Revolutionizing Road Trips with Lightship’s Electric RV
Toby Kraus and Ben Parker are co-founders of Lightship, an all-electric RV. Their first model, the L1, is a tow trailer with a sizable solar array on top, electric heat pump HVAC, an induction stove in the kitchen, an 80 kilowatt hour battery and an EV range extending or gas mileage boosting feature wherein the tow trailer provides some on-road power to the vehicle that's pulling it.
Ben is a former mechanical design engineer at Tesla who contributed to the Model 3. Toby also worked at Tesla, first in finance then as product manager for the Model S. He later assumed an executive position at Proterra, an electric bus company. Despite Proterra's recent bankruptcy, it played a pivotal role in advancing large vehicle electrification. In 2020, Toby and Ben teamed up to establish Lightship and unveiled the L1 for pre-orders in March 2023.
This conversation not only covers the founders' backgrounds and the L1's feature set, but also how they have sized the RV market, how the electrification of the RV will help drive the electrification of the pickup truck sector overall, and how the L1 can serve as a power source to a home when it's not in use as an RV. MCJ Collective is proud to be a multi-time investor in Lightship via our venture capital funds, and we still learned a lot during this conversation.
Get connected:
Toby Kraus LinkedIn / Ben Parker LinkedIn
Lightship LinkedIn / X
Cody Simms LinkedIn / X
MCJ Podcast / Collective
*You can also reach us via email at info@mcjcollective.com, where we encourage you to share your feedback on episodes and suggestions for future topics or guests.
Episode recorded on Aug 10, 2023 (Published on Aug 24, 2023)
In this episode, we cover:
[03:06]: Ben's background and Tesla experience
[05:43]: How electrifying food trucks led Ben to work on RVs
[09:07]: Ben's experience in Formula 1 student racing
[10:37]: Toby's background: finance, Tesla, Proterra, and Eclipse
[16:46]: RV categories and the market landscape
[20:30]: The role of aerodynamics in trailer design
[23:08]: Potential for Lightship L1 to unlock electrification in pickup trucks
[25:05]: The hodgepodge of fossil fuel systems in legacy RVs
[27:20]: Prioritizing a game-changing product with sustainability as a bonus
[28:24]: An in-depth overview of the Lightship L1 trailer's sleek design
[30:58]: Details of the L1’s solar paneled roof, HVAC, and stove
[34:51]: Pricing and target customer demographics
[40:23]: Addressing range anxiety with existing RV campground infrastructure
[42:25]: Lightship L1’s battery and potential as a home backup power source
[49:50]: Tackling the problem of embedded emissions with durability
[53:51]: How Lightship finances their business
-
Cody Simms (00:00):
Today's guest on My Climate Journey's Startup Series are Toby Kraus and Ben Parker, co-founders of Lightship, an all electric RV. Their first model, the L1, is a tow trailer with a sizable solar array on top, electric heat pump HVAC, an induction stove in the kitchen, an 80 kilowatt hour battery and an EV range extending or gas mileage boosting feature wherein the tow trailer provides some on-road power to the vehicle that's pulling it. Ben is a former mechanical design engineer from Tesla who worked on the Model 3 and Toby worked at Tesla in an earlier capacity, first in a finance function, and then as a product manager on the Model S. Toby went on to an executive role at Proterra, the electric bus company, which recently filed for bankruptcy, but which has been a major factor in the large vehicle electrification space. The two of them joined forces to start Lightship in 2020 and unveiled the L1 for pre-orders in March, 2023.
(00:00):
Yin Lu (01:49):
I'm Yin Lu.
Jason Jacobs (01:49):
And I'm Jason Jacobs, and welcome to My Climate Journey.
Yin Lu (01:55):
This show is a growing body of knowledge focused on climate change and potential solutions.
Cody Simms (02:00):
In this podcast, we traverse disciplines, industries, and opinions to better understand and make sense of the formidable problem of climate change and all the ways people like you and I can help. Ben, Toby, welcome to the show.
Ben Parker (02:16):
Good to be here.
Toby Kraus (02:16):
Thanks.
Cody Simms (02:17):
Boy, you guys have, I think, no offense to any other company who's listening to this, but you might have the sexiest website I've ever seen of a climate tech startup and so with that, kudos to you and I'm excited to jump in and for all of us, including myself, to learn more about the future of electrification as it relates to RVs. Which if you pulled an average person on the street and said, "Name your favorite climate solution," they probably wouldn't throw out electric RVs at the top of the list. You guys are doing it. We're going to dive into all that and what it means, but let's start with your backgrounds. You guys both have incredibly interesting and relevant backgrounds for this space. And Ben, let's start with you. Talk through what you were working on that ultimately got you to the point of wanting to go down this path.
Ben Parker (03:06):
Yeah, we do both love EVs as you probably hear. I'm trained in practice as an engineer for a number of years. My main job in the industry was I worked as a battery engineer at Tesla for about five years. I was there 2015 to 2020. You'll hear from both of us that Tesla is one of the threads that activated Lightship's story and also brought me and Toby together. Although we were somewhat different generations of Tesla's growth, I was there basically from the early days of the Model 3 and through the whole ramp of the Model 3 program. It was a crazy job. It involved living out of a suitcase in casino hotels in Reno, Nevada for better part of two and a half years as we were trying to ramp that first gigafactory and get through what became known historically as production hell. It was hell on Sundays and once the Model 3 was in stable volume production and Tesla was somewhat out of the fire, I worked for a little bit of time in Germany on an automated battery manufacturing line.
Cody Simms (04:03):
Before we even go there, I mean, just to acknowledge, I personally feel like the Tesla Model 3 is probably the most consequential technology launch of the last decade. Could maybe argue the iPhone was the consequential technology launch of the 2000s. One could say the Model 3 might be the thing over the last 10 years that truly transformed society or set us on a path toward transforming it.
Ben Parker (04:27):
We're pretty biased. Toby has a Model Y, I have a Model 3, so we're really biased, but I do remember before the Model 3 was in volume production it was when we were just starting production. I remember another person on the battery engineering team who started a climate company himself, his name is Rich, just commenting to the group that the Model 3 was really kind of like a product ahead of its time. He already believed that it was going to make a big difference and once you started to see them on the road and now five years on just I live in the Bay Area, littered in the Bay Area, they're everywhere.
(04:55):
It's pretty amazing what's happened from it and I think that was part of Toby and my thinking too, back then was you could tell pretty early on what a special product it was going to be that the third major generation of Tesla's cars and what it was going to mean for the idea of a mass market EV, you could tell that electrification was happening and it was going to happen fast in passenger cars and that was what was spurring him and me, although we'd not met at that point, to think each of us, to think ourselves about what the next wave of electrification was going to look like in ground transportation and that was where both of us wanted to be and wanted to have an impact.
