LightShip Camping Reserve SimulatorBeta

The tow vehicle’s job is to land the LightShip at a campsite with the most Total Camping Reserve it can. Where there is no electrical service, whatever you need for the stay has to arrive with you — this works out which pairing delivers the most of it on your trip.

Put in your own tow vehicle. It runs the same trip against an F-150 PowerBoost towing the LightShip AE.1, in a fixed priority order. First, reach the destination with a sensible reserve — enough left to get to a charger or a pump unhitched afterwards. Second, arrive with the most Total Camping Reserve (TCR) — the energy aboard for living off the grid once you stop. Third, the shortest road time the first two allow — counted in travel days at a typical daily pace, because a trip that runs past a normal day on the road costs a night, not just an hour. Neither column runs TrekDrive by choice; either uses it by necessity where the road alone cannot get it there, and the page says so when it does. Range gets you there. Reserve lets you stay.

★ We need your help to build a better simulator. One tow vehicle on this page has ever been measured pulling an AE.1. If you tow one, you can fix that.

Trip cockpit

Drag a slider — the whole trip re-plans as you move it

Your vehicleF-150 PowerBoost

Travel days · door to door——

Total Camping Reserve——

Truck energy for the trip——

Arrive at — truck · trailer——

Verdict——

Camping-reserve and arrival figures are modelled (amber); the verdict applies the trip-goal rule — reach the destination with a sensible reserve first. Road-limited means the last usable charger’s position sets the truck’s arrival, and no reserve setting can buy more. Full detail, stop by stop, in the panels below.

TrekDrive duty % of the drive with it engaged

Cruise speed mph — where you set it on open road · consumption scales with it (measured 50–70)Faster is not always quicker here. For an electric tow vehicle, slowing down can shorten the whole trip: lower consumption can carry the truck past a charger it would otherwise have stopped at, and dropping a stop saves more time than the slower driving costs. Once no more stops can be shed, the effect reverses and slower is simply slower. Where the turn comes depends on the truck’s pack and on where the real chargers sit along this road, and it moves with a single mile per hour — so it is a property of one trip, not a recommended speed. A combustion truck does not show it: fuel is assumed where needed, so faster is always quicker. Try the slider both ways.

62 mph

Time on the road per dayCounts the whole day on the road — driving plus every stop — which is why charging-heavy rigs cross into extra days sooner. The RV community’s own rules of thumb (the “3-3-3” and “4-4-4” rules) put a normal travel day near 300 miles and 5–6 hours; 8–10 hours is widely treated as an outer limit, not a norm. When the trip needs more than one day, the door-to-door figure becomes calendar time on a same-departure-time-each-morning assumption: each road night adds the rest of a 24-hour day, and the final day may run over by the destination day buffer (in Trailer & trip) when that finishes the trip.

6 h

One hard push — drive it through, no overnights

Unhitch + rehitch per stop minweight-distribution hitch · most fast-charge stalls can’t be reached with a trailer attached — owner estimates put pull-through availability near 10% (Tesla publishes no figure; its trip planner flags trailer-accessible sites). This prices the full cycle — safe placement clear of the stall lane, chocks, jack, electrical, chains, re-hitch, re-check — not the 30-second coupler drop. Dragging this to zero shows the all-pull-through trip. Adjust to your own practice.

30 min

Arrival reserve — tow vehicle and LightShipBoth the tow vehicle and the trailer must reach this level before you pull in. Refuelling and charging time to get there is added to the total trip time. Higher = more camping reserve on arrival, bought with stops; lower = a shorter travel day. Tops out at 95% — arriving at 100% would mean refuelling or charging at the campground door, which the model does not represent.

