Is EV Towing Doable? 6,000 Miles With an Airstream, Honestly

The short answer

Is EV towing doable?

The trip is the answer. We did it, with a dog aboard, in 110-degree desert heat and over the Continental Divide, and we were never once actually stranded.

The Airstream and Rivian framed in the arch of an old desert highway underpass on a cracked dirt road under dramatic clouds — Almost any road we wanted. The charging map stopped being the limit.

Across the entire loop there was exactly one charger that simply had to work or we were in trouble. One. Every other leg of 44 logged tow segments had an easy backup within range: a second network, a slower stall, a campground pedestal, a place to sit and wait. The safety net was almost always there. EV towing in 2026 is not an experiment you survive. It is a road trip you plan.

The honest planning number is not the marketing range. Towing the Airstream, our real full-pack range worked out to about 168 miles, and the number we actually planned around was a 100 to 120 mile hop between charges. Treat the gaps between fast chargers as the constraint and the whole thing relaxes.

4,405 tow miles measured under the trailer
1.19 mi/kWh weighted towing average
168 mi real full-pack towing range
1 washer fluid the only part we bought, all trip

The road, honestly

What the charging actually felt like

The number that defines an EV road trip is not range. It is time plugged in.

We made roughly 52 fast-charge stops on the road, plus 13 free overnight campground charges, and spent 33 hours and 23 minutes connected to DC fast chargers over the trip. That is about 38 minutes a stop, on average, and it is the real tax of doing this in 2026. A diesel pulls into a pump and is gone in five minutes. We were not.

Thirty-three hours sounds horrifying until you spread it across a month on the road. It works out to about an hour a day, across fewer than two charging stops a day. Each roughly 38-minute stop bought us about 113 miles, two and a half hours of driving, so all that charging supported nearly 130 hours behind the wheel. Put another way, for every hour we drove, we charged about 15 minutes. A normal travel day was two stops and an hour, and even our heaviest days each carried their own story. Our two 500-mile crossings came back to back on the way home, 582 miles one day and 523 the next, ripping out of the Chicago area across Iowa, Missouri, and Kansas to beat the clock to Colorado, six fast-charge stops and roughly five hours of charging each. We pushed to reach Denver a day early and breathe before Rocky Mountain National Park, and we did. The hardest stretch of all came at the very start: the dash from San Diego across to Oklahoma to collect my wife from the airport. I would have left sooner, but my son was graduating college and I was not about to miss that, so I hauled, and still stole the time to drop down onto Route 66 and take the country roads. Even the long days got us where we needed to be, on time, on electrons.

~1.1h/dayaverage time charging, spread over the trip
1.7stops/dayfewer than two on a normal day
113miaverage distance between charges
26%of drive time~15 min charging per hour driven

And here is the part that only makes sense when your bed is bolted to your truck: some of those longest stops, we slept right through. More than once we plugged in for a power nap or for the night and woke up in the Airstream with a full pack, comfortable the entire time, never actually needing it to charge that long. The trailer turns a charging stop's worst case, a long wait, into its best case, a real rest. So the 33-hour figure overstates the waiting; a meaningful chunk of it was sleep we wanted anyway, in a bed we brought with us.

You learn to live inside the charging curve. Towing, you arrive at a stall low, which is actually the good news: the pack takes power fastest when it is nearly empty, so the first ten or fifteen minutes fly and then it tapers. The move is to charge in the fat part of that curve, roughly the 10 to 60% window, get your 100-mile hop back, and go. Chasing the last 20% on the road is a waste of your life. The Rivian's peak charging speed is fine but not class-leading, and on a trip this size you feel every kilowatt it leaves on the table.

The Airstream and Rivian R1T parked still hitched together at a Rivian Adventure Network charging stall at night in Grand Junction, Colorado, under a parking-lot light — The whole trip we charged like this, still hitched. The Rivian's front charge port is the quiet hero of long-distance towing.

