LightShip Turbo Edition F-150 PowerBoost · LightShip AE.1

TrekDrive TurboAssist (Testing)

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.

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.

Three findings from the Campaign 1 re-analysis drove this design.

Source: controller replay of the Campaign 1 10-second frames through a dwell-and-hold loop at 90 % load, sustained 60 s, 5 min hold — the “Mixed” defaults of the V1 Road Mode design-goal document (working paper, unpublished), illustrated in the Atlas mockup article. The 10-second frames already smooth some chatter, so 1,667 is a floor. These are page-specific replay results, not figures on the Specifications page.

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.

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 a future testing campaign into a deployment of V1 itself: drivers run Road Mode, the system logs which settings they converge on across different terrain, and those real-world settings become the empirical basis for an automatic version — the deployment teaches the automation. That campaign has not run, because V1 does not yet exist as firmware. Campaign 2 (September 2026, Prescott ⇄ Salton Sea) ran with TrekDrive off throughout for the aerodynamic work, and it settled one instrumentation question along the way: no channel on the truck sees the trailer's TrekDrive draw. The only trailer-side witness is the Atlas state-of-charge display, read at stops — an endpoint instrument, not a rate instrument.

• Bound the battery cost with paired state-of-charge readings on repeated assist runs. A 34-mile run at LightShip's ~250 Wh/mi is about 11 % of the pack; two integer readings resolve that to roughly ±6–9 % (modeled), enough to collapse most of the spread between the three cost bases above. Instantaneous draw — and therefore the assist crossover point — stays modeled until LightShip's own draw or hitch-force channel is exported.
• Log which Road Mode settings drivers choose, and where — if usage clusters, that cluster is the default a future autonomous version would adopt. Requires V1 to exist.
• Confirm the assist actually comes out net-positive per activation, and under which charging assumption.