90%

Road nights — where you stop mid-tripObserved practice among early electric-trailer owners (Pebble Flow, 2026): a road night en route is taken at a powered campground, not boondocked — truck and trailer both go on shore power. Modelled as a budget of about 7.68 kW × 12 plugged hours ≈ 92 kWh per night — 7.68 kW is what an owner’s portable EVSE (Tesla Mobile Connector class, 32 A at 240 V) passes, whatever the pedestal is rated for; one EVSE charges one vehicle at a time: the trailer is filled first through its onboard charger, the remainder goes to the truck’s pack (capped at 100%), and a gas or diesel tank is simply full each morning. The next day’s stops are re-planned from the recharged state, so an overnight can remove charging stops — and a charging stop the day cannot finish is skipped in favour of the night’s shore power. The one case the budget bites: a very large pack arriving deeply drained leaves below 100%. Boondock follows its own observed practice: seek out a charge or fuel stop toward the end of the day, then find a place to boondock — the evening top-up is completed even when it runs the day over, the truck carries its evening state into the morning, and the trailer pays a frugal transit-night draw of 1.2 kWh per night (fridge and lights, no HVAC). All modelled, none measured.

Trip

Preset routes carry real charger locations; your own trips assume chargers wherever needed.Eight preset routes — five Western, three Eastern — carry real charger locations — every public fast-charging site along the road, by mile marker, baked into this page on a stated date — so the electric column stops where a charger actually is, or is told it cannot get there. Your own trips do not look up anything: type the driving distance from your map app and chargers are assumed available wherever needed, which is close to true east of the Mississippi and optimistic where fast charging is sparse. Fuel is assumed available on every route; the route notes say where that is not so.

Where are you going

Trip name

Distance miles, from your map app

What the road is like

Your tow vehicle

Start fromThe page opens on the strongest electric case, deliberately. The Silverado EV Max Range is the largest battery and one of the two highest single-outlet export ratings in this list, so the electric column starts at its best rather than its worst. Opening on the weakest EV would have been a thumb on the scale before a reader touched anything — and this page’s standing rule is that where a judgement call exists, it is made in favour of the vehicle being compared against, and said out loud. Pick any other truck above and the figures move, sometimes a long way: the Rivian R1T exports at 1,500 W from 120 V outlets with no 240 V at all, which is a different proposition entirely. That spread is the point of the page.

Battery packTowing range is not stored — towing consumption is, in watt-hours per mile, and range is that divided into the pack. So choosing a smaller battery shortens the range and cannot quietly change the physics. The per-truck consumption figures descend from this page’s 45% towing-loss convention and disagree with each other by about a third; none of them is measured. Only the PowerBoost row on this page is measured.

Name it

Powertrain

Usable pack kWh

Towing range mi, full pack, with this trailer, at 62 mph cruise ·

Range without the trailer mi, EPA · only used to check the truck can reach a charger unhitched after camp

Onboard export kW — the 240 V outlet’s nameplate rating

Run that export to the trailer while drivingAn electric rig pays for it out of the same pack that's towing, so its range falls and it stops more Can use Tesla SuperchargersNative NACS, or a CCS truck with the adapter Ford, GM and Rivian owners have had since 2024. On for every preset; the station data cannot say which individual Tesla sites admit other makes. Matters most on the Western routes, where several critical stops are Tesla-only.

Trailer & trip

Where you're camping

Destination day buffer h — the last day may run this much over to finish the tripNobody stops for the night five minutes from the campground. The final day — and only the final day — may run up to this much past the daily budget when that completes the trip; a driver an hour or two out pushes through. Interior days never stretch.

Draw down to % — it still has to get home

Departure SOC % of the 77 kWh pack

Base house load — travel mode, cooling aside

Base house load kW while rollingStorage Mode travels lighter when 110 V services aren’t needed in the cabin; Camp Mode keeps them on; Camp Mode with HVAC adds cooling in motion.

HV Solar Boost — roof array charges the pack while rollingNow a shipping software update. Helps every rig, and helps the ones that cannot export the most.

Average output watts, 24 h average · offsets house load on the road and at camp

TrekDrive

The trailer’s own axle motor pushes, so the tow vehicle works less. It spends trailer battery to do it, and the trailer cannot be charged while it runs.The trailer's own axle motor pushes, so the tow vehicle works less. It spends trailer battery to do it, and while it is running the trailer cannot be charged — those two are mutually exclusive. HVAC and 120 V services keep running. This duty is assist by choice, and applies to your vehicle only. Neither column runs TrekDrive by choice for the reference — but on a preset route either vehicle uses it by necessity wherever the road cannot get it to the next charger or the destination with a sensible reserve, whatever is set here. The PowerBoost never meets such a gap on these routes because fuel is assumed available.

