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. Robert Bollinger 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. No roadmap and no guarantee, just the absolute conviction that this truck deserved to exist.

When the B1 was shown 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. The trucks went 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 the team believed in that 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. Every system was designed 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 the understanding of what it truly takes to bring a vehicle to production. In Detroit we built the second generation B1 — refined, resolved, ready — and created its brother, the B2 Pickup Truck. Same platform, same uncompromising DNA, a new body style that opened the trucks to a whole new audience. Two vehicles. One conviction.

The third generation B1 was the pre-production version — the one built to survive the real world. Gearboxes and motors made to our exact specifications. Tier 1 suppliers who understood what we were building and why. The test mule was put through grueling off-road and on-road miles — proving grounds, rock crawls, highway runs, weather, load. Every system stress-tested until it either broke or didn't. Most of it didn't. What broke got fixed and tested again. By the time it was done, we had a truck that was ready. That work led to the investment that made the commercial program possible. Everything we had learned was finally pointing somewhere.

The all-electric Bollinger B4 chassis cab went into production in September 2022. Engineered from the ground up — not adapted, not compromised. Full testing. Full homologation. A purpose-built commercial vehicle that met every regulatory, safety, and performance standard required to put it on the road. From a diesel repair shop in the Catskills to a production commercial electric truck in Detroit. That's what this team did. It remains one of the proudest moments in the company's history.

A decade of designing, building, testing, rebuilding, and refusing to stop. Three generations of vehicles. Hundreds of thousands of miles driven. Countless systems engineered from scratch — portal gearhubs, suspension, transaxles, battery packs, two-speed gearbox, electronics, controls. A team that grew from six people in a diesel repair shop to over a hundred engineers, designers, and builders in Detroit. A pass-through that carried lumber and kayaks and everything in between. Ten years of work that nobody handed us. Ten years that nobody can take away.