A high-level preview of where TurboAssist is headed. The behavioral findings below come from a re-analysis of Campaign 1 (13 legs, 3,719 miles). The economic figures are modeled and depend on how the trailer battery is recharged — exactly what the next testing campaign is instrumented to measure. Nothing here is a finished fuel-savings claim; V1's claim is operational, and stated plainly below.
TrekDrive was conceived to solve a battery-electric problem: a range-limited electric tow vehicle faces real range anxiety pulling a heavy trailer, and the genuine hassle of charging a 50-foot rig at stations never designed for one. For that customer the axle motor extends range — a sound answer to a real problem.
But that market is small and, in 2026, shrinking. The customers who dominate towing run hybrid and pure internal-combustion vehicles — roughly 90% of the tow market, a base more than 10× larger than battery-electric tow. For them, range is not the pain point; a tank of gas solves that. Their pain is the economics and effort of hauling a heavy load — fuel burned and engine strain on long grades. TurboAssist reorients the same axle motor, on the same trailer, from a range rescue into a way to make towing a heavy load easier on the truck.
TurboAssist extends TrekDrive's value from the shrinking battery-electric tow niche to the ~90% of tow vehicles that run hybrid and ICE — with no new trailer hardware. Same trailer, same motor, far larger market.
The long-term vision is an autonomous coordinator: the truck reads its own sensors, decides when the engine is stressed, and commands the trailer motor to assist automatically. That remains the goal — but it is not V1.
V1 is deliberately narrower. Its only purpose is to move TrekDrive off always-on — to make it engage on sustained high-load stretches and stay quiet in steady cruise. Nothing inside TrekDrive's motor control changes. The driver sets the parameters through a new Road Mode with on-screen sliders: how hard the engine must be working before the motor assists, and how long it holds. The system then logs the result.
V1 makes no fuel-savings claim. Its claim is operational: "TrekDrive no longer runs permanently; the driver tunes when it engages, and the system logs enough to learn the settings that make it worthwhile." That claim is fully defensible today. The optimal settings aren't hardcoded because the data to defend them doesn't exist yet — so V1 hands the driver the knobs and instruments the outcome.
Three findings from the Campaign 1 re-analysis drove this design.
A pure engine-load trigger catches most thermal stress but not all of it. The campaign's hottest event was a high-altitude climb where heat built without load being the campaign's highest — so it ranked only mid-pack on assist duty. Catching that last slice needs an altitude or coolant-temperature term. That is a V2 refinement, not a V1 defect.
Campaign 1 measured the mechanical load-transfer benefit as real: when the trailer motor takes load off the engine, the decomposed mechanical saving is approximately 27.8% during assist. But whether that nets out to a fuel saving depends entirely on how the trailer battery is recharged.
Refilling the trailer battery through the truck's own ProPower generator costs fuel — and at that basis, the round-trip net comes out slightly negative: the recharge costs more than the mechanical saving returns. Refill the same battery from grid power at the destination, and the net flips positive. The motor firing in the right places doesn't change this; the charging source does. These figures are modeled on published battery-draw placeholders, pending direct measurement.
Because the optimal trade depends on charging source, terrain, and battery state — none of which V1 can yet measure automatically — the honest move is to let the driver manage it until there's data to automate it. The charging-source dependence is the reason the sliders exist, not a problem to hide. A driver charging at camp each night runs assist freely; a driver relying on the truck to recharge uses it sparingly on the grades that matter most.
Both use the same driver-set Road Mode sliders. The difference is only whether the charge-versus-assist changeover is a manual step or an automatic one.
The driver-slider framing turns the next testing campaign into a deployment of V1 itself. Drivers run Road Mode; the campaign instruments the trailer-side battery draw that Campaign 1 could not measure, and logs which settings drivers actually converge on across different terrain. Those real-world settings become the empirical basis for a future automatic version — the deployment teaches the automation.
V1 is the minimal, honest first step: stop TrekDrive from running permanently, hand the driver a tunable Road Mode, and instrument the result. It brings TrekDrive to the large and growing hybrid/ICE tow market today, while generating exactly the data needed to make a fully automatic TurboAssist defensible tomorrow.
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.