That photo is the argument in one frame. We pulled into a charger and plugged in without unhitching, almost every single time, because the Rivian's charge port is on the front. On the entire trip we had to unhitch to charge exactly once, at the Rivian Adventure Network site at the Camelback Esplanade in Phoenix, where the stalls sit inside a parking structure with no room to maneuver a 47-foot rig. We dropped the Airstream, charged, and re-hitched, the one exception that proves the rule. It is also the easiest fix in the world: a single trailer-friendly pull-through stall there would solve it outright, and here is hoping Rivian adds one. Hold that thought, it comes back when we talk about the other trucks.

The upside

Where EV towing already wins

Reliability. It is not close.

Nearly 6,000 miles and we did not have a single mechanical issue. No diesel exhaust fluid. No oil changes. I barely touched the brake pedal the whole trip, because regen braking holds the rig on grades that would cook conventional brakes, including the descent off the Continental Divide at the Eisenhower-Johnson Tunnel. The Rivian is not zero-maintenance, it asks for a tire rotation every 7,500 miles or so, but those are free where we bought the tires, and next to oil, DEF, and fuel filters it is barely a list. The only part we bought for the truck on the entire trip was a five-dollar bottle of washer fluid.

And where diesel pickups were laboring up the big climbs, we had more power than we needed. Horsepower and torque make all the difference with 6,000 pounds behind you. We climbed 128,800 feet of cumulative elevation and the motors never strained. The third win is efficiency: even loaded and fighting heat, the Rivian returned 1.19 mi/kWh weighted across all 44 segments, the best of any truck we would seriously consider. Which brings us to the bill.

The number that ends the diesel argument

Let us be precise about charging, three honest ways. We paid $771 because most of our charging was free on the Rivian Adventure Network referral. Take the perk away and the same route at Rivian's list price runs about $1,766, but that is a high ceiling, not a likely bill, because Rivian's network is on the pricey end and we used it precisely because it was free. Optimize for cost instead, charging on cheaper Tesla and IONNA stalls at around $0.37 a kilowatt-hour, and it lands near $1,450.

What we paid $771 free RAN via referral · 13¢/mi

Same route, no perk ~$1,766 Rivian list price · 30¢/mi

Cost-optimized ~$1,450 Tesla / IONNA, ~$0.37 a kWh · 25¢/mi

Every one of those beats a diesel's roughly $2,550 in fuel and a gas truck's $2,410. Pick whichever scenario you think is fair: electric still wins, and the inflated list price is the only one that even comes close.

Over ~5,900 miles	Our Rivian	F-250 diesel	F-250 gas
Energy / fuel cost	$771	~$2,550	~$2,410
Cost per mile	13¢	43¢	41¢
Tailpipe CO2	0 lb	~11,000 lb	~11,700 lb
Oil + DEF service	$0	~$250	~$100
Transmission flush (prorated)	$0	~$85	~$85
Brakes (prorated)	~$0	~$150	~$150
Tires + washer fluid	~$5	~$5	~$5
Maintenance, this trip’s share	~$5	~$490	~$340
Time refueling	33h 23m	minutes	minutes

Diesel assumes 12 mpg, gas 10 mpg towing this 6,000-pound load, at June 2026 US average prices ($5.21 diesel, $4.11 gas), with EPA tailpipe figures. Maintenance uses a Ford F-250 reference: oil and DEF are the service these miles actually trigger; transmission and brakes are the prorated share of services that come due every 30,000-plus miles, weighted here for the 128,800 feet of descent a combustion truck rides its brakes down and the EV takes on regen. Figures are approximate; the direction is not.

And the routine stuff is not even where towing really bites. Hauling 6,000 pounds accelerates the expensive services, the ones the EV simply does not have. An F-250's ten-speed transmission wants a fluid flush far sooner when it tows, real-world advice runs every 30,000 to 60,000 miles instead of the 150,000 on paper, and that service is $450 to $680 because the box holds over 17 quarts. The Rivian has no transmission to flush. Towing also eats brakes, a diesel riding them down a grade can need a pad-and-rotor job at several hundred dollars an axle, and often. We dropped off the Continental Divide and barely touched the pedal, because regen does the braking, so our pads and rotors are effectively still new and the only brake item on the truck is a fluid flush every three years. The harder you tow, the more lopsided the maintenance math gets.

