla that it was uh it was time for a big refresh of the RV. The world has changed a lot over the past 20 or 30 years and we thought it was time to bring bring RVs up to date and into this, you know, this this new age of digitization, electrification, and still keep um, you know, the the the most beautiful parts of camping the the same that they’ve always been. I think in some ways camping
01:42 Ben Parker
is even better in such a, you know, an action packed world today than, um, than in decades past.
01:46 Josh
Let me I I totally agree with you. We think RVs is America as it gets. I mean it’s like like baseball games, barbecue and RVs, right? How fast though, Ben, I’m just curious, how fast is that market growing?
02:01 Ben Parker
Well, I think the, um, numbers would tell you it’s 5 to 7% a year and has been for a long time. Maybe the more of the story behind it is that um RVing is just been um it’s it’s been a big part of our the American experience for a long time, but it’s been steadily on this on this uptick. More and more people are um sort of wanting wanting to get back to nature and have great, you know, great great natural experiences. We were talking about about COVID off air. It really accelerated during COVID. So so many people in you know, our generation, millennial generation, um got to experience RVing for the first time and we’re we’re converted
02:40 Ben Parker
by it and uh, yeah, the the the great American road trip is alive and well. It’s just uh it’s it’s getting better and we’re trying to try to um hasten that.
02:51 Josh
What are the benefits then? If you explain like an electric RV as opposed to your traditional gas guzzler? Is it just is it is it because it’s cleaner, it’s quieter? Like what are the advantages?
03:03 Ben Parker
Well, one um one thing to explain up front is that what we build at Lightship is a towable RV. So there RVs are towable and drivable, drivable, you know, you got the steering wheel, usually called a motor home as well. Towables are the RVs that you hitch behind your your truck and pull. Um about about 90% of RVs sold in the US are towable because uh Americans love big big trucks and SUVs. And so once you’ve got that, you know, that love affair, the the towable
03:41 Ben Parker
follows. Um what what sets us apart in the in the type of towable that we build is that we um took our background from places like Tesla, where my my co-founder and I found our our start. He he led the finance team there. I was a battery engineer there. Um other other new automotive startups that have since grown big, places like Rivian, Lucid and applied what we had learned there to this new space. So we took a ground up approach, we thought about um if you’re starting from scratch, what should a towable RV behave like? And what came out if uh if people go to our our website, lightshiprv.com
04:26 Ben Parker
is uh basically a road-going spaceship. This this thing looks, it’s not your grandfather’s RV, although we do have a lot of grandpas who are who are excited about it. It looks totally unique. It’s got this really streamlined aerodynamic shape when you’re towing it, which we call the road mode and then the whole body of the of the vehicle expands to be double the size when you get to the the campground. So you get this really awesome spacious uh living space with panoramic wraparound windows. You know, if you’re in a beautiful place like a national park, you catch the the full vista. Maybe half dome is right right in front of you in in Yosemite. The entire roof
05:04 Ben Parker
of the RV is covered in solar. So we integrate solar panels right into the the shape of the lightship and then in the floor, we pack a giant uh EV battery. It’s this it’s a battery that is the same size as you would find in something like a a Tesla Model 3 or or a Model Y. So you know, really big, 50 to 100 times as big as what you’d find in a in a traditional RV and we can use that solar plus the battery to power all of your appliances on board. So if you’re off grid, you can just keep camping for days and not worry about running out of power. We even use that same EV battery to power a motor on the trailer. So this this is this is something that makes a lightship a totally new class of of vehicle. It is a self-propelling trailer. It acts a little bit like an e-bike in the sense that the motor on the trailer assists
06:01 Ben Parker
the truck that’s pulling it. So the truck doesn’t feel the weight of the lightship as it’s it’s pulling it down the road, which is pretty impressive because it’s a 27 ft long, you know, close to 8,000 pound vehicle when it’s fully loaded and that truck if it’s a a gas or a diesel truck, will keep its normal highway fuel economy and get great kind of hybrid performance.
06:17 Josh
Let me ask you, Ben, how much does this all cost?
06:19 Ben Parker
It’s um we I would say we we are starting uh at a in a premium segment of the market. It’s not it’s not priced to infinity. We we are What does premium mean, Ben?
06:33 Ben Parker
Premium means $100 to $200,000. We we start at $125 and you can option up a lightship into the into the high hundreds. So you would compare it, um if you’re thinking about products that are out there today, it’s something like an Airstream. It’s a, you know, it’s a really nice nice trailer. Now, of course our ambition is to to grow big and make Lightship a a household brand name.
06:55 Josh
Does that mean more does that would that necessarily mean Ben relatively smaller more affordable models on the way at some point?
07:00 Ben Parker
Yes. This this is the beginning. People RV in a lot of different ways and um there need to be different access points to to get into a lightship. And so um we’re thinking about all the ways that we can offer people that that experience including a lineup of products.
07:18 Josh
Ben, I got to tell you, that that VO makes me want an RV. Thank you, man. for coming in. Appreciate it.
07:23 Ben Parker
Let’s uh let’s go on a road trip.
07:24 Josh
I would love to. Thank you, sir.
07:26 Ben Parker
Thanks.
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