(05:27):
And where Lightship then came from was once I was off of the Model 3, I came back to California to Tesla headquarters in Palo Alto. I was working on the next generation battery design, which is now I think what's going into the Cybertruck and everything produced out of the Austin now fourth gigafactory. That was my day job. Then I picked up kind of a pet project first over lunches and then a lot of my free time and the idea was to electrify all the food trucks in the Bay Area because there's a rotating circuit of really great food trucks that come to Tesla's headquarters. They're a pitfall. And what was so annoying to me is that they all run these generators. Usually they paint or gas generators.
Cody Simms (06:04):
Oh yeah. If you stand in the wrong place when you're ordering food and you're by the vent out of those generators, that air is hot and smelly and awful.
Ben Parker (06:13):
Yeah, totally. And even when they put the exhaust on the opposite side from the serving window when they'd line two of them up side by side, now the generator from the truck next to the one you're ordering at is venting into the order window of the next. And I was just doing that day after day and getting great food and also having to deal with these things. I got kind of fed up and so I wanted to work on a way to turn them electric as well. And I was doing that for probably eight or nine months and that was where naturally the idea of RVing came from was electric RVing in particular, was that I would tell people about the food truck project that I was doing in my spare time and then RVing would oftentimes come up in conversation because they're similar needs when you're trying to run all the appliances onboard a vehicle, whether it's a food truck or an RV.
(06:57):
And yeah, I started looking into it, being surprised as we'll get into it by just how popular and sort of impactful RVing is really to the landscape of American life. Then where things really got catalyzed and kicked into gear was that COVID came. We all got locked down that first March of 2020 and so I was cooped up back in my apartment in San Francisco and it felt like a moment to make a decision to go work on this. I ended up, found a family RV rental business in Antioch, California. I got a good rate from them. I called them a week before RVing just blew up in popularity that whole summer as everybody realized it was a great way to isolate that start of the pandemic. I rented this RV at a pretty good rate and took it out for about three months that whole summer and covered maybe 6,000 miles.
(07:42):
I had left Tesla right before I started the journey. It was amazing. I hadn't done a lot of RVing. I grew up on island on the east coast and I live one of the most expensive urban areas in the country. Hard to find space to put an RV there, but both of us love road tripping in the outdoors and that feel at home there. I was out on the road and I was talking to a bunch of RVers and learning the lifestyle and starting to figure out what electrification would mean for the past time too. At that point was really convinced that electrification was going to be really big in RVing and so incorporated the company from the road and then came back to the Bay Area and started working on just the battery system in our first prototype. Then it was within a few months of that, Toby and I got connected.
(08:18):
This is now end of 2020 going into '21 and we actually got put in touch through Dorian West who he was our very first ever investor. Toby and I both knew Dorian from Tesla. He was really longtime Tesla, had been there right from the beginning. Had a big hand in building battery engineering team from its origins and actually led engineering on the semi truck program for a couple of years as well. And he and Toby and I all had overlap and so I was looking for a co-founder. He said, "Have you talked to Toby Kraus?" And I said No. Then I looked up Toby and I gave him the pitch, not once but a few times as you'll hear, and eventually we shook hands first virtually and then in person a few weeks later and started Lightship, the first American electric RV manufacturer and now we're a couple years into building it and I think some pretty cool stuff to show for it.
Cody Simms (09:03):
Let's dive in then and Toby, let's hear your side of the story. And Ben, one thing you didn't even mention was that I guess maybe it was while you were a student but you were building Formula 1 electric racing cars or something crazy like that too.
Ben Parker (09:17):
I am a diehard car nut. Every angle of it. My girlfriend is like, "Will you stop reading Car and Driver for the 12th time?" Grew up loving cars, spent a ton of time in the auto shop as a kid, growing up we had an auto shop in our high school, which was a lucky stroke for me. I basically chose where to go to college because there was a Formula student racing team at that school and I got a tour of that lab and saw the car and stuff like that and I was like, "Yes, this is for me." Ended up building these hybrid electric race cars for sort of like an open wheeled formula style single seater race car. We were a group of a few dozen students and we would build them on a two year design cycle and then compete with them against other schools and I ended up leading at the second half of my time in college and it was good.
Cody Simms (09:59):
Not just leading but winning the title for Best Electric Car two times over and winning first place or something a few years later in a race. I'm sure we could talk all about that then for sure. But let's dive in and have Toby introduce himself, though you will be pleased to know that as part of our summer movie series as a family, we have been making our way through all of the Fast and the Furious. That's our summer evening relaxation I guess. Toby, let's hear from you about your work and gosh, from Tesla to Proterra, you've lived a bunch of the stories in electrification over the last 10 plus years now. You were at Tesla really early.
Toby Kraus (10:37):
Well, first of all, I'm learning a few things about Ben that I didn't know. Namely, I knew he did Formula racing. I didn't know that his team was good and winning things, so I'm glad to hear it. My quick background, I wish I had half the engineering ability that Ben did. The joke of Lightship is I'm an engineer, non-practicing. I majored in engineering in college and then quickly left the trade. I was investment banker for the first couple of years of my career during the last financial crisis, 2007 and 2009. I was working in Morgan Stanley in Manhattan and it was an interesting time to be in finance and as the sky is falling for some reason I thought it was a good idea to go work in automotive, out of the frying pan and into the fire, I guess. Only two of the top three largest vehicle OEMs in the United States had gone bankrupt at that point. I decided to go work at a startup car company. Fortunately I was both naive and lucky and that company was Tesla and so I went there in '09.
Cody Simms (11:29):
'09. How many people were at Tesla in '09?
Toby Kraus (11:33):
I think I was around boy 450 or something like that. Yeah, I was basically hired as the first finance analyst to work on Tesla's IPO. I actually didn't even know it at the time, but that was what they brought me in to do and like Ben, I had just an incredible experience at Tesla. I was there for six years. I led the finance team for a couple of years. I take issue with your comment that the Model S was one of the most transformative products of the last decade. I would take issue that the Model 3 was one of the most transformative. The Model S to me was the most transformative because that was what I was working on during my generation. I can actually can see the Model 3 was more transformative. It was really like first mass market.
Cody Simms (12:09):
I like the rivalry here, this is good. Hopefully I don't create some co-founder angst and problems.
Toby Kraus (12:15):
We're just fine. All of the trials and tribulations of starting a company will give us plenty of angst. We can agree the Model S and the Model 3 are both great cars. Yeah, I was at Tesla for six years, led the financing for a few years and then I was actually a product manager for the Model S, the big black fish-mouthed model you see driving around from time to time still. Then yeah, as you mentioned I went over to Proterra back in 2016.
