It is worth stating plainly, because it is the part most easily forgotten as the product evolves. TrekDrive was conceived to solve a BEV problem: a range-limited battery-electric tow vehicle faces real range anxiety pulling a heavy trailer, and the genuine inconvenience of charging a 50-foot rig at stations never designed for one. For that customer, TrekDrive’s axle motor extends range and reduces charging hassle. It was a sound answer to a real problem.
But that market is shrinking. BEV tow-vehicle sales are falling fast in 2026. The number of customers who tow with a battery-electric truck — the customer TrekDrive was originally scoped for — is contracting, not growing. Scoped only to BEVs, TrekDrive’s addressable market shrinks with it.
The customers who remain — and who dominate — tow with hybrid and pure-ICE vehicles. For them, range is not the pain point; a tank of gas and a five-minute fill solve that. Their pain is the economics and effort of hauling a heavy load: fuel burned, engine strain, and heat on long grades. TrekDrive does not disappear for this customer — its job reorients. The same axle motor, on the same trailer, stops being a range rescue and becomes a way to make towing a heavy load cheaper and easier on the truck.
TrekDrive TurboAssist extends TrekDrive’s value from the shrinking BEV-tow niche to the roughly 90% of the tow-vehicle market that runs HEV and ICE — a customer base more than 10× larger than today’s BEV base — with no new trailer hardware. Provide a solution for the 90% of tow vehicles that can pull a LightShip, not just the shrinking few.
The market claim is strategic and unambiguous: TurboAssist addresses a vastly larger and growing-by-comparison customer base. The per-mile economics for that customer are a separate, honest matter — Campaign 1 measured the mechanical load-transfer as real (~27.8%), but the net fuel benefit depends on how the trailer battery is recharged, which is exactly what Campaign 2 is instrumented to measure. The positioning does not rest on an unproven economic figure; it rests on serving the right and far larger market.
TrekDrive today runs continuously whenever it is engaged. V1 makes it variable: the axle motor assists during sustained high-load stretches — long grades, headwinds, hard passes — and stays quiet in steady cruise. The driver sets the sensitivity with three sliders, and the system is instrumented to learn which settings make it net-positive.
Critically, the three sliders appear only when two conditions hold at once: the driver has selected the existing Road Mode, and the trailer is receiving a live absolute-load value from the truck over the hitch connection. With no truck signal, or in any other mode, the Atlas behaves exactly as it does today. The presence of the truck signal, inside Road Mode, is what reveals the controls.
Vehicle Mode
Road mode enables driving and charge/assist services.
Tune when the axle motor assists. Higher settings assist less often.
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The 90 % / 60 s / 5 min set is the “Mixed” default drawn from replaying the Campaign 1 telemetry through a dwell-and-hold controller: across thirteen legs it cut raw threshold-crossings by about 85 % while still tracking terrain — mountain legs showed high assist duty, flat low-load legs showed none. These are modeled starting points, not tuned production values; the sliders exist precisely so the settings can be learned in service.
The sliders are only meaningful because the trailer knows how hard the truck is working. That comes from one value — absolute engine load — read from the PowerBoost’s standard OBD-II port and passed live across the hitch. No PowerBoost wiring is modified; the truck box is a passive reader on a port built to be plugged into. The full hardware and signal-path specification lives in the V1 design-goal document.
The truck side only ever reports a number. It never commands the motor. Every torque decision stays inside LightShip’s own validated TrekDrive algorithm — V1 only causes that algorithm to run intermittently instead of permanently.