It started on a farm in upstate New York with a simple frustration — every truck on the market was a compromise. Bad weight distribution, poor ground clearance, half-hearted four-wheel drive. I wanted to build the one that should exist. All electric, all-wheel drive, all the time. A small team in a small shop in Hobart, New York. We had no roadmap and no guarantee, just the absolute conviction that this truck deserved to exist.

When we showed the B1 to the world, something unexpected happened. People felt it immediately — not just truck people, not just EV people, but anyone who had ever wanted a vehicle that took them seriously. The reservations came in thousands. We took the trucks to Moab, to the desert, to snow and mud and places that would break lesser machines. The B1 didn't break. It thrived. Those early miles meant everything — proof that what we believed in our shop in the Catskills was real.

Electric wasn't a concession to the moment — it was the whole reason the truck could exist the way it did. All-wheel drive without compromise. Portal gearhubs. A two-speed hi-lo gearbox. Power takeoff for running tools anywhere. A pass-through for lumber, pipe, kayaks, whatever the job demanded. Ten inches of adjustable ride height. We didn't adapt an existing platform — we designed every system around what electricity made possible, and the result was a truck that could only ever have been electric.

Moving to Detroit meant growing up. The team expanded, the ambitions expanded, and so did our understanding of what it truly takes to bring a vehicle to production. Raising capital for something genuinely new — not a variant, not an adaptation, but a truck the world had never seen — turned out to be one of the hardest things I've ever done. Investors wanted precedent. We were the precedent. We kept building anyway.

We went back to the beginning and built it better. Tier 1 suppliers. A third-generation battery pack designed from scratch. Every system on the vehicle reconsidered, refined, made worthy of what we had promised. When it all came together — when the whole vehicle finally sang — it was one of the most satisfying moments of my life. That work led to the investment that made the commercial program possible. Everything we had learned was pointing somewhere.

The Bollinger B4 chassis cab went to production. A commercial electric truck built to every standard we had set for ourselves from the beginning. I am deeply proud of that — of the team that built it, of the suppliers who believed in us, of the vehicle itself. What happened after, under new ownership, was painful. But the truck got built. It exists. No one can take that away.

The IP came back. The parts, the machines, the knowledge, the relationships — everything that was built over a decade came back. The B1 and B2 were never meant to be a chapter. They were meant to be a beginning. The same small team, the same standards, the same love for this work. Whatever comes next will be worthy of everything that came before it.