The potential of mobile housing
Yeah the article is about semi-mobile non-RV houses, but really it&#x27;s the same use case as an upscale RV.<p>Between solar panels, an EV drivetrain which comes with a HUGE battery for running appliances, skateboard design for more space, better acceleration&#x2F;handling&#x2F;regen braking, room for a &quot;range extension&quot; ICE generator as backup, and the final killer killer feature:<p>... stay with me ...<p>Highway self-driving, even if it&#x27;s just supervisory.<p>I&#x27;d sell everything I own and live in a mobile home. If it drove me between places at night with better-than-human safety (and maybe a big huge airbag in the bedroom)... my god.<p>Keep in mind that highway self driving should be much much easier than general self driving. You can get convergent evolution of the infrastructure with embedded sensors and warning broadcasts. You can get highly optimized pre-calculated route &quot;programs&quot; rather than rely entirely on some generally trained AI agent. You&#x27;ll have a lot more room for sensors. You don&#x27;t have to travel as fast at night either, so the RV can putter along at 40mph for excellent energy efficiency and better safety, and not offend any daytime drivers.<p>When it gets to the destination, if you don&#x27;t wake up there can be huge self-driving parking lots where the RV can park (and recharge) while you wake up.<p>And the picture in the article says a 1000 words: I really like a design of a house where there is a central courtyard and a bunch of buildings around it. Japanese houses (well, the rich ones in anime and stuff) were designed like this. Your mobile home could simply drive up to part of that courtyard, and become part of your house. Need a new bedroom? buy a new segment and plop it next to the courtyard.<p>COVID kind of killed a lot of commuting, but the idea of my bedroom driving me to work in the morning is a good one, and if you need to drop a #2 at work you can walk out to the RV and do it there (I&#x27;m not a huge fan of crapping in public bathrooms, but that might just be me, the #1 thing I like about WFH is crapping in my bathroom). Heck you&#x27;ll have a shower and a change of clothes and a place to nap if you need it at work. Supports longer hours if you need it. If the RV has an attached office, and your workers tend to have this, you can simply have a pop-up office where a smaller building has meeting rooms but people work in their RV-offices.<p>Your RV can drive you home in traffic while you get the last couple hours of work done, so even 100 mile commutes can be tolerable.<p>Currently the RV industry, as I understand it is based in Indiana mostly, is pretty slow to change. It astonishes me that RVs haven&#x27;t been hybrid drivetrains for a decade (that relates to my frustration that PHEVs weren&#x27;t forced in adoption in the 2000s, 10 years after the prius and insight hit the market). I guess the pickup trucks never adopted the drivetrain, but there were hybrid SUVs in droves ten years ago.<p>I think the Tesla semi and other BEV semis will be what does it. You can take a short range BEV semi and make it longer range with an attached ICE generator for the long haul. I&#x27;m hoping that &quot;inside out&quot; rotary or other small engine designs optimized for battery recharging can work here.<p>With the skyrocketing cost of housing, would you rather have a luxurious mobile home for 500k and spend 300k for a house in the boonies, or have a 1 million dollar crap house closer to the job?<p>And right now RVs are kind of expensive because they are too bespoke. If demand skyrockets due to all the advantages listed above, we may actually get economies of scale in housing, since the footprints are all shipping container sized essentially. Heck, the skateboard design of an EV may mean that the entire drivetrain is simply an underbody and the top living part is relatively swappable.<p>Also, some BEV drivetrains (million mile battery) may be far more long term and reliable, a lot of RVs have an issue of ricketly ICE drivetrains that don&#x27;t age well.