The honest counterweight is time. That same 33 hours and 23 minutes of charging is time a diesel spends driving. You are trading dollars and emissions for hours. On a 6,000-mile haul, that trade was real. On a 250-mile weekend, it would barely register, which turns out to be the whole point of who this is for.

Colorado

Over the Divide, and at home in Denver

If one stretch sold me on this truck for this life, it was Colorado.

The Rivian's Tri-Motor Max Pack makes around 850 horsepower, and you feel every bit of it the moment the road tilts up. We towed the Airstream over the Continental Divide through the Eisenhower-Johnson Tunnel at 11,158 feet, the highest interstate tunnel in the world, and the truck never strained or hunted for a gear, because there are no gears. It just climbed, quiet and flat on the torque, while the diesels around us downshifted and roared. Coming down the far side, regen did the braking. With 6,000 pounds behind you, that much power stops being a number and becomes confidence.

What surprised me more was the other half of Colorado: the city. This is where the Rivian quietly wins an argument the spec sheets never have. A Ford F-250 or a GMC 2500 has the towing brawn, but park one downtown and it becomes a barge, too long and too wide, a chore in every garage and on every side street. The Rivian is right-sized. It threads urban Denver as deftly as it crawls a mountain pass with the trailer on. One truck that is genuinely at home both in RiNo traffic and over the Rockies is rarer than it sounds, and it is exactly what a trip like this needs.

The white Rivian R1T and silver Airstream parked at a Colorado campsite at golden hour, red-rock foothills and pines behind them, the awning out — Lyons, Colorado One of two Colorado basecamps. The kind of scenery that makes you slow your pack-up.

Eric and Diana floating inner tubes down Clear Creek in Golden, Colorado, on a sunny afternoon with green cottonwoods and foothills behind them — Floating Clear Creek in Golden, a walk from the campsite.

We made two basecamps here and loved both. First Lyons, tucked against the red-rock foothills north of Boulder, then Clear Creek RV Park down in Golden, the mountains right there and a creek you can float a tube down on a hot afternoon. Both towns were the genuinely welcoming kind, the sort of place you catch yourself checking real-estate prices on your phone.

Denver was on the map for the people. We met up with Patrick and Liv of the Electric Duo, EV-touring friends who showed us their city: a rooftop burlesque show with the downtown skyline lit behind the stage, and the reason we rolled in a day early, the fifty-plus-member electronic-percussion spectacle ITCHY-O at Mission Ballroom. A great meetup with other EV friends, the kind the charging life keeps handing you.

Somehow Colorado turned into one of our favorite stretches of the whole trip. Between the mountains, the towns, and the people, it was genuinely hard to hitch up and leave.

The real audience

Who EV towing is actually for

Here is the thing nobody building these trucks seems to say out loud: most people don't take a trip like ours.

Most people buy a camper and camp within a couple hundred miles of home. That is not a guess, it is the industry. About 40% of North American campers travel fewer than 50 miles from home on a typical trip, up from 13% in 2014 and 31% in 2018, a clear and growing trend toward close-to-home camping. The median camping trip is about 250 miles. The average RV owner drives roughly 4,500 miles a year in their camper, across every trip combined.

Diana standing beneath Mesa Arch in Canyonlands National Park, the desert canyon stretching out under the rock span behind her — Mesa Arch, Canyonlands. The kind of place a week-long, couple-hundred-mile camper buys you.

Sit with that last one: this single trip, nearly 6,000 miles, covered more ground than a typical RV owner puts on their camper in an entire year.

Which flips the whole question. EV towing could be a fantastic solution for a huge number of families and retired couples who travel a couple hundred miles, camp for a week, and want a tow vehicle that can also power the camper off the grid. For that buyer, the range anxiety that dominates every comparison review basically evaporates, and the time-at-the-charger tax nearly disappears with it. I would go so far as to say EV towing fits far more people than would ever currently consider it. The trucks are being judged against trips almost nobody takes.

The point of it all

What the chargers gave back

Good infrastructure does one thing above all: it disappears.

The Airstream and Rivian R1T parked beside the brown Canyonlands National Park entrance sign under moody Utah clouds — Canyonlands National Park We reached every one of the Mighty Five on electrons. Two years ago this was a stunt.

