EVs have a towing problem. RVs have a design problem. Lightship is trying to solve both—without building something that looks like a beige suitcase. Their new electric trailer, the Cosmos, wants to make camping cooler, quieter, and much more sustainable. Think less “generator hum at 10 p.m.” and more “silent spaceship that charges itself.”
At SXSW, I sat down with Lightship co-founder Toby Kraus, whose past life at Tesla shows up in the Cosmos in all the right ways. Now he’s making electric RVs that don’t suck. Built from the ground up, the Cosmos tackles aerodynamic drag using a principle from high school physics: CD × A, or coefficient of drag times frontal area. Make the shape slippery (reduce the drag) and make the front area hitting the wind smaller (lower the A), and suddenly your battery won’t vanish in 100 miles. The trailer collapses down for towing, so it’s as sleek and compact as a small car—then expands into a roomy, 10-foot-tall cabin once parked.
It also includes a force-sensing towing hitch, making the trailer almost weightless behind your EV. Inside, it’s all sleek panels, interactive design touches (yellow means it opens), and a subtle nod to Star Wars—not a Pottery Barn throw pillow in sight.
Kraus and his team are betting on a future where your RV isn’t just a camper but a backup home battery, a guest suite, and maybe the easiest ADU (accessory dwelling unit) you’ll ever permit—because it doesn’t need one (wheels!).
Crouse: So what brings you to SXSW?
Kraus: We were at South By in 2023, and that was where we showed our first show vehicle. It looked like this, but it wasn’t fully engineered. It was just showing the concept.
That was the first two years of the business, and then the past two years have been like when we revealed it. At South By [in 2023], we got a ton of preorders and a lot of important validation. We built something that, obviously, we thought was cool. But it was this moment of validation that other people agreed with, and we could, in fact, bring it to market.
Was it helpful to get feedback from people who had placed the pre-orders or testers? Was there any feedback you got that surprised you?
Oh, yeah. Even leading up to the concept, we did our darndest to really understand not just customers but the people who RV.
We were like, how are we going to learn? We could spend a bunch of time RVing ourselves, which we did, but we needed to meet people. So the earliest form was doing several dozen long-form interviews with RVers—just conversations. That led us to the first concept. For instance, the whole layout you see here is very unconventional if you’ve been in many RVs. It also has everything in your house, but it’s just small.
That’s kind of like living in New York City.
Ha, yeah, you could say that. If you talk to people who RV a lot, they’ll say, “Yeah, we don’t use the bathroom because it sucks. I don’t use the kitchen. I only camp at the campground.”
Yeah. There’s a lot of counter space in here.
This whole layout came not only from crowdsourcing but also from really understanding customers. And we’re still learning. I wouldn’t say we’re perfect. There are little things where we’re like, “okay, we’ve got to make changes.” The last iteration before we start production of the four vehicles I mentioned is that we’re giving a couple of those vehicles to customers to use and live in. Then they’ll tell us, ‘Hey, I don’t like where the stove is laid out,” or something like that.
What was the most significant design challenge you faced, both in terms of the interior and the functionality of the exterior?
I’d say the biggest overall design challenge had to do with the problem we were trying to solve: making a hyper-efficient vehicle that’s appropriate for the age of electrification. More and more people are buying electric vehicles, and they have this Achilles’ heel—towing.
People typically lose a lot of that range when towing.
Exactly. It depends on the size of your vehicle, but you typically lose two-thirds of the range. So the design challenge is: how do you solve that problem? By the way, that problem exists whether you have an electric vehicle or a gas vehicle.
With the standard gas vehicle, people just see it as horrible fuel efficiency, right?
Yeah. You’re supposed to get roughly 22 miles per gallon in a truck. That led us to realize we can’t just electrify. You can’t just put in a giant battery and propulsion system. You have to actually design the vehicle from scratch to be efficient, and that sets the stage for everything else.
