Towing an Electric RV

An electric travel trailer carries a battery large enough to run a home. That battery has to be filled, repeatedly, in places chosen for their scenery rather than their electrical service. How you solve that is the decision that shapes the rest of the experience: how often you stop, how long for, how much planning a travel day takes, and how far from a hookup you can comfortably get.

There are two ways to answer it.

Both work. Both have people travelling on them right now. They are not better and worse versions of the same thing; they are different trips, with different strengths, and the right one depends on how you like to camp rather than on which is technically superior.

This site exists because the second path had almost no public data behind it. So it was instrumented and driven — roughly 6,000 towing miles, including a 3,719-mile measured campaign logging 42 vehicle parameters at 2-second cadence, with fuel accounting reconciled against the truck’s own totaliser to 0.21% mean error. What follows is what that produced, with measured figures separated from modelled ones throughout.

The first is the mainstream path and needs no introduction from this site — it is covered as a field guide inside the page above, written from owner experience rather than advocacy. The second is newer, less documented, and is where this project’s measurements live.

Figures below are measured on this rig at 5.8 kW continuous transfer. A production version would be specified higher; everything here is prototype data and labelled as such.

Charging from the tow vehicle is not a general capability — it needs a specific set of attributes on both halves of the rig, and today only one combination has all of them. Several electric trucks can send power aft while towing: the F-150 Lightning, the Silverado EV and the Cybertruck all have 240 V bed outlets that work in motion, and their owners use them. But they are moving stored energy between two tanks, not adding any. The PowerBoost carries a generator, which makes it the only tow vehicle on sale that can put energy into a rig under way and keep doing it where there is nothing to plug into. On the trailer side, the LightShip AE.1 is the only electric RV currently shipping with a NACS receptacle placed near the hitch and a charging system that expects to be fed while towing.

The full specification — four attributes on the truck, two on the trailer, and which vehicles meet which — is set out on the V2V AC Energy Transfer page. Nothing about it is proprietary; the requirements are published so that anyone can assemble the same thing.

That specificity is also why this site exists. A capability available in exactly one configuration has no owner community, no accumulated experience, and no independent data. It has this.

Two things a reader is entitled to know about a site like this — who wrote it and what their stake is, and what tools were used to produce it. Both are set out in full rather than summarised here.

Both bear on the same question, which is whether the numbers on this site can be trusted. The short answer is that the measurement discipline is deliberately conservative, modelled figures are never presented as measured ones, and corrections are published alongside the claims they replace — several are collected on the Roadmap.

The argument that started the project — and the case for building transitional technology at all — is set out separately in The Honest Bridge. It is a personal statement rather than a finding, which is why it sits apart from the measurements.