Once routing stopped being the scary part, the trip stopped being about the truck and went back to being about the road. We saw the Mighty Five, every one of Utah's national parks, Zion, Bryce, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands, and Arches, without ever once sweating the next charge. A couple of years ago that itinerary on electrons would have been a stunt. This year it was just the plan.

Diana in the front seat of the Rivian R1T with Mission, the older German Shepherd, riding in a back-seat hammock beside her — Mission logged every mile from the back seat.

And then there was the part that actually matters. EV-towing friends drove in from a long way off just to hang out with us in Branson. We stayed with my cousins at their farmhouse. We saw my father and my daughter outside Chicago, and tracked down friends I have known since childhood. We ate ridiculously well the whole way, and the dog rode shotgun for all of it. The charging network did not just make the trip possible. It got out of the way so the trip could be about everyone we love and everywhere we have been meaning to go.

On the road

What surprised us

Endless red hoodoos of Bryce Canyon falling away toward distant Utah plateaus under a clear sky — Bryce Canyon, Utah The best towing leg of the whole trip ended here, 110 miles at 1.88 mi/kWh.

The infrastructure is better than we expected

We braced for a charging desert and found a network. There were far more chargers than we expected, and routing was genuinely easy. We could take almost any route we wanted. A couple of years ago that was not true. The Tesla Supercharger network opening to non-Teslas, plus newcomers like IONNA, turned navigation from the scary part of the trip into an afterthought. Credit where it is due: Rivian has made trailer pull-through stalls a real priority at its Adventure Network sites, so we could roll in fully rigged and charge without a circus. Which makes it all the stranger, as you will see, that the truck itself still gets two basic things wrong.

Everyone wanted to talk

Almost every campground we rolled into, someone wanted to talk about the setup. We were packing up to leave Ruby's Inn when a farmer from West Virginia, coal country, a robust country boy, came over to talk about towing with the Rivian. I was shocked at how pro-EV he was.

He told me about his grandfather, who bought one of the first Priuses, then bought every generation after and sold them cheap to the kids as they grew up. They all got hooked. On his farm and his construction jobs, his workers are red-blooded Americans who think diesel is somehow more American. He tells them: we mine coal here, and electric vehicles use that electricity more efficiently, with less carbon than diesel. That, he tells them, is more American.
A conversation outside Ruby's Inn we couldn't stop having

We really did need to pack up. I just kept talking with him. If that was you, outside Ruby's Inn, find us. I owe you the rest of that conversation.

Wind matters more than the mountains

We expected elevation to dominate efficiency. It does play a role. But wind speed and direction turned out to be a bigger factor than we ever expected, and the data is stark. Across the trip, the swing from a tailwind to a headwind moved our range by 42 miles, a 27% efficiency change. The swing from flat ground to a net climb moved it 24 miles, 16%. Heat moved it 32 miles. The wind, not the grade, was the thing that most often decided whether a leg was comfortable or tight.

Wind tailwind to headwind 42 mi · 27%

Heat mild to hot 32 mi · 23%

Grade flat to net climb 24 mi · 16%

The big question

So, would I do it again?

Eric resting in a smooth scoop of orange sandstone in the Utah desert, wearing California-flag socks — Six thousand miles to earn an honest answer.

With this generation of trucks and this generation of charging speeds in the United States, no. And it took 6,000 miles to be able to say that with a straight face.

This is not a knock on the trip, it is an honest read on the hardware. There is no perfect EV truck for long-distance towing right now, especially for a real trailer like our Airstream. Every one of them gets something genuinely right and something genuinely wrong, and on a trip this size the wrong things compound. I do not want to turn this into a spec-sheet shootout, so here is the short version of what each one nails and misses.

GMC Sierra Denali EV / Chevy Silverado EV (Max Pack)

Right: the range. Wrong: the inverter and the port.

The Max Pack has the range we wish we had. So much of our overnight campground charging was free, and the Rivian would sit full for hours before we were ready to roll, all that energy wasted. A bigger pack banks it. We figure the Silverado or Denali would have eliminated 25 to 30% of our charging stops. But in our assessment its inverter is the weak link, it does not feel stout, does not match the older Ford Lightning's Pro Power Onboard, and falls down under load. And its charge-port location means far more unhitching to charge than the Rivian, which is a real chore with a weight-distribution hitch.

