EXCLUSIVE! Meet the Bollinger Trucks That Can Off-Road Like a Jeep and Haul Heavy

hey guys I have a tearful truck exclusive for you an inside look at the Bollinger electric truck design and production facility here in the Detroit Michigan area they're working on two production level prototypes the four-door SUV the b1 and the four-door pickup truck the b2 in this video I'll show you all the details about the new production prototypes I'm gonna speak to the CEO Robert Bollinger some of the engineers and actually go for a ride and the prototype the two-door truck but I think you're looking at here is kind of the future of the heavy-duty truck because let me show you the pickup right here be - don't look at SUV quite yet so here it is the b2 pickup truck this is a production based prototype and this is an active production space the guys are working around the clock almost to get these done for September unveiling and the size of the truck is I think with the interesting part let me show you so it's sitting here on a jig and the wheelbase on the pickup truck is actually 20 inches longer when you compare it to the four-door SUV and it reminds me a little bit of the Jeep gladiator but the gladiator is more of a midsize truck what this is is a full-size truck because it's much wider and I'll show you in the bed right here between the wheel wells in the bed it's about 49 inches so you can put a 4x8 plywood or sheet of plywood in the bed and it will have a mid gate and here's how it will work as you can see the entire structure is aluminum and this is the C pillar and everything from the c-pillar forward is shared with a four-door SUV of course this is a pickup truck much longer wheelbase and it's gonna have a mid gate very similar concept to the Chevy Avalanche but the glass partition will be here and it'll actually fold open fold up like on the SUV and the metal mid gate will fall down and it will lay down in line with this bed partition here so it's gonna make a flat floor where you can load cargo material 4x8 pieces of plywood anything you want so that's a pretty neat design it's also a six foot long bed not like a short five foot bed so you can put six foot long items in here or you can fold the mid gate and put much longer items inside the truck the battery is basically mounted into the floor of the vehicle between the two axles it's a dual motor setup one electric motor in the front and one in the rear a lots happened we started right away on the next level prototypes the four-door version of the b1 and the four-door b2 let's quickly walk around this two-door sure and then just kind of go inside and kind of show where you guys are going next okay great talk to me about style first of all okay well I studied industrial design wanted to be a card designer and a car guy whatever so a lot of people when they see they're like oh an industrial designer worked on that because it's very like you know it's not car styling it's it's more like form follows function all those you know you know catchphrases people use but basically what it is is that it's the look of it is what I like and what I've always liked always like classic Broncos classic you know internationals and stuff like that so it was basically I would wanted a vehicle that would be everlasting and have a classic style and never get old also we wanted flat panels because we wanted to bend the metal ourselves so we wanted to be able to really build the whole truck ourselves with our own hands it was hard to make it so simple and keep it like a simple form to the whole overall thing because it can get out of control easily and you start adding a lot of stuff to it our next prototypes that you'll see inside carry over almost all of the styling cues same form we've updated a few little things here and there but inside all the components are brand new so we have updated motors updated inverters we can tell you about that inside but basically the vehicles have the same franck space the front space is actually little bit bigger on the next prototypes we saw the pass through of course that we got to put a patent on and so on the Ford or you can hold 13 foot boards through the middle with the with the gates closed which is kind of longer than pickup trucks anyway right and then on the pickup truck version or you can hold 16 foot boards with the gates closed and then of course with the gate tailgate down you can 20 feet 24 feet whatever so it's basic that has crazy cool amazing storage capabilities on the top and then it has amazing off-road you know capabilities that were built into it with the portal gear hubs and stuff like that that are also carried into the next prototypes so that's our DNA as our DNA is crazy good off-road capability crazy good store capability class three truck so if this comes in at five thousand pounds I can hold five thousand pounds which you know no other Eevee can do obviously and no Eevee coming out it can do so it's amazing so it'll be the only class three electric vehicle out there overall the chastened design will remain mostly the same but there is one visual difference that you will notice the prototype the two-door has a radiator outlet on the side here in the fender the new one has an outlet on the top and a big inland in the front around the headlights and that was done for additional cooling and also the bigger battery pack that's gonna go into production b1 and b2 trucks just imagine a full-size truck with heavy-duty payload capability that has up to 20 inches of ground clearance four-wheel drive with a high low transfer case front and rear locking differentials front and rear disconnecting