Cody Simms (12:35):
Maybe describe Proterra for folks who haven't heard of it.
Toby Kraus (12:39):
So Proterra, the core product that they were building at the time was an electric transit bus, like a city bus and at the time, it's crazy to say now, but honestly commercial vehicle electrification, electrification of big vehicles was not guaranteed but not really even being worked on. And Proterra at the time was pretty innovative because they were working on a transit vehicle and a transit vehicle became really the first early adopter market for electrification in commercial transportation. Proterra wasn't, I think is still kind of the market leader in that segment and I actually went over there, I followed my first boss from Tesla, his name is Ryan Popple, pretty awesome figuring in early climate tech investing and an awesome leader.
(13:19):
He'd become Proterra's CEO and I went to love the guy I went to go work for him again and my job was I ran what we call Proterra Powered, actually really kind of worked on starting and then leading Proterra Powered, which is Proterra's technology business taking the technology they developed first for an electric transit bus and then really trying to commercialize it and sell it through a partnership model to any commercial vehicle manufacturer in the world that would buy it.
(13:40):
And that was awesome. We did a ton of really cool early programs. Our main customer was Daimler, which this folks may know is the parent company of Mercedes-Benz and then also on the heavy duty side, which is really where we were working Freightliner trucks and they're the largest commercial vehicle manufacturer in the world, so they have a million platforms that people know and many they don't. But we worked on an electric school bus and electric delivery truck, an electric medium duty truck and that was super cool. I was basically spending all my time thinking about the electrification of ground vehicles. That was maybe the first little nugget that would sort of send me off on RVing through a little bit of roundabout path. I left Proterra at the beginning of the pandemic. I actually didn't know what I was going to do. All I knew is I wanted to actually move my family back to Colorado where I'm speaking to you from and the main motivation there was just honestly personal reasons.
(14:26):
My daughter is two years old, we were struggling young parents trying to find help. I'm sure you can appreciate this, Cody, with young kids. We have family in Colorado and so it was sort of a natural place for us to go and I didn't quite know what my next step would be and I ended up signing up to do what's called an EIR, entrepreneur in residence at a venture firm and I'd never heard of that job before. It was basically I was sitting around thinking about electrification and I was offered a job to get paid money to sit around and think about electrification and I was like, "Yes, I'll do that."
Cody Simms (14:56):
This is Eclipse, right? Major hardware investor.
Toby Kraus (14:59):
Yeah, this is Eclipse. Worked closely with one of the partners there, Greg Reichow, another awesome Tesla guy and it was funny, I love team Eclipse, love the firm, but honestly found out being an EIR, I was like, "That ain't me." You know me, I'm a very pragmatic person. The idea of sitting around and ideating is just like I just wanted to dive in and do something and I wasn't going to give up though. I cheated and I spent all my time networking and as Ben mentioned, got connected to Ben through our very first pre-seed investor and Dorian as I mentioned, and I suppose you could say the rest is history. The reality is, and this gets into the origin of Lightship, when I first heard the pitch for Lightship from Ben, I was super skeptical putting on my hat at Proterra, spent all my time thinking about electrification of different types of vehicles and how big the markets were and what the willingness to pay and the TCO and all of this stuff.
(15:50):
I just totally overlooked RVs. I thought it was a small market and I didn't really understand the product topology. And what Ben knew then, and I know now is it's a massive industry. It's a part of Americana, one in 10 American families that owns an RV. It's like half a million vehicles sold in a year. And to put that in context, in vehicle worlds there's light duty cars and trucks, that's king. It's 12-14 million vehicles sold every year in the United States and then all these other vehicle categories that attract a lot of attention, a lot of venture capital dollars, even the big ones like Class A trucks or something like that, low hundreds of thousands of units in the United States.
(16:27):
For there to be this half a million vehicle category that nobody was working on it, also absolutely critical to the overall success of electrification, particularly if you think about the electrification of the pickup truck, which by the way is the number one selling vehicle in the United States in terms of personal vehicles and it's not even close. That was really compelling to me.
Cody Simms (16:46):
Let's go there then. One of you, whoever wants to do it, break down the RV landscape just for those of us who aren't one of the one in 10 Americans who own an RV, I think of there's tow trailers, there's motor homes, RV feels like the broad category that has a couple different segments underneath it. Maybe explain what that looks like today and then also where the problems are with this category today from an emissions perspective and an energy and power usage perspective.
Toby Kraus (17:14):
So yeah, the market's really interesting and honestly this is sort of why I missed it. If you look at the industry, honestly even starting with the word RV, this is an ongoing forever debate we have at our company, what do you call the product? Is an RV, is it a camper? Is it a towable, trailer?
Cody Simms (17:29):
And when I hear RV, I think Winnebago, that's the thing that pops to my mind.
Toby Kraus (17:33):
And you are not alone.
Cody Simms (17:34):
Actually I think of cousin Eddie in Christmas Vacation is like what I immediately think of, which is totally awful, but I love cousin Eddie, so that's the sight that comes to mind for me.
Toby Kraus (17:43):
We get that. You get Walter White from Breaking Bad. When you say RV, they think of what the industry actually calls a motor home or a motor coach, which is a drivable RV. The overall category RV includes both drivable RVs and towable RVs. Towable RVs are something you're going to pull behind a truck or an SUV. When I first thought about RVs, I thought about what the industry calls a motorhome and it turns out that actually is a very small part of the market. It is about 50,000 vehicles or so sold in the United States, definitely gets a lot of attention, particularly with the popularity of vans and van life these days, but that is the smallest fraction of the market. It is the 10% and the 90%-
Cody Simms (18:24):
That includes the Sprinter Van phenomenon and all of that as well?
Toby Kraus (18:28):
Yeah, that whole category is 50,000 and the Sprinter Van category is like five to 10,000. The really big nugget and the problem to solve is the towable segment, so think more like Airstream, a lot of people are familiar with, not like a Sprinter Van. That was something that really clicked for me. The other part about it, and Ben can get more into this, it also is segment of the market that really is ready for electrification and that was really important for us as we were getting started,
Cody Simms (18:54):
Just because you're not having to power the full drive train, you're more powering the use of it as an actual place where you spend the night and live and make food and this, that and the other. Is that correct?
Ben Parker (19:06):
It's multiple things and by the way, I'm laughing at the Breaking Bad reference. We're a company that kind of loves William Z and Walter White has literally shown up on our board slides before.
Cody Simms (19:15):
You're going to have to fly an underwear flag out the window of the L1 as you go, I think.
