CleanTech Camping Solutions Dominate 2023 Tesla Takeover
Solar and affordable lithium-ion batteries are ushering in the golden age of camping and exploring with your vehicle.
We attended the California Tesla Takeover event this weekend in San Luis Obispo, California, as a normal citizen, not press. We were blown away with the special section of the event dedicated to camping. Solutions ranged from a snorkel that lets you run the air conditioning from your Tesla or Rivian into a rooftop tent from Campstream, to a custom designed Tesla car camping kit from Fruble Fabrications, to lightweight adventure trailers optimized to work with electric vehicles from 360 Sierra.
It’s nothing new to cobble together desperate camping solutions into products for overlanding, RVing, and even camping in your car, but the addition of solar and lithium-ion batteries is for the first time making if possible to build a full kit around these solutions with zero emissions powered by the sun.
Campstream’s Rooftop Tent AC Adapter
The guys at Campstream hail from Sweden and were dissatisfied with the rooftop tent experience on their Teslas. To keep rooftop tents warm or cold traditionally requires a bolt-on air conditioner or diesel heating unit to keep from cooking or freezing depending on the outside temperature.
To solve this, the team developed a custom snorkel and baffle that fits onto the window of a Tesla Model Y, 3, or Rivian that allows you to utilize the air conditioning that already lives inside these electric vehicles to keep your rooftop tent at an optimal temperature overnight. They even have a handy addition to the kit that enables you to run a USB cable through the same vent hole to keep your phone charged overnight without having to leave it in the car. Smart.
Fruble’s Tesla Camping Kit
We’ve talked about Fruble Fabrications before, but it was really exciting to see the car-camping kit designed by Jimmy of “Living In Tesla” YouTube fame in person. The 90-pound, flat-packed camper kit-in-a-box is shipped from his manufacturing facility in British Columbia, Canada, to just about anywhere in the world and delivers an IKEA-style assembly process.
When fully assembled, the $1,865 USD Fruble Tesla Camper Kit provides a platform for you to sleep on with a mattress, a home for a gas or induction stove, a cutout for a fold-up sink, and plenty of storage to boot. The installed kit comes in three pieces, and since we last saw it online, Jimmy has added an induction stove powered by a lithium-ion battery to his own setup. The acquisition of a portable power station allowed Jimmy to eliminate the burning of cooking gas, and drops his personal emissions while reducing waste.
360 Sierra’s Easy Tow Trailer
Finally, the crew over at 360 Sierra built up a Yakima trailer with an easy-to-tow camping kit. They used Renogy’s 100 amp-hour lithium batteries as the foundation and paired them with a 180-watt solar panel and a fold-out kitchen. It is fully plumbed with water and features primarily Dometic products which have stood the test of time, having been used in the RV, hotel, and adventure sectors for decades.
We love the clean integration of solar to the onboard power system and how it seamlessly enabled the use of a Dometic CFX electric refrigerator that’s fully sealed and designed to be used out in the elements. The overall trailer weighs in at just 350 pounds, which, coupled with its long towing arm, makes it easy to move around by hand as well as on the back of just about any vehicle with a hitch adapter. Their trailer at the event was fitted with a gas stove, but Andre confirmed that with the addition of another battery cell, it could easily power an induction stove instead.
I hooked it up to my Tesla Model Y for some wheeling around the bumpy grass field and didn’t even notice that it was there. Afterwards, I grabbed it with the convenient handle on the hitch adapter and lifted it off my vehicle so it could stand on the support leg. The trailer is well balanced and truly does make it easy to fully kit out a vehicle for camping with minimal fuss.
Overall
It was great to see the addition of a camping section to the California Tesla Takeover event this year, which is typically focused on wraps, rims, and sound systems. Opening up a camping section lets designers showcase their products to buyers they know are already interested in a cleantech lifestyle.
We hope to see the same camping section at the event next year and look forward to sharing even more solutions when the time comes. For a quick fly-by style overview of some of the highlights from the event, check out the video below from Kyle Conner and Colton Guerin from Out of Spec Studios.
Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Latest CleanTechnica.TV Video
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.
