Bollinger Motors is an electric vehicle startup, but unlike luxury sedan startups Faraday Future and Lucid Motors, Bollinger is interested in building elemental vehicles designed to get dirty. The company showed its B1 electric SUV to the public at the 2017 LA Auto Show to much acclaim, and now it’s teasing us with its B2 Pickup derivative, which it unveiled on Wednesday.
Like the B1, the B2 Pickup is all-electric, all-wheel drive and really, really boxy. The aluminum-intensive truck uses a 120-kWh lithium-ion battery pack to drive two electric motors, one at each end of the truck. These motors are attached to geared, portal-style axles and inboard disc brakes to help improve its off-road abilities. The suspension is hydropneumatic and height-adjustable.
Bollinger’s B2 is almost identical to its B1 SUV, apart from its longer, pickup-truck bed.
Bollinger Motors
“The new B2 incorporates everything that we’ve learned in making the B1, and takes it in an exciting new direction,” said founder Robert Bollinger in a statement. “It’s the pickup I always wanted and something crazy better than what’s available on the market today.”
The B2 has a 5-foot, 9-inch bed, but the rear wall of the cab can flip down and the rear window section can be flipped up, allowing the truck to fit a big stack of 4×8 sheets of plywood. The B2 will be listed as a Class 3 work truck, capable of hauling 5,000 pounds. Thanks to the unique front pass-through enabled by its EV construction, it can also handle absurdly long objects — up to 16 feet in length.
B2’s unique EV construction allows for long objects to be run all the way through the vehicle.
Bollinger Motors
At least for the moment, Bollinger is making no claims as to towing capacity, but considering how beefy all the truck’s components are — and all that sweet electric torque — we think it will be ample. That said, like all EVs, towing large objects is likely to have a pretty deleterious affect on the B2’s range, which is estimated at 200 miles.
The Bollinger B1 is in its final stages of testing and engineering, and the company predicts that it will be ready for sale in 2020. Given how similar the B2 is to the B1 in style and engineering, it seems likely that it will hit production around the same time.