Ben Parker (19:18):
Cody, don't tempt me. Because I will. Yes, it's what you're saying. That's part of the reason why tow RVs are ready to electrify where that may not be the case for these larger motor homes. It is partly that yeah, it only needs to sort of aid its propulsion. It doesn't need to do all of the work of moving itself. I think even bigger though is that when you think about a towable RV, it's a trailer gets pulled behind a truck, you have a hitch coming off of the rear bumper of the truck, whether it's a pickup truck or a big SUV, like an expedition or something like that, a Tahoe.
Cody Simms (19:50):
You even have the big ones that sit with part of it in the trailer, right?
Ben Parker (19:54):
In the bed.
Cody Simms (19:55):
In the bed. That's the word I'm looking for.
Ben Parker (19:57):
They call those gooseneck trailers or fifth wheel trailers. Also a big segment of the market. Although interestingly if we say, okay, RVs are 90% towable, so let's say 450,000 units, something like 20% of all the RVs are those gooseneck style trailers. The big fifth wheels, the vast majority of them, like over two thirds of all RVs sold, all of the half million sold are conventional trailers which they call bumper pull trailers. That's something like a Jayco or an Airstream or any of those sort of classic trailers that we're used to seeing.
(20:30):
What's so interesting from an electrification standpoint and really kind of like a product design standpoint as well is that those trailers, it's not legal to ride in a trailer as you are pulling it down the road. It's not crash safe and all those sorts of things so that the occupants are always sitting in the truck while you're in motion. And what that means is that you can design the body of the trailer to be very efficient as it moves down the road. Most trailers are sort of like a full height brick.
Cody Simms (20:55):
They're a bunch of drag.
Ben Parker (20:56):
Yeah, you're pulling a sail behind you and so you get a lot of aerodynamic drag in particular from that and that aero is a really key element of the efficiency that an electric vehicle demands. You can have a small enough battery on board and still get a long range and so with a trailer you can sort of rethink the body and that's sort of what we did from the start to be more of a collapsible design so that in the case of our first product, which we call the L1, we say that it has a road mode and a camping mode and when it's in the road mode-
Cody Simms (21:25):
Save it, save it. I don't want you to spoil that. We're going to come to that. We're going to describe all about the L1 because that part is super cool.
Ben Parker (21:30):
Let's do it.
Cody Simms (21:30):
Everyone stay tuned on that.
Ben Parker (21:32):
Suffice it to say that when the L1 is in the road mode, it is a collapsed shape and when you can reduce the frontal area of the vehicle and make it into sort of a bullet like shape, then you can get really great passive efficiency out of the vehicle, which you can't necessarily say for something like a converted bus or something like that where if you're inside it's always going to be this big full height thing and so it's always going to be pushing a lot of air and thus not be very efficient. That was our approach was to first be really passively efficient. Then you can put a relatively small powertrain on board, so think an EV battery and a motor.
(22:08):
The trailer actually self propels and the reason that you have to take that approach of going ground up with a redesign of the trailer is because if you were to just throw batteries in a motor at a conventional trailer design, the size of the battery and the weight of the battery that would be required to get, let's say a full 300 miles of range, would be too great. You can't make a great consumer product in that way.
Cody Simms (22:30):
If I understand correctly, the trailers themselves still have some degree of propulsion to them. They're not just purely towed. Am I hearing you correctly there?
Ben Parker (22:38):
Ours and uniquely ours, most trailers conventionally have always been dead weight. It's just a brick that you pull behind your car.
Cody Simms (22:44):
So yours actually has an aerodynamic footprint to it and it's actually presumably helping the vehicle that is pulling it move forward down the road to some degree. If you are driving a future EV truck, like the Cybertruck, once it comes out, you're reducing the load on the battery of the truck. But even if you're driving a gas or diesel truck today, you're helping to create greater fuel efficiency.
Ben Parker (23:08):
You nailed it. We say it's a self-propelling or a range assisting design through combination of great passive efficiency and putting a drive line on board. You can basically be the unlock for electric RVing because the state-of-the-art is if you get one of these new EV trucks like Ford F150 Lightning or the Cybertruck or the Rivian or there's a whole bunch that are coming out now, biggest vehicle segment in America is going electric and it's really exciting, but they all kind of have an Achilles heel, which is towing range and really it's because they're trying to pull a big brick of a load like a travel trailer behind them. But if you first make the trailer efficient and put a propulsion system on board, now you can get back to effectively zero range loss for those EV trucks and that becomes an unlock for the electrification of the pickup truck because what people want to do with pickup trucks is truck stuff. They want to haul things and pull things and so you sort of must redesign the RV to enable electrification of that segment.
Yin Lu (24:05):
Hey everyone, I'm Yin, a partner at MCJ Collective here to take a quick minute to tell you about our MCJ membership community, which was born out of a collective thirst for peer-to-peer learning and doing that goes beyond just listening to the podcast. We started in 2019 and have grown to thousands of members globally. Each week we're inspired by people who join with different backgrounds and points of view. What we all share is a deep curiosity to learn and a bias to action around ways to accelerate solutions to climate change.
(24:31):
Some awesome initiatives have come out of the community, a number of founding teams have met, several nonprofits have been established and a bunch of hiring has been done. Many early stage investments have been made as well as ongoing events and programming like monthly women in climate meetups, idea jam sessions for early stage founders, climate book club, art workshops and more. Whether you've been in the climate space for a while or just embarking on your journey, having a community to support you is important. If you want to learn more, head over to MCJCollective.com and click on the members tab at the top. Thanks and enjoy the rest of the show.
Cody Simms (25:05):
Super interesting that I didn't have as much context on in terms of your strategy and then at the time when it's stationary, a trailer also is using fossil fuels for heating, cooling, cooking, et cetera. Maybe share a little bit more about the legacy state, what fuels are used, what they're used for, and how you all thought about approaching that side of things too.
Ben Parker (25:25):
Back to the generator roots here, it's sort of the way that you run a camper today. The home side of the camper is through honestly kind of a hodgepodge of fossil fuels, fuel systems. You'll have typically a generator which is run either off of propane or gasoline or occasionally diesel. That's what's providing electrical power to run the electric appliances on board. Sometimes it doesn't even have enough power capacity to run something like the air conditioner, in which case in many RVs, you can only run the air conditioner if you are plugged into the grid at a campground that would support it.
(26:00):
Separate from that, there's a propane system, so typically you have propane cans on the tongue of the trailer and that propane is used for sort of all of your cooking. It's used to heat the inside of the cabin. There are of course safety systems on top of that to make sure that you don't accidentally build up carbon monoxide inside of the vehicle and unfortunately you can poison yourself with a propane system and then separate from that there's a battery system as well, but it's an old style 12 fold car battery, like a lead acid battery and it's fraught.