sway bars and a self-levelling suspension Boulder says there will be a provision for a winch this in fact could be an electric Ram Power Wagon killer our in wheel geared hub this is completely designed in-house by myself and Carl it's a 4.34 of inch center distance which gives you that much extra ground clearance as well as a 194 to 1 gear reduction ratio so you'll get extra torque multiplication everything upstream of that is a lot lighter because of that so this is the the gear set here it's a ACMA 12 quality ground helical reduction it's a 2 inch face with 6 pitch gear you know 23 pressure angle pretty standard dimensions and this will handle all the shock loading from it's wheel slip and rock crawling to yanking stumps so we instrumented the all four wheels with what's called wheel force transducers and that senses force torque and acceleration and speed in six directions well force and torque in six directions yeah thanks so much Andre the suspension is a unique hydraulic design and it's height adjustable it's meant to ride at the 15 inches of ground clearance normally for example on a highway but you can also lower it to a 10 inch ground clearance level for entry and egress and loading or lifted off-road to 20 inches of ground clearance so there's 10 inches of range on this suspension and of course I want to drive it offroad but that'll have to wait until a little bit later combined power output according to Bollinger is 614 horsepower there is a lot of juice there it's a single gear but there is a high and low range so basically you could have high forward low forward high reverse and low reverse so really four settings for the transmission it's an oval drive system so it's reacting to the traction capability of the vehicle and on the pickup truck up to five thousand pounds of payload capability and around 7,500 pounds of maximum towing so the towing number is not very high but the payload is where it's at as far as Bollinger is concerned but what about towing what are some of the challenging because 7,500 it's kind of like a midsize truck level of currently towing yeah what are some of the challenges there the main thing is is cooling so with an electric powertrain is you're generating heat in the batteries and in the motors and the inverters and there's a sort of a time limit of when you get to saturation on the temperature so that really determines what your continuous power is and continues power is you know if you're towing up you know i-70 out of Denver in you're pulling forever and ever and ever you're just gonna get into continuous power anything like short acceleration runs that's peak power so that that you know thermal doesn't necessarily come into it but you sustained almost like a dyno pull yeah you know we were just pull pull pull that becomes your limiting factor how much can you how much heat can you get out of the system and that's the balance of how much weight can you pull how much power do you need in order to pull that and then keeping it cool the front rear bumper design may change a little bit on the production units but it's pretty neat the hitch is actually hidden behind the license plate on this truck and it is wired for a seven pin connector so it's pretty standard stuff 2 inch receiver here this is the black box this is actually the casing for the battery for the bollinger truck and it's a hundred and twenty kilowatt hours and bollinger states that it would give the truck and the SUV about 200 miles of range it's not a lot of range because right now the ribbing r1c with the biggest battery option which is 180 kilowatt hours is claiming 400 miles of range which is twice of the bollinger but let's talk to the expert and see exactly what the charging times are at how this battery works in the vehicle this particular variant is kind of a composite some carbon fiber included here to kind of keep the weight down okay and then we have multiple cooling plates as you can tell running this way that's liquid cooled yeah it'll bring you water glycol coolant flowing through the packs okay and then we put the battery modules on top of the cooling plates to kind of wick heat away that's the bottom that's right that's right yeah and to recharge actually our vehicles really well equipped in terms of options so there's an included high powered charger that also is an inverter so you can put power in when you're charging or you can take power out like if you want to be sort of out in a remote wilderness setting you can power tools you can get power tool power from the from the vehicle you know sort of a lot of small power inside the vehicle for like USB chargers phone chargers things like that even though it's a fairly simplistic vehicle there's not a lot of screens and you know visible technology and the having like under the hood you know controlling the battery controlling the electric motors the gearbox and even sort of the translation of like operator command from like excel pedal and brake pedal so like what torque gets delivered to the wheels this is a pretty modern setup and so we actually have two vehicle controllers that are identical and redundant and in part for safety if one would would fail the other would detect it and we can take the appropriate actions and here there's the four-door b1 SUV and it's neat to see it in the state actually because you can see some of the components on the inside so there is like I said electric motor in the rear and one in the front and here in the rear you can see kind of inboard brake solution with the brake caliper and the rotor and the suspension is gonna be hanging out here so you do have some wheel