This 30 Under 30 Alum Is Helping Save Mileage With A Newly Unveiled Electric RV

In 2020, San Francisco-based entrepreneur Ben Parker toiled away as a battery engineer at Tesla before getting wrapped up in a pet project: Electrifying food trucks, where he dreamed of ditching the noisy, exhaust-coughing generators that sat behind them. This quickly morphed into a broader idea to electrify the RV industry, and now, three years later, his side hustle is becoming a reality.

Last week, Parker’s company Lightship, which he cofounded with former Tesla employee Toby Kraus, unveiled the first model of its electric RVs (called the L1) at SXSW and announced that it expects to begin production late next year. Backed by $27 million in funding from investors including Prelude Ventures, Obvious Ventures and Congruent Ventures, the startup is currently taking preorders.

Lightship’s first model stands at a price of between $125,000 to $151,000–above-market for a typical trailer, which costs roughly $50,000, but on-par with boutique industry leaders like Airstream–though buyers can qualify for the $6,600 solar ITC tax credit, which isn’t applicable to any other RVs on the market.

“We’re going to bring electrification to new demographics of people who’ve been underserved by it so far, and we’ll bring new demographics of people who the RV industry has not been able to market to effectively,” says Parker, 29, who was featured on the Forbes 30 Under 30 2023 Energy list.

He says the company is aiming to target both families who trek to national parks across the U.S. and people who want to upgrade their work-from-anywhere lifestyle–as the pandemic helped make the “van-life” craze more mainstream. Parker leaned into the zeitgeist on his own three-month RV trip, which would later inform several design decisions that set the Lightship RV apart from the industry standard.

The RV market is deceptively constant in the U.S. More than half a million RVs are sold in the U.S. every year, of which about 90% are towables, according to the National RV Dealers Association. Comparatively, a total of 13.8 million new light-duty vehicles were sold in the U.S. last year, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, which includes any passenger vehicles and some vans. However, some one in 10 American families owns an RV—that’s more than 11 million households, and an increase of 62% over the past two decades, according to the Recreational Vehicle Industry Association.

But despite consistent momentum in the RV industry, some say it’s a tough year to launch in the current economic climate. Following the RV boom of 2020 and 2021, dealers last year saw an excess of stock with diminishing demand, says Bret Jordan, a research analyst at Jefferies. Combined with a potential recession, some think it may be a difficult time to introduce a new product to the market.

“We’re coming off this massive surge of demand during the pandemic when everybody decided that they wanted to own an RV for a socially distant vacation,” says Jordan. “Pretty much everybody's talking down the first half [of 2023] as far as too much inventory, not enough retail demand and talking about laying off production, because you don't want to build a lot more RVs right now until the dealers can clear out the inventory they have.”

Still, higher-end and boutique RV manufacturers may not be feeling the lull as hard, Jordan says, as lower-end trailers mainly make up the stock not selling.

And thanks to its new technology, Lightship is firmly priced at the higher-end. The RV’s batteries can be charged by both solar and the grid to ensure no mileage is lost from towing a heavy trailer (the typical towable trailer can slash the mileage of a full tank or charged battery by two-thirds). Parker experienced the pitfalls of RVing firsthand when he took a trip towing an RV behind an electric truck—the drag, combined with a not-yet extensive EV charging network, made it incredibly difficult to drive the distance between plugs without running out of power (in one event, Parker had to ditch the RV on the side of the road).

The Lightship trailer utilizes electricity to assist the vehicle that’s pulling it, boosting the efficiency of combustion engines and EVs. Their pop-top trailer, like an Airstream, is shaped like a bullet, but stands at under 7 feet tall when collapsed.