(26:28):
Toby and I have had our furnace blower motor fail multiple times on us overnight and leave us out in the cold. You can sort of go from that hodgepodge of different fossil fuel systems to a single fuel source which is clean and is all electric, and if you can do that, you turn an experience that's kind of involved, frankly from a power standpoint, if you're anywhere off grid, which is what RVing is about and what our viewers like to do to one that feels in a lot of ways more like a vacation home. In your vacation home, you flip the breaker. Now all the lights are on again. Similar to our products where you go in, you turn it on and now everything's just live. The entire roof of the vehicle is solar integrated as well. You can fit a pretty large solar array up there and that big solar array is enough to continuously provide energy to support your camping experience as you're running the appliances.
Toby Kraus (27:20):
One other comment on that, this is something that Ben and I are super enthusiastic about. I think it's super important when it comes to consumer climate tech. It also relates to your comment about our website. Thanks by the way, we're super proud of it. When you think about consumer climate, something that I always appreciated about Tesla and I think the reason Tesla was able to be successful is they made a better product. It was game-changing and your commentary on the Model 3, you could almost forget that it's electric and it's just an incredible product. It's one of the best products for the last decade. The reason Tesla was able to be so successful was that and the climate really kind of came along for free.
(27:56):
You look at the RV market, this is something that we focused on, like here is an opportunity where you can make just a game changing product. The impact comes along for free and because it's a better product, you have an engine for change. For us, a lot of what goes into the product and design, the brand, the website, that actually is kind of like our engine, right? We're sustainability nerds, but the reason people are we can kind of recognize why they're going to buy our products is because they're better, not because they're necessarily sustainable.
Cody Simms (28:24):
Let's go down that path then. Ben gave us a little bit of a preview of it, but we've announced the first product line relatively recently earlier this spring I believe, which was the L1 trailer. What is the Lightship L1 trailer?
Ben Parker (28:37):
It's the perfect travel trailer for the age of electrification, Cody, of course.
Cody Simms (28:41):
Describe it. pulls up next to me and what do I see?
Ben Parker (28:45):
And you think, "Spaceship? I don't know. What am I looking at? This is amazing." It's really cool. It's about a 27 foot long family-oriented travel trailer that's about the size that a small family would often take on an RV vacation, like going to state parks or national parks, things like that. It's very sleek. It has a lot of modern automotive styling on the outside. That combined with the company name Lightship is why we get a lot of spaceship. What was that article to that MotorTrend?
Toby Kraus (29:13):
Yeah, there was a lot of Star Wars references in that one. It's like a travel trailer galaxy beyond its competitors or something like that.
Ben Parker (29:20):
That's kind of what you see on the outside. Then the inside-
Cody Simms (29:23):
First it pulls up and it's collapsed. It collapses when it drives. Then when I'm ready to get into it, there's actually basically a lid that raises up, that raises up the windows.
Ben Parker (29:35):
It's not just a lid, it's the whole roof. It's funny because going down the road you would not recognize that it is an RV for many reasons and it's not the aesthetic design alone. It looks like a bullet shape. It's this long bullet that gets pulled behind your truck. It's about the height of the truck as it goes a little bit wider than the truck, about the same height. You get to the campsite and there's sort of this presentational moment where it goes from this trailer that tows in a pretty small way to an enormous living space, which we call the transformation from the road mode to the camping mode. The whole top half of the vehicle raises up about three feet and it's sort of shocking when you see it. You're like, "How did that just turn into that?"
Cody Simms (30:14):
And most of that is glass window, so it creates basically this panorama view that you get.
Ben Parker (30:19):
Yeah, exactly. The whole top half has a lot of transparent surfaces, windows all around it, and you especially appreciate it from the inside because you walk in and because of the transforming nature, you get a really tall ceiling out of it. It's about a seven and a half foot residential height ceiling, which people are not used to in a trailer because normally you get maybe 6'3" or 6'4" for the ceiling height. You get this feeling of spaciousness on the inside and then you are just surrounded by windows. When you're in a really nice natural environment like a state forest or a mountaintop or something like that, you're just looking out over vistas the natural setting that you just spent all this time getting to.
Cody Simms (30:58):
Solar paneled roof, yeah?
Ben Parker (30:59):
Yeah. Instead of having a bunch of cutouts and holes for air conditioners and things like that, the entire roof is dedicated to a seamless solar array. The MCJ audience will especially appreciate this. It's about a two kilowatt array just on the fixed portion of the roof. Then actually there's a way to expand the array into the awnings as well. In total it's about a three kilowatt array. Most American homes only have maybe four or five kilowatts of solar on the roof, so no ground-based EV will have an array that big. And it's great because it basically means that you have a source of replenishment for the battery. Effectively the battery is big enough of course to buffer you between bad weather and things like that. But if you have any decent amount of sun, it's very likely that the solar input will keep up with your energy use as you're camping and even running the air conditioner and things like that.
(31:49):
There's an interesting portion of the vehicle on the front. It's like a box that sits on the tongue of the vehicle. And what we did was we realized that normally the propane cans would go up on the very front of the vehicle there, but no fossil fuels, no propane to store there anymore. Instead we both changed the architecture and shifted the air conditioner out to the tongue so it becomes a heat pump style heating and cooling all electric air conditioner and the loud bits like the compressor for instance, which you really don't want to be inside the cabin, you can shift out to the exterior. It's kind of like a mini split for folks who have that at home. You know how quiet it is on the inside. You put all that loud stuff on the outside and then you just have an air recirculation system on the inside, so it's like whisper quiet cooling or heating and I'll power it off to the battery.
Cody Simms (32:32):
Your cooking service is an induction stove?
Ben Parker (32:34):
Yeah, exactly. Which it's great because it's electric, it's very efficient, but one thing that we're learning that's actually especially cool about that in an RV setting is there's not that much counter space in an RV. It's a pretty small vehicle. Because induction cooktops stay relatively cool and integrate flush into the surface of the counter, now you have even more prep space than you used to in a vehicle. I think one thing that we talk about a lot that we think is really cool is that because this thing is effectively an electric vehicle, it is like a little vacation home on wheels and there's a lot of consumer electronics built into it. We're having to build all of those three things at once.
(33:11):
For technologies that are nascent and up and coming in residential use, for instance, light induction cooktops, like bi-directional heat pumps, I think it's very likely that for our customers these will be some of the first times that they will have been exposed to heat pumps, induction cooktops, things like that. And as they get comfortable with them in their Lightship, then when it comes time, like your furnace fails at home or you're renovating your kitchen and you're going to replace your stove top, if you already have a lot of comfort with those technologies, it's all the more likely that you're going to try to electrify your home with them as well. It's kind of not just a gateway to truck electrification, it seeps into the home as well. It is a home.
