The Honest Bridge
I want to start by conceding the thing I'm about to be criticized for. Range-extending an electric trailer with a gasoline engine feels like defeat. We have spent a century being sold clean futures that turned out to be tailpipes with better marketing, and a reasonable person meets any story ending in “so we still burn a little fuel” with earned suspicion. Hold onto that skepticism. I only ask that you point it at the actual problem rather than at me.
Here is the promise that brought most of us into this category, stated generously because it is substantially true: a big battery buys freedom. Traditional RVing means chasing hookups and rationing the inverter; put fifty usable kilowatt-hours under the floor and a great deal of that nuisance evaporates. The idealists were right about that. What they were wrong about is what comes next — a big battery doesn't eliminate the problem of finding power. It relocates it. A small battery needs a little power often, and almost anything will do. A big battery needs a lot of power periodically, and that summons an entirely new set of aggravations.
The first one nobody warned us about: you cannot count on the outlet. You carry an EVSE, you pull into a campground or a rural outbuilding, you plug in — and it faults. Often enough that experienced owners carry two or three EVSEs from different manufacturers and try them in sequence. That isn't troubleshooting; it's sampling a distribution and hoping. The rest stack up behind it. The roof can't refill the floor — rooftop solar is a fine supplement and an insufficient primary source. The public fast-charging network was never laid out for a fifty-foot rig. And the tow vehicle can't rescue you either: an electric truck towing an electric trailer asks one network to fill two batteries at the same stop.
None of that is an argument against electrification. All of it is an argument against pretending we're finished. So what does a pragmatist actually do in the season we're in? You already have to bring a tow vehicle — the trailer doesn't move without it. The highest-leverage move available is to make that vehicle also solve the power problem, at essentially zero added weight. A hybrid pickup with a substantial onboard inverter is a properly derived, properly bonded Level 2 source that doesn't care how a pedestal was wired in 1974. It's the range extender the trailer can't carry on its own roof, riding in the vehicle you were already obligated to bring.
That's the whole philosophy: assemble the best combination of available products that cuts greenhouse output as far as today's technology allows, label the compromise honestly, and keep building toward the version that won't need it. Refusing to cross the bridge doesn't move the far bank closer.
This began as an owner modifying his own trailer, with his own resources. LightShip has seen the work and may develop a version of the concept. I am a customer with an idea — the full statement is on the home page.
Nothing here is proprietary. Anyone can buy the same truck and the same trailer and assemble the same capability. What this project has created is the documentation and the measurement, not the hardware.
This is an argument, written in the first person, about why a transitional technology is worth building. It is the reasoning that started the project — not its findings.
The findings are separate and deliberately so. Charging Infrastructure lays out the question without advocating an answer; V2V AC Energy Transfer and ProPower System carry the measurements, coded so you can see which numbers were measured and which were modelled. If you disagree with everything below, those pages still stand on their own.
Continue to the charging question, or see the measured data.
If you have questions or comments, please visit the LightShip RV Owners Club on RVForums.com and post them to this topic. I monitor that site regularly and would enjoy your feedback.
