Toby Kraus has a theory about why electric vehicle sales are stalling in the United States — and it’s not just that President Donald Trump abruptly eliminated the Biden-era tax credits that kept prices lower.
“I firmly believe it’s because we haven’t actually built the products for all of the demographics of people,” Kraus told Latitude Media.
After spending the first decade of his career at electric carmaker Tesla and the now-defunct heavy-duty truck battery manufacturer Proterra, Kraus set out to serve a market that played to the one thing he had spent more of his life doing than working on automotive electrification: camping. In 2021, he and his co-founder Ben Parker launched Lightship, a manufacturer of towable electric RVs that look like a cross between a classic Airstream and a Rivian R1S SUV.
Now, the company is planning to use the same battery platform that powers the RV for a whole separate line of trailers that could provide portable energy storage in different contexts. The product, which Lightship has dubbed the “PowerSled,” would allow companies such as utilities or landscaping businesses to swap the system in for an extra diesel truck.
“If you live in a coastal urban place, and you’re mostly driving to the grocery store, that problem has been pretty well solved. But in the United States, the top-selling vehicles every year are trucks; it’s the Ford F-150, the Chevy Silverado, the Dodge Ram,” Kraus, Lightship’s chief executive, said in an exclusive interview. “Those are really hard-to-electrify segments because people have different expectations — they want to carry a bunch of bricks, they want to haul their boat to the lake — and EVs don’t really do that well.”
