Nightmare Road Trip Pushed Tesla Alumni to Solve a Big Issue With EVs

Taking a road trip in an EV is no easy feat, as two Tesla alumni found out the hard way.

Range is already a significant anxiety for EV owners taking long journeys, and towing a heavy RV can cause an electric vehicle battery to drain even faster.

Toby Kraus and Ben Parker, two ex-Tesla employees who each spent five years working at the EV giant, say they have an answer.

Their startup, Lightship, recently began production of its $250,000 AE.1 Cosmos electric RV, a futuristic towable camper that uses an onboard electric motor to boost the range of electric and gas-powered vehicles.

Kraus and Parker told Business Insider that the AE.1 was partly inspired by a particularly frustrating road trip the pair took during the COVID pandemic. The two founders, who live in California and Colorado, respectively, took a cross-country trip ahead of their first pitch for the new EV startup.

“I rented a Tesla Model X and a trailer, and towed it, laboriously, all the way out to Colorado to meet him,” said Parker.

“I spent over half the time on the road getting to Colorado just charging the Model X, and going 55 miles an hour on a 70-mile-an-hour interstate,” he added.

After meeting in Boulder, the two ex-Tesla employees began the journey back to California to give their pitch, and again found that the added weight of the trailer meant they were spending more time charging than driving.

Things took a turn outside Grand Junction, Utah, when a strong headwind meant the Model X began to run out of charge just as it began to get dark.

“We’d been deep in conversation about the company we wanted to start, and looked down at the range meter and realized we were not going to make it to the next charger,” said Parker.

Parker and Kraus briefly considered using a tiny 1800-watt gas generator to charge the Tesla, one mile at a time, before ditching the trailer at an exit ramp and “crawling” to the nearest supercharger.

“We’ve experienced it many times since. It is a nightmare to go trailering with an EV today,” said Parker, who described the initial road trip as a key part of Lightship’s inception.

Kraus, who worked on Tesla’s finance team for five years in the early 2010s, told Business Insider that the towing problem was the “Achilles’ heel” of EVs.

“There are plenty of products now that have 300, 350-mile range, which is awesome, but guess what? If you use them to tow, all of a sudden your range drops by two-thirds,” he said.

Tariff turmoil

Lightship, which has raised over $60 million since it was founded in 2020, now employs around 100 people at its Colorado base.

In addition to the limited edition $250,000 AE.1 “Cosmo”, the company is working on more affordable versions of its motorized electric RV, which are set to cost from $151,000 to $184,000 and begin deliveries in the Spring of next year.

Like the rest of the industry, Lightship is facing up to the impact of the Trump administration’s tariff spree, which has seen major players including Ford, General Motors, and Toyota take a bit hit from the taxes on imported vehicles, steel, and car parts.

The startup is building its AE.1 electric RVs in a factory in Broomfield, Colorado, meaning it is insulated from the worst of the tariff impact.

Parker added that the tariffs had been a factor in Lightspeed’s decision-making as it sets up its supply chain, and said that they had been inspired by Tesla’s approach of trying to build vehicles where it sells them.

Despite this, Kraus said the company had still faced tariff-related turmoil.

“For us, it’s a couple of points of margin. We’re not changing pricing. We’re not passing it through to our customers. I think we’ve built the business plan and overall strategy in manufacturing here to be resilient to this,” he said.

“Any complex hardware manufacturing company in the modern age is going to be impacted,” he added.