So the whole reason the vehicle collapses is because that’s a very efficient form. It’s about as aerodynamic as a small passenger car when you tow it that way [collapsed]. And then, when camping, the top goes up—it’s 10 feet tall and has a seven-and-a-half-foot ceiling. That was the biggest design challenge: how do you make it reliable and deal with the vehicle architecture and complexity?
We took a thoughtful, principled approach. We’re building the whole thing from scratch. So, we’re not going to make a standard RV interior. We’re doing something unique—what a camper really needs.
Yeah, so how did you guys solve that range problem when towing?
The rough math is this: when you tow with a traditional trailer, you lose two-thirds of your range or efficiency. Most electric vehicles today are designed with around 300 miles of range. You tow, and suddenly it’s 100 miles of range.
So we said, “Okay, you have to close that gap—100 miles of lost range.” We close half of it passively. There are no electric systems or added technology—we just make the vehicle passively efficient.
The technical drag equation is CD × A—coefficient of drag times frontal area. That explains the shape. You make it very slippery—that’s the CD part. That’s what all cars do. But you won’t get far unless you change the A—the frontal area. The frontal area is basically the cross-section when you’re looking head-on.
So we changed A—we squished it down to half the size. That, combined with the slipperiness, makes it very passively efficient. So, back to that original problem: with a traditional trailer, you go from 300 miles to 100. We get 100 miles back just from passive design.
We are actively closing the second 100-mile gap with technology. We have a big battery, like an electric vehicle, and an electric motor on the rear axle. It’s more like an e-bike than a car. It assists while towing.
What it’s doing is pretty complex, but the control system is driven by a force sensor in the hitch. It monitors the force and keeps it as close to zero as possible so the trailer becomes almost weightless. If there’s force, the system commands the motor to provide torque until that force gets close to zero.
Very cool. And that gives you the second 100 miles back?
Exactly. It gets you very close to no range loss.
Besides almost no range loss, what do you think sets the Cosmos apart from all the other RVs in the pack?
There’s a lot. The RV industry has tons of segmentation—many user types and preferences. There are 12 million RVs in the U.S. at the highest level, and 90% are towables. 10% are motorhomes or motor coaches. Vans gets a lot of attention, but they’re a small part.
We’re a towable. Even within that category, there are subtypes: off-road adventure trailers, fifth wheels—which go over the truck bed and connect via a kingpin—and then bumper-pull travel trailers. That’s the main section of the market, and that’s where we are.
The most common reference point people use for us is Airstream. That’s the high-end, top-of-the-line product. But there are also a lot of beige, sharp-edged, generic models.
Right, the ones with that saucy stripe around the outside.
Oh…The stripe—the 90s-era art.
Some might say it is the suburban version of spray-painted flames.
Ha, yeah. What sets us apart depends on your reference point. I won’t talk down to Airstream—they do a nice job. But they’re very retro. Their interiors are nice but traditional. They did a Pottery Barn partnership. It’s polished but traditional.
What sets us apart is our approach and the technology. Everything I described—building this from scratch for efficiency—has never really been done. Adding an electric propulsion system to a trailer? It has never been done.
That’s probably the baseline differentiator. But honestly, I think we get as much, or more, credit for the second part: the design.
We’re engineers and get excited about the tech, but what people care about and notice is the design. They say, “That thing is a spaceship.” It’s beautiful.
I’m guessing you’re a Star Wars fan? Was that the inspo behind the space-tech vibe?
Oh yeah. The original design team presentation definitely included some Star Wars material. We get a lot of funny parallels. The biggest differentiators people latch onto are the design, interior, and exterior. No one’s done something like this before. It’s modern and colorful.
It’s almost giving Lego. I like all the pops of color. It’s nice.
Thanks! I just learned from our design team that everything yellow indicates that it’s interactive. So if it’s yellow, it opens or drops into a second bed. Or they’re pull handles for storage. All intentional.
Useful. You worked at Tesla before this, right? Has that influenced how you’re building the Cosmos at all?
For sure. I was at Tesla in a different era—2009 to 2015—so it’s crazy. I’ve been gone 10 years. It was a California company back then, but now it’s in Texas. But yeah, Tesla had a considerable influence.
