Fast company logo
|
advertisement

CO.DESIGN

#Vanlife goes glamping with these customizable EVs

The startup Grounded is bringing ‘Scandinavian-inspired’ modular interiors to EV vans. The hitch? It’ll cost you your month’s rent.

#Vanlife goes glamping with these customizable EVs

[Photo: Grounded]

BY Nate Berg4 minute read

For most of the relatively few people who ditch the conventional residential world of apartments and homes for the rolling nomadism of #vanlife, the experience is measured in months, not years. The challenge of outfitting a tiny compartment for modern life, the cost of gas, and the potential for expensive and inconvenient mechanical failure all add up to make a hashtaggable dream life on the road more of a nightmare. “Vanlife” becomes “vanmonth” becomes “vanmemory.”

A new startup is offering a more flexible, and more realistic, alternative. Using increasingly accessible electric vehicle technology and infrastructure, modular furniture, and a subscription model more attuned to the realities of living in a van, the startup Grounded has launched a customizable EV camper van designed to fit the personal needs and timelines of the vanlife-curious.

[Photo: Grounded]

Built within the chassis of a Ford E-Transit van, Grounded uses the blank space inside the vehicle as a customizable canvas that customers can fill in with a combination of components, from beds to benches to booths to sinks. The company, which has just launched production at a facility in Detroit, intends to market the vans both to fleet-based rental companies and to individual vanlife aspirants.

[Image: Grounded]

Grounded was founded by Sam Shapiro, a technologist who previously worked as a senior software engineer at SpaceX. The idea for the company came from Shapiro’s own experience. When the pandemic hit, the ad tech company he was working for in New York went fully remote—and so did he, packing up and moving into a Chevy Express 2500 low-roof camper van and subsequently roaming around the U.S. The experience was mostly great, giving Shapiro a chance to see different regions of the country while continuing to work full time. But it wasn’t entirely smooth.

“There were a bunch of different problems,” he says, noting the difficulties of creating a viable space to work, contending with battery chargers and gas costs, being unable to stand up inside, and the inevitable mechanical failure. One time his engine went kaput. “I got stuck somewhere in California and worked out of a restaurant for like 10 hours,” he says.

[Photo: Grounded]

An office job with SpaceX in Seattle brought an end to Shapiro’s year of full-time van living, but he kept thinking about the bumps he experienced on the road and how a more sustainable vanlife could be achieved. Last August he started Grounded to improve the realities of van living by building out an EV version of what had previously been a large, gas-guzzling vehicle.

Drawing from his software background, he’s focused on using the electrical capacity of EVs to support a range of monitors and app-based controls, from remotely starting the van’s heat on the way back from a hike to systems that balance and optimize battery use when off the grid. Built-in solar panels can charge the battery running the appliances, and bidirectional systems allow the van’s battery to pull from that pack when needed.

[Photo: Grounded]

Inside, Grounded’s vehicle is a reconfigurable blank slate, and the company has a library of components that customers can combine to form their ideal interior. Shapiro says this was a loud demand from the vanlifers and RV customers the company surveyed.

“There’s a big appetite for customization. These are kind of like homes on wheels, and people want the interiors to feel nice,” he says. The design aesthetic is what Shapiro calls “minimalist,” “intentional,” and “Scandinavian inspired,” and will be made mostly of Baltic Birch wood and aluminum.

Renderings of the company’s intended offerings show dozens of layouts and furniture components, but those may be more illustrative than representative. “The key is a sort of constrained customization,” Shapiro says of the components the company will offer. “It’s not necessarily working with a custom designer to build everything from scratch. But on the other end, it doesn’t have to be one single layout that every single customer gets either.”

advertisement
[Photo: Grounded]

Grounded will be selling its outfitted vans directly to companies and individuals, in addition to its short-term subscription service, which starts at $2,300 per month for a minimum of 12 months. “We see it as a way to open up the market and give people access to vehicles who might not be willing or able to spend six figures on buying one,” Shapiro says.

Shapiro declined to disclose the company’s financials, as it’s currently in a pre-seed round of fundraising. Grounded is currently building out its first three vehicles and will be shipping them next month to its first customer, an RV rental company in the San Francisco Bay Area called Simple Campers. The company is also taking preorders from individual customers.

Shapiro expects Grounded to build its first 50 vehicles at its Detroit location before expanding to a dedicated manufacturing facility. He says the goal is to make vanlife more accessible, but also more realistic for people who may not be ready to totally abandon their conventional lifestyles. Through flexible design and flexible ownership, Shapiro says Grounded can push vanlife closer to that hashtaggable dream. “It’s not trying to be something it’s not,” he says. “It’s not trying to be a house.”

CoDesign Newsletter logo
The latest innovations in design brought to you every weekday.
This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.
Privacy Policy

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Nate Berg is a staff writer at Fast Company, where he writes about design, architecture, urban development, and industrial design. He has written for publications including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Atlantic, Wired, the Guardian, Dwell, Wallpaper, and Curbed More


Explore Topics