futureboy wrote:
I think this may be entirely doable within our lifetimes, but you're right, the demand won't be coming from the small off-the-grid RV community. It will come from the ongoing desire to extend a cell phone's battery beyond a day, or to give an electric car a range of 500+ miles. Google around for "battery breakthrough 2014" and you'll see many headlines about fancy new batteries that can have over 10,000 recharge cycles, or quadruple capacity, etc. but in reality most of these are years off from production. Additionally, the cost of batteries is simply too high, but even that's predicted to drop to below $100/kwh. Once we live in a world where the cost the electric battery in your Tesla is only $5,000, not $30,000, and capacity is 2-3x more, it would be conceivable to have a fully electric, solar-charged RV with, say, 5-6 Tesla car battery stacks. That will be a pretty sweet futuristic RV where you could literally never need to plug into shore power if you desired to stay off the grid indefinitely. You might not be able to drive more than 400 miles in a day, but hey that's alright.
Until then, diesel remains king!
While I always appreciate those that are forward thinkers, a fully electric/hybrid drive RV within our lifetimes may be a bit of a stretch (unless you're 10 yo). The power requirements far exceed anything on the horizon. Some how, you need to provide 4-500 hp for 6-10 hours a day and than provide 7-10 KW of energy overnight with no recharge available from shore power.
Before focusing on the very small RV market, find away to make it work for long haul truckers. If it don't work for them it ain't going to work in the RV market.....unless the customer is the US military where cost and performance is inconsequential.