Cody Simms (33:50):
Thanks Ben, for painting the picture of what it feels like. And I can only sit here and imagine, I haven't been inside one but seen the pictures on the website and I've seen a couple other videos that you all have shared on social media and other places and it certainly looks very different from an Airstream trailer's pretty sleek looking, right? But this is a whole new level of sleek presentation. Toby, talk a little bit more about the price points, the target customer segmentation and also just availability. What is it going to look like as it rolls out and becomes available to people?
Toby Kraus (34:21):
Yeah, definitely. One thing I also just comment before I answer your question too on the design, we appreciate it, we're really proud of and I think we'll owe a lot of credit to our head of design. His name's Rob Williams who was one of our very first hires and I think this was something for Ben and I as we started off on this journey, it wasn't immediately obvious what an electric RV could be or that the design should be critical part of it. And I think Rob, this is a lot of his influence. He was the early creative force at Rivian and did a lot of the design for the R1T and the R1s. We really have him to think for a lot of that.
(34:51):
On that price point and customer and what that looks like and when this is available, so our starting price is right around 120 grand. It's expensive and Ben and I think are recognizing that. And if you look at the overall market, I'd say that the Lightship L1 is really targeted at what I'd call the mainstream premium segment. Think an Airstream. That for us is a really awesome place to start, land and expand as a startup would say. There's a ton of volume that transacts there and there's an opportunity for us to really build our brand. But I think it's also important to say that why are we doing this? What are Ben and I about? We're designing in business for scale and for impact. I think this is a little bit of Tesla DNA here, but the L1 I would say is our Tesla Roadster. This is our first product and we're hyper-focused on driving the price down and getting to subsequent generations of the product.
(35:48):
Won't be surprised that they are called the L2 and the L3. We're not the most creative folks in the world and ultimately we want to be the reason that the entire industry goes electric. There's absolutely no reason the industry needs to rely on fossil fuels and frankly, the industry does need to go electric if we're going to see large penetration of electric vehicles in the truck segment as we've talked about. That's kind of where we're starting. The L1 we'll be starting production at the end of next year and kind of ramping up from there. And on the customer point, I think this is something that is really interesting and something that Ben and I are also really excited about. When we started, we've been working on this for a little over two years and we I think had this vision of bringing electrification to new demographics of people and also bringing new demographics of people into RVing.
(36:33):
What does that mean from a customer standpoint? What that means is we want to make the market bigger. We don't want to only be designing a product for the market sort of status quo as it exists today. At the same time, we see a bit of a problem in electrification as it exists today. There's a bit of a stereotype of who drives a Tesla and where you'll find Teslas and urban areas and coastal areas and liberal leaning areas, and I think that's sort of all well and good, but I think in order for electrification to really be successful, it needs to become mainstream. It needs to go everywhere in our country. Then you turn back to us, I think we want to grow the pie in terms of who does RVing, so it means new people in the market, but we also want to build a product that appeal to the market as it exists today.
(37:19):
We don't want our only customers to be people who drive Teslas, though Ben and I both drive Teslas and love Tesla. That would be a failing if that was all we appealed to. This sort of started as a vision, call this a couple of years ago and one of the very first things Ben and I did, this is before we had any money, we had a lot of time, is we went out and we talked to a ton of our RVers. And we talked to several dozen RVers and from that we kind of got this early hypothesis of who our customers would be and our number one customer demographic we call and still call the family adventurer, a family of two parents and a kid or a kid and a dog or a couple kids. This was sort of a customer group that expand a lot of these adopter groups that we're talking about, both more traditional and sort of more technology focused people.
(38:07):
At least that was our early hypothesis, but this was a very qualitative study. Later, to flash forward, as we were leading up to our launch this spring, we did a much more in-depth study. We surveyed 2000 people and out of that study we wanted to validate our hypothesis. What was really cool, and I think something that we're really proud of is it really showed that when you look at who was really excited about the Lightship, this is actually pre-launch, we actually revealed the L1 and what it looked like. It was kind of a risk because we're debating, "Should we even do this? There could be a leak or something," but we're like, "No, we really need to understand if we have the product right before we launch it." And what we were super excited to see was the broad appeal of the product was there.
(38:50):
People across the board think it was like 80% of people said the product was appealing or very appealing, but more importantly you really saw that the customer groups were both the existing more traditional market and new entrants into the market, people who didn't necessarily have a lot of RV experience. And that has since borne out as we've gotten the product more onto the feeling done more events, and then we're constantly talking to customers. You have certainly people who are like, "This is awesome. I'm going to tow up on my Cybertruck when the Cybertruck shows up." And one of Ben's favorite stories is the family he met in rural Arkansas who's going to put it behind their F250 dually. And that's all awesome. That is all good for us and I think good for electrification, obviously good for our business, so we're excited about it.
Ben Parker (39:35):
It's kind of obvious in retrospect too, if you don't have to worry about a bunch of fuel sources for your camping, that's great. You mentioned earlier too, Cody, where even if you're towing with a gas or diesel vehicle, which is still the vast majority of the incumbent fleets, tens of millions of gas and diesel trucks out there, those owners are not that psyched about getting eight miles a gallon when they're towing a normal trailer. To be able to get back up to 20 or 25 miles a gallon, which is something where the efficiency works both ways necessary for an EV, but hugely complementary just from a gas savings standpoint and ultimately a pocketbook standpoint for people who have gone RVing all their lives. That's really cool.
Cody Simms (40:15):
I mean, it's interesting to think of it as, you could call it an RV tow trailer that's electric or you could call it gas mileage booster for your existing truck that you can also sleep in.
Ben Parker (40:23):
Yeah. Another really interesting element of it which has dawned on us more over time is that charging infrastructure is sort of one of the big frontiers and it's one of the big talking points as the electrification of the car happens in America. Is the charging infrastructure adequate to meet the need as we get millions of these things on the road? And I remember talking to a guy who has a contracting business and drives big diesel trucks in Minnesota and we were talking about is range anxiety going to be a thing with a trailer like this? He was like, "No, not a problem." And it's actually twofold. One, because I know I can count on my truck to get me the distance if I need to, even if the range assist runs out. And two, most of the RV campgrounds that I go to have effectively destination charging built in to the experience. They all have high power plugs to run big motor coaches and things like that. That same 240 volt plug you can use to charge your Lightship overnight and then keep going.
