Electric RV startup Lightship’s plans for ramping up in 2026

Next year is slated to be a big one for electric RV startup Lightship.

2025 was the year it launched production of its flagship trailer, a spaceship-like vehicle outfitted with solar arrays to enable off-grid adventures. 2026 is the year of ramping up production—no easy feat for a product with thousands of parts that hasn’t reached economies of scale, and with the complexities of establishing a supply base from scratch.

“The idea behind our products and the ownership and user experience that we want to build around is that it should basically be what RVing was always meant to be, which is freedom off-grid in beautiful places and the ability to take your comfort with you on the road, wherever you go,” Ben Parker, Lightship’s co-founder and chief product officer, told Tech Brew.

Hitting the road: Parker and fellow Tesla alum Toby Kraus founded Lightship in 2020.

“I had a pet project while still at Tesla to try to electrify all the food trucks in the Bay Area, because I couldn’t stand yelling over a gas generator every day to put in my lunch order,” Parker said. “That snowballed into, let’s build a ground-up, fully electric RV company.”

He and Kraus got to work raising funding (the startup closed a $34 million Series B funding round last year) and developing a product, opting to do much of the component design in-house. And executives say that about 80% of Lightship’s components are sourced domestically.

“We made a strategic decision to in-source manufacturing, I think a little bit compelled by our Tesla roots,” Parker said. “It’s also very practically important to us, because when you’re a tiny startup, you have almost no leverage in your supply base.”

Built-in solar: One of the features of Lightship’s products that Parker said differentiates it is solar arrays built into the roof.

“The panel is designed to be very lightweight so that it can bond into the composite roof assembly, which itself has perfect impressions in it to accept that solar panel,” he said. “What you get out of that is a very weight-efficient and high-power-efficiency approach to building a solar array. That type of thinking of being built in, not bolted on, applies at literally every level of this product.”

“We also swung for the fences and put an enormous battery in and a giant solar array on the roof, because if you’re going to take an inch and try to reinvent a product category and make a real dent in an industry, you might as well take a mile,” he added.

The electric RV space is growing, with offerings from other startups like Grounded and Evotrex, a hybrid RV trailer company that emerged from stealth earlier this month with $16 million in seed funding.

“I think it’s a good indication that this is actually gonna happen,” Parker said of the emergence of other startups in the sector.

Ramping production: For now, Lightship’s challenges are less about demand (Parker declined to share specific numbers, but said the startup has “many hundreds” of customers on a waiting list and “many millions of dollars of orders booked”) and more about supply.

“The fundamental challenge of a ground-up vehicle manufacturer is ramping production from zero to hundreds and eventually thousands of vehicles produced per year, which is our intention and plan,” Parker said. “We’re still early days.”

Lightship launched production of its first model, the AE.1 Cosmos Edition, in August at its Broomfield, Colorado, factory, and announced two additional trims: the AE.1 Atmos and AE.1 Panos. The starting price for the Atmos is $184,000, with deliveries slated to start in the spring. Panos starts at $151,000; deliveries are scheduled to start later in 2026.

“The Cosmos Edition proved that the market is hungry for electric RVs that don’t compromise on performance or design,” Kraus, co-founder and CEO, said in a statement. “Now we’re opening those doors wider. Atmos and Panos bring our vision of sustainable adventure to more families and adventurers, regardless of their camping style.”

The vehicles are powered by Lightship’s proprietary “TrekDrive” system, what the company describes as “an intelligent propulsion technology that can double the range or mpg of the tow vehicle.”

Hayley Cashdollar, Lightship’s head of operations, told Tech Brew via email that the startup’s product development and manufacturing processes “often occur concurrently” at this stage.

“It sounds like a challenge, but it’s actually allowed us to discover some incredible synergies where we can augment design to meet a manufacturing need, or vice versa, and save money and time along the way,” she said.

Lightship so far has built a “handful” of production vehicles that it’s delivering to customers, according to Parker. The company is slated to scale up production 10x next year, to about 100 vehicles.

“What are the core challenges for our company over the next year? They are operationalizing and scaling a pretty complicated and nascent production operation, and then pulling the cost out of the product,” Parker said. The challenge of bringing costs down and ramping volumes up, he added, “is what keeps my co-founder and me up at night.”