Energy it costs the trailer

Assumptions

Fast charger 10% to 80% min at a working stall

Gas and diesel 100% refuel min each · pull-through lane, no unhitch

Trailer DC rate kW — 150 when enabled; peak, tapers near full

Level 2 rate kW · portable EVSE, 32 A × 240 V

Continuous export duty × the truck outlet’s ampsStandard electrical practice runs a circuit continuously at 80–85% of capacity. The fraction protects the source circuit — the truck outlet’s conductor, breaker and receptacle — so it applies to the truck’s outlet rating; the LightShip’s own import-limit setting (below) is how it gets enforced in practice. 0.80 × the PowerBoost’s 30 A outlet = 24 A = 5.76 kW, corroborated by measurement: seven instrumented legs delivered 5.69–6.06 kW, and 5.76 falls inside that band while 0.85 (6.12 kW) lands above every leg. Convention as the basis, measurement as the check.

LightShip import limit A — the trailer’s Energy > Grid Status settingThe AE.1’s own screen carries an amps limit with +/− steppers, and it is where the export derate is actually set in the field — most portable EVSEs offer no output adjustment at all (Tesla’s Mobile Connector is fixed at 32 A), so the trailer knob is the universal enforcement point. Charging from the PowerBoost the operator dials in 24 A = 0.80 × the truck’s 30 A outlet. The default here is 30 A so the truck-side convention sets the operating figure unless you lower it; the weakest link of the whole chain is what delivers.

Portable EVSE rating A — the cord between truck and trailerPortable Level 2 units typically top out at 32 A (Tesla’s Mobile Connector is fixed 32 A; a few units do 40 A); hardwired wall units go higher but are not in this path. The Cybertruck is the one rig sitting exactly at this ceiling: 0.80 × its 40 A outlet = 32 A, with no headroom anywhere in the chain — any EVSE under 32 A, or a trailer charger under 32 A, clips the Cybertruck and nothing else. The 30 A trucks carry 8 A of margin.

LightShip charger ceiling A — assumed, not publishedAn assumption, flagged as one. The AE.1’s true AC import ceiling is not established: the owner’s manual gives 9.6 kW (40 A at 240 V), which assumes a hardwired, home-style charger, and the limit cannot be probed safely on a running system. Defaulted to 40 A since revision 4.11 (30 A before). On the road the portable EVSE’s 32 A and the trailer’s own import-limit setting are tighter links, so this ceiling binds nothing at the defaults.

Charge the trailer at the same time as the tow vehicleOff by default: the trailer is charged after the tow vehicle finishes, not alongside it. Requires a second connection at the same stop.

Scoreboard

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Charging times assume immediate access to a working charger — no queues, no dead stalls, no detours. Stop counts and times are best-case infrastructure performance.

Where the time goes

Driving is identical — stops are the whole difference

Driving Fuel Truck charging Unhitch / rehitch Trailer top-up

What the tow vehicle brings to camp

Drawn down to 25%, then it has to get you home

Ask an AI to explain it

Recommended · nothing is sent from this page

This is a complicated result, and it is meant to be. Range, charging windows, hitching, export rate, house load and cooling all interact, and no single number on this page explains the outcome by itself. Handing the whole picture to an AI assistant and asking it to walk through the reasoning is the fastest way to understand what actually drove the difference — and what would change it for the way you camp.

The button copies the results above, the conditions they were run under, and the assumptions behind them. It tells the assistant which figures are measured and which are modelled, and asks for a plain-language explanation rather than a summary of the table.

Anything specific to ask? (optional)

The reply is that assistant's interpretation, not a result from this simulator. Nothing leaves this page — the text goes to your clipboard and no data is transmitted anywhere.

Stop by stop

Every number, and where it came from

Green is the only measured column

Questions & Comments

This page is in beta and being actively developed. If you find a bug, or a number that looks wrong, please report it on the LightShip RV Owners Club on RVForums.com. I monitor that site regularly and would enjoy your feedback.