Cody Simms (41:17):
It's interesting, I've heard the same argument to be made around the electrification of recreational boating too, which is that docks already have all these electric plugs on them. We haven't talked about the battery at all, getting into range anxiety and all that sort of stuff. The battery side of your story is super important. Before we, and not that range anxiety relates to your tow trailer, but this is what I think of when I think of range anxiety, I think of battery. Before we do, one thing I wanted to hit on is you mentioned you'll be manufacturing and starting to deliver at the end of 2024. Are you all doing all the manufacturing in Colorado, in the US? Is that the plan?
Toby Kraus (41:51):
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that's really important for us. If you look at to sort of global industry, it is really focused on North America and the United States. I think for us focusing on that market and manufacturing-
Cody Simms (42:02):
Made in the USA is an important thing to be able to say.
Toby Kraus (42:05):
Made in the USA I think is important. And honestly it's just practical. It's 27 foot, 7,500 pound vehicle. That's not something that is going to make a lot of sense to build overseas and then ship here.
Ben Parker (42:14):
It doesn't fit in a shipping container.
Toby Kraus (42:16):
It does not fit in a shipping container. Yeah, we just announced our first pilot production facility and that'll be in Broomfield, Colorado.
Cody Simms (42:25):
And moving into the battery, describe what is on board with the L1.
Ben Parker (42:30):
Honestly, Cody, this is kind of the secret of building this company in the 2020s is that the batteries that we need to make this product exist and they exist because of the automotive industry and the sort of broader movement that has happened and ultimately probably tens or hundreds of billions of dollars that the auto industry has spent developing really great high quality, low cost EV components. If you look at something like the battery, if we were for our first product, Toby and I have both worked in batteries from different angles, if we were to for our first product as a startup take on doing a great high quality, low cost, high voltage automotive EV battery from scratch, that alone is a probably multi hundred million dollar endeavor just for us to build that. The beauty is that there is now a supply base of EV components that are out there from the auto industry.
(43:20):
There are multiple suppliers of great high quality sort of [inaudible 00:43:25] linear high voltage auto batteries of a standard chemistry and a lithium ion chemistry and can fit between the frame rails of a trailer like this. We can go to that supply base and get what we need. And that applies to the battery in terms of its cost and performance and it applies to a number of the other components in the vehicle too. Effectively, the guts of this thing are a bunch of EV automotive components integrated together with a home solar system and then controls a custom in-house developed control system to manage the energy so that you can feed power in a seamless way to all of your camping appliances, your cooking and heating and things like that and have a seamless experience out of it.
Cody Simms (44:07):
It's a sizable battery, right? What is it, 80 kilowatt hour battery, is that right?
Ben Parker (44:10):
It is a big boy. It's an 80 kilowatt hour battery.
Cody Simms (44:13):
Which is significantly larger than a Powerwall, if I understand correctly.
Ben Parker (44:18):
It's like six of them. If you stacked up six Tesla Powerwalls, you would get this much energy. That by the way is-
Cody Simms (44:23):
And just for comparison, do you know for the ... I don't mean to put you on the spot, but for the Ford F150 Lightning or the Cybertruck, what's roughly the size of battery that are going into those type of vehicles?
Ben Parker (44:34):
Well, it's funny because they have huge batteries too. Theirs are in fact even larger than this one. They're like 130 kilowatt hour battery.
Cody Simms (44:40):
Because they have to drive the thing down the road.
Ben Parker (44:42):
Totally. This is part of what's so great is that because the vehicle is efficient enough, you can put a relatively small EV battery on board, so our battery is the same size as would be in something like a long range Model 3. It's about that size. It is more than enough energy for both powering your camping loads. Actually it turns out it can even be used to power your home as well. If you think about the life of an RV, most RVs just sit there for 48 or 49 weeks out of the year.
Cody Simms (45:10):
You're getting to it. We had a community question through our MCJ member Slack from Ryan Ocker who said, "Hey, RVs have a relatively low utilization rate, so you've got this big battery on it. Is there something you can do at home to use it?"
Ben Parker (45:24):
Yes, Ryan. Toby, you should jump into. That's one of the big ideas of the company as it relates to the product is how do we ... Really the product and beyond is how do we turn an asset that is a very low utilized asset? RV's probably going to used less than 5% of the year, into one that is very high utilization. And there are multiple ways to do that. You can sort of get at it through the business model. You can also get at it through fundamentally what the product is, which is to say an energy asset. As it sits at your home and it has three kilowatts of solar in the roof and six Tesla Powerwalls in the floor, it's a home solar system. It's a very capable large home solar system that you sort of just got as a part of getting an RV and you will use to back up your home when the grid goes down. You can daily charge your daily driver EV off of it. There's sort of no limit to how you can use it as an energy tool.
Cody Simms (46:11):
Yeah, that's right. You've got the solar array on the top. You all of a sudden now get six Tesla Powerwalls and what'd you say, two to three kilowatts solar sitting there in your driveway?
Ben Parker (46:22):
Yeah, and one thing that's so cool about it is that we talk a lot about EVs being used as an energy asset for your house too. There's vehicle to grid or vehicle to home or topics that come up a lot. Now, one of the challenges there is you don't know exactly when your EV is going to be home. Is it going to be home when you need it to power your home or is somebody out doing an errand and the grid goes down? In the case of an RV, you can almost guarantee that if your RV is home, you are home too. You'll be able to use it to keep the lights on.
Cody Simms (46:49):
What needs to happen for a home to be able to power itself off of that? That's a local regulatory challenge, I guess more than anything. Is that right?
Ben Parker (46:58):
I think of it a bit like a backup generator. If you have a backup power source, then you can switch off of the grid and over to, in this case here, Lightship to power the home. There's additional development complexity that's involved in then grid connecting the Lightship as well.
Cody Simms (47:13):
So vehicle to home, not an issue, vehicle to grid becomes a can of worms a little bit?
Ben Parker (47:18):
Yeah, it's more challenging. The lucky thing is that it's on the path for us and it turns out as we've actually gone deeper with customers and gone through how they would use it or where they would need it to use this as a home solar system, much of the upfront need is about energy security and reducing your energy bill by charging your EV every day. There's definitely additional value in the longterm around vehicle to grid, but it's not an absolute upfront necessity is what we're finding and that kind of streamlines our path to market.
Cody Simms (47:44):
I don't see any of that story today in your website, your marketing materials, this is stuff that right now you're just leading with, "Hey, it's a good product" it looks like. I presume over time that will be part of the story you tell.
Toby Kraus (47:56):
Indeed, I think you point out one of the major areas that we need to keep working on as we build the brand. We've loosely called this chapter two and we haven't put a lot of it on our website and that will be forthcoming. I mean, maybe to give a little preview, like Ben said a little bit of it, but as we got started, we started working on the problem of electrification and I think what we realized is in the RV market problem, one is electrification, problem two is utilization, and utilization is a really interesting problem in this market. And Ben just sort of touched on one of the big ideas and one of the opportunities that comes from the utilization problem, but there are others, and this relates back to what I described as our vision before in terms of bringing new demographics of people into RVing and sort of what does that mean or what needs to happen.