Tesla Cybertruck

Right: software, manners, the inverter. Wrong: range and the rear port.

The Cybertruck is the one that can power the camper. Its inverter can run the trailer even while the truck is charging, which is exactly the feature that would have let us sleep in the national parks that have no hookups. But its towing range is the shortest of the three, roughly 140 miles to our Rivian's 168. We ran the math: the same trip in a Cybertruck means about 20% more charging stops, and its rear charge port forces an unhitch at most of them with our hitch. It would have powered more campsites and made every charge a bigger chore. The best-driving truck here would have made this particular trip more painful, not less.

Rivian R1T Tri-Motor Max Pack our truck

Right: the whole package. Wrong: the inverter and the last 30 miles of range.

I still believe the Rivian is the best tool on the market for this job. The front charge port let us charge while hitched on all but one stop the entire trip. The gear tunnel, the built-in air compressor, the powered tonneau, the genuinely good software, and the best towing efficiency of the bunch all earn their keep. What holds it back is maddening precisely because Rivian so clearly understands towing: this is the company that prioritizes trailer pull-through stalls at its chargers, and yet ships a DC-to-AC inverter too weak to run the Airstream and a Max Pack that is a touch short on range. A real inverter and another thirty miles, and there would be no argument.

The feature that would change everything

Pull those threads together and one missing feature explains most of our frustration: a truck that can power the camper. The promise that sold us on an electric truck was tow your house, then power your house, a silent generator at your campsite, no propane, no fumes, no fifty-dollar-a-night powered pull-through. With a real 240-volt inverter we would have stayed in many more of the national parks that offer no hookups at all. Today the Cybertruck is essentially the only truck that can do it, and choosing it means accepting 20% more charging stops and an unhitch at most of them. Nobody sells the whole thing in one package yet. The first one that does, a real inverter, a true Max Pack, and a front charge port, changes this entire calculation.

What would actually change my answer

Not much, honestly. Give me another hundred miles of towing range and charging even half as fast as the new Chinese EVs already manage, plus an inverter that can run the trailer, and this goes from a trip you plan carefully to a trip you just take. The reliability is already there. The power is already there. The efficiency is already best-in-class. The missing pieces are range, charge speed, and camper power, and all three are engineering problems on a clear curve, not fundamental flaws. Ask us again in two truck generations.

The receipts

Nearly 6,000 miles. 65 charging stops, about 52 of them fast-charges on the road. 33 hours and 23 minutes plugged in. $771 out of pocket, and $995 of free charging on the Rivian Adventure Network. One washer-fluid bottle. Zero breakdowns. Zero tailpipe. Every number is downloadable, and the per-segment math is on the tow-segment pages.

Follow the build Read the Cybertruck vs R1T towing review Run your own range numbers See the whole trip, day by day

Who's behind the data

Meet the crew

We are not journalists on a one-week press loan. This is the rig we actually live with, and EVs are not new to us. As a family we have driven electric since 2015, starting with compliance-era cars like the Volkswagen e-Golf, the Fiat 500e, and the Ford Focus Electric, then a string of Teslas including a Plaid track car, and now several Rivians. Every car we own has been electric since 2019. So when we say the inverter is too weak or the range is thirty miles short, that is ten years of living with these things talking.

Eric

A lifelong car and motorcycle enthusiast who has owned everything from 911 Turbos to exotic Ducatis, and still keeps a small motorcycle collection. Car and motorcycle culture is the through-line; the Airstream is just the newest excuse to chase a good road.

Diana, "Lucy"

A registered sleep technologist at the hospital, where she helps people manage sleep apnea and conditions like narcolepsy. She is close to her big family and loves traveling with the Airstream community and her EV friends, a crew that camps together and drives electric to a different national park every year.

Mission

An almost-eleven-year-old German Shepherd who rode every mile from the back seat. He hit a rough patch of illness on this trip but is doing well on his medication, and he is not letting it slow the adventures down.