The other founder also worked at Tesla. We wouldn’t be able to do this without that experience. It gave us the first-principles mindset, starting from a clean sheet of paper. That’s a very Tesla way of thinking.
Maybe more importantly, it taught us the pragmatic side—how to build a culture and a company that can do difficult things fast. Tesla also taught us what not to do.
So this thing doesn’t self-drive?
This does not self-drive. We have a lot of technology, but we don’t think self-driving is necessary in the camping experience.
Also, culturally, Tesla is full of brilliant people, but it can be a burnout culture. It’s sometimes “smart at all costs,” even when that includes being mean. So here, we’re trying to build something more inclusive and team-oriented. We’ve learned a lot from Tesla—the good and the bad.
Who’s your customer?
We have a few different customer types, and we’ve spent a long time learning who they are—and it’s still evolving.
Going back to our mission, we talked to dozens of RVers. Our number one customer archetype, which has stayed true from the beginning, is what we call the “family adventurer.” They’re mid-career families with a kid or two and maybe a dog. They’re not traditional RVers going to RV camps, but they’re not hardcore either. They want to camp in state parks, national parks, or maybe at a winery—more experiential travel.
That’s the main one. But we’re learning there are other profiles too—like the same family adventurer, projected 15 years forward. The kids are out of the house, and now they have time to travel and enjoy the outdoors more. That’s become a big one for us.
A surprising one recently emerged: people who see this not as an RV but as a house—an ADU, an accessory dwelling unit. They’ll say, “I was going to put in a granny cottage, but the permitting is a nightmare.” Then they see this and say, “This is great—it’s on wheels, so it bypasses all that.”
Ah, a mobile Man Cave of sorts.
I prefer “guest room” or “home office.” But something cool about that use case—and about the product in general—is that it has a 77-kilowatt-hour battery and 1.8 kilowatts of solar.
To put that in context, that’s like six Tesla Powerwalls. It’s a small but real home solar system.
So if you’re using it as an office or extra bedroom, it’s also storing and generating extra energy. People say, “Oh man, I don’t need a Powerwall—I’ll just use this as home backup.”
Can you tell me about the TrekDrive system?
The TrekDrive system is the propulsion system and controls, which is the more challenging part.
We put a motor on the rear axle. Compared to a car or truck-sized motor, it’s pretty tiny. For example, we have a 20-kilowatt motor, whereas a truck might have a 200-250 kilowatt one—so it’s 10 times smaller.
It can be that size because we’re not trying to accelerate fast. We’re just trying to turn the wheels and get energy from the battery onto the road.
The other reason it’s small is safety. The truck is always in control, and we specified it that way.
The TrekDrive system includes a complex control system. The most important part is the proprietary force sensor in the hitch. That sensor, along with the rest of the controls, creates motor torque to reduce the force on the hitch, giving you all of your range back or your efficiency.
Where do you see Lightship going in five years?
In five or even ten years, our mission will be twofold: We want to make electrification and sustainable technology more accessible and RVing more accessible.
Ben, the other founder, and I have been working on electric vehicles for a long time. And now EVs are hitting a wall—you’ve got your early adopters, but for them to make a real climate impact, they have to go mainstream—not just for people in California.
RVing is a different market. People who buy RVs often have a Dodge Ram in their driveway. The question is: how do we make electrification more accessible to them? We do it by building something they love and want to use.
If we can serve those superusers, we can bring the technology to more people. Another thing that keeps people out of RVing is the experience itself—it’s a lot of work. People will say they love RVing because it brings them together with family and friends, but they’ll also complain about how bad their RV is. It’s falling apart. Everyone hates generators—there’s nothing worse than someone running one at 10 p.m.
So we want to eliminate that and make it feel like staying in a vacation home. That’ll make RVing more accessible.
This is a long-winded answer, but five years from now, we want to make the product more accessible. Right now, it’s at a high price point. We need to bring out our next generation—our more mainstream product.