(48:44):
And one of the things that needs to happen is we need to think of ways to get people in a Lightship that don't necessarily involve them purchasing a Lightship. Maybe they don't have the means to purchase a Lightship, maybe they just don't want to purchase a Lightship. Maybe they don't have the space in their driveway, but fortunately there's this utilization problem, right? People buy already, half a million RVs are sold every year and then they're used 5% of the time. There's a massive amount of RVs at any given time to be used. For us, there's really cool things to do with that. Either plug in your house and use it anytime the sun is shining. Actually with the battery, it doesn't even need to be shining, or give your RV back to Lightship and let us use it to get more people into the product who maybe just won't take it off for a weekend. I think that's something you'll see more and more information from us as we enter chapter two of the business.
Ben Parker (49:36):
We're kind of brimming with excitement and we really want to tell you all about it. Putting the finishing touches on it.
Cody Simms (49:41):
I don't want you to say anything you're not ready to say yet, but I guess it sounds like some degree of sort of shared usage model potentially being considered.
Toby Kraus (49:49):
Indeed.
Ben Parker (49:49):
That's appropriate. Yeah.
Cody Simms (49:50):
Super cool. Then I guess the last question that we had that came in through the community was from Weldon Kennedy. You may be familiar with him. He's building a home electrification company as well, all around induction stoves and whatnot. He asked if you could just share anything about the lifecycle emissions analysis work that you've done to look at the embedded emissions of the vehicle itself relative to I guess payback period on those emissions as people use it.
Toby Kraus (50:19):
It's a really good topic and this is something that we think about quite a bit too. Honestly, I think this applies to all electric vehicles and on the one hand you think about the impact that is created by not using fossil fuel, and on the other hand you look at the impact that is created in all the embedded emissions of all the materials that are going into it. And for us, the most important thing I think to say here and the way in which we are attacking this problem is really focused on another company value, which we say is built to last and what does that mean?
(50:53):
You can use sustainable materials in your design and that's awesome and we're doing that, but actually the bigger opportunity when it comes to RVs, if you look at your typical RVs, there's sort of like a dirty secret in the industry that they are designed to fail and you talk to different people and this is like a nugget we got from a former RV executive and he said that your average RV is designed to be used 50 times and that it ends up in a landfill, which is insane to think of that.
(51:24):
So for us, part of our approach and part of the Tesla background, we are bringing an automotive approach to developing an RV. And one of the big things there is designing durability. While a traditional RV may be designed to only be used for a few years and it's pretty typical for people to sell and upgrade their RV, we are going to be focused on designing an RV that is something you pass down to your kids. It is a generational item. Getting back to the question, that for us, in addition to replacing the fossil fuels is how we really think about mitigating the full lifecycle emissions of the product.
Cody Simms (51:59):
And a lot of it will probably, again, come down to how much utilization the buyer is able to get out of it. Again, for all the ways we talked about, even when they're not sleeping in it, how much is it powering their house or powering the grid or serving as a backup, all which reduces its overall time to payback on its lifecycle embedded emissions?
Toby Kraus (52:22):
Yeah, exactly. It's getting rid of the fossil fuels, that reduces the emissions, getting rid of the fossil fuels and making it built to last. Now your emissions per use are great. Now increasing your utilization from 5% to 50%, now your emissions per lifetime, no number of uses is actually diminishing a fractional amount of what it started with.
Ben Parker (52:43):
We think and talk a lot too about some of the indirect or the ripple effects that happen here too. First and foremost, thinking about ourselves as a key enabler of the electrification of the pickup truck. If those are going to sell, how do people need to want them? For people to want them, they need to be able to use them as it fits into their lifestyle today. That's sort of a big shift that we see ourselves as an enabler for. And I think even zooming out further, Toby and I talk sometimes about just where can we fit into the travel landscape and in particular the sustainable travel landscape?
(53:10):
Because for us as everyday consumers, so much of our impact as it relates to travel is us getting on a plane and staying in a hotel somewhere and there's a lot of emissions associated with that. When you think about doing more regional and nature-based trips in a vehicle that it itself and the truck that's pulling, it can run sustainably. That's a great alternative and it's a low emissions alternative to a lot of people travel today.
Cody Simms (53:32):
I so appreciate you guys taking the time to come on here and share all about what you're building and what you may even be thinking about building in the future. With that, I want to say thanks for joining us today. We didn't even mention MCJ Collective that we're proud to be two time investors in what you're building. Certainly want to disclose that and thank you for that. I guess maybe we didn't hit on that, is just how you finance the business so far. If you want to take 30 seconds to share that and then we'll wrap it up and let people get back to this and maybe they're even listening to this episode in their electric vehicle or in their gas vehicle pulling a trailer and anticipating what the future may hold for them.
Toby Kraus (54:10):
Is that your way of saying, Cody, that you're only have given us the softball questions and have you not been an investor, you'd really hit us hard? It's not lost on us the kind of insanity that we are a venture backed RV company, which is I think the first of its kind, and I think we've been really lucky to have the support of really awesome investors such as yourselves and other kind of our major investors. Our obvious ventures who led our seed round, Prelude Ventures, who led our Series A, and Congruent Ventures has participated in all of our rounds and they've all been really awesome.
(54:42):
And I think what's really exciting for them is in the world of climate, I think generally, I think consumer facing climate is a little bit rarer, but I think also just looking at a completely new category of vehicles and a completely new opportunity to bring electrification to new demographics of people like we talked about, is something that has overcome the hump of investing in a venture backed RV company. Yeah, it's been quite a ride and I think there certainly will be more fundraising for us as we bring the product to market, so stay tuned.
Cody Simms (55:13):
All right, well Toby and Ben, thanks for your time today. Super appreciate getting a chance to chat and for you to share everything that you're working on with us. Yeah,
Ben Parker (55:21):
Thanks, Cody.
Jason Jacobs (55:22):
Thanks again for joining us on My Climate Journey podcast. At MCJ Collective, we're all about powering collective innovation for climate solutions by breaking down silos and unleashing problem solving capacity. If you'd like to learn more about MCJ Collective, visit us at MCJCollective.com. And if you have a guest suggestion, let us know that via Twitter, @mcjpod.
Yin Lu (55:49):
For weekly climate op-eds, jobs, community events, and investment announcements from our MCJ venture funds, be sure to subscribe to our newsletter on our website.
Jason Jacobs (55:58):
Thanks and see you next episode.