articulation because the Bollinger SUV in truck like Robert said are meant to be an off-road vehicle as well very capable to get you to places off the beaten path and behind me it's kind of a chart which kind of looks like Lego set instruction to me there's the main chassis and Tunnel then you have some additional components then the main body frame etc etc etc and at the very end of course you get a four-door SUV guys here's the front electric motor assembly it's pretty neat so the electric motor itself is right here that's a little bit over 300 horsepower just right here it's very compact then you have some gear train to connect it to a high-low basically a transfer case which is here then it goes to the differential which is here it's selectable locking differential and the whole unit attaches to the chassis using several bolts on both sides and some other connections but the inboard brakes are actually connected to the differential and there's like a rubber isolator in the middle so the whole unit can be lowered and lifted in and this drive unit weighs about 300 pounds all together in the front and about the same in the rear it's pretty amazing how compact this is so I'm here at the pretty cool moment because they're just about to marry the battery to the Ford or SUV chassis itself and there's a lot of guys over there trying to make it just right [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] it's a fully road-legal vehicle right so how does a because you don't have provisions for like a airbag system alright how does that work out yeah so we've been very honest from the front from the very beginning we don't have airbags class three vehicles you can choose to go down the air bag safety route or the seatbelt safety route so you still have regulations for seatbelt safety so we still have to do the crash test with the with the cab if you will and then we're doing a whole due diligence list of safety protocols simulated crash testing side pole front all that kind of stuff for occupant safety battery safety is a big thing too so basically our trucks even though they will fully be road legal as a class 3 vehicle they're gonna have a lot more safety features to them then the federal government requires the basically the class 3 for the class 3 yeah ok so what does it mean to be a class 3 classification truck well it's based on the gross vehicle weight rating GVWR of 10001 pounds and with that weight class certain things change like the safety requirements kind of starting from the front and rear there's a crash structure that bolts on to the chassis so if you were to hit say a row you know run into a frontal barrier the that crash structure is is engineered to reduce the impact to the driver so there's a what's called a VPI pulse and that's what the the occupant actually feels so we do most of our work with that and then the seat belt does the rest of it I'm just over 6 - and I'm sitting here in the driver seat and there's plenty of space I got a lot of legroom Headroom is also plentiful and the same will be true with the production versions of the truck but what catches my eye the most is the simplicity of the Interior and actually the column shifter it's just basically classic design but with modern technology behind it I really like that it's almost like a restomod where you have a classic body but modern powertrain I really love this idea the windows are sliding design and there's certain that lock to win in a certain position front and rear so we have options on how you want to air out the vehicle while moving I asked to drive the B one concept truck but it's one of a kind concept vehicle with many quirks and it wasn't in the cards once Robert got it on the road I was still able to get a quick first impression it was like riding in the conventional a CV or truck it has lots of visibility lots of interior space and a comfy suspension yes sir the whole design of the whole vehicle inside it out resolved supposed to be one language and one thought so the interiors just is clean and minimal as the outside so we have round gauges we have flat panels that you can unscrew yourself and put in and you say you want to put in extra switches for extra lights that you have on it you can do that the left and right or a mirror of each other so it's ready for right-hand drive we got the air vent thing on top here which is basically out of necessity because we couldn't fit the transfer box inside and because we wanted to keep it clean and simple and not bunch it out so we invented these so we call machine guns but so it's defroster vent beautiful and then you can turn it completely off by turning it inside too we still have the same thing inside on the next vehicles with the glass opening yeah glass opening the tailgate and on the new ones this we have a easier just dismantle system if you will for the rear glass so again all the glass would come off on this prototype the front windshield did not come off but on the new ones they do [Music] [Music] what's next is we will reveal the four doors in September and then we'll have a price point and then you'll be able to go on our website and put a deposit in make an actual pre-order and we still have to announce that price point so it's a whole big thing unto itself so it's it's not a cheap vehicle you know has six gearboxes 120 kilowatt hour pack it's a lot going into this truck there is no truck for sale currently but there's ravine you know Tesla is talking about it there's Atlas there's several other companies this year competitor are you targeting somebody or just kind of doing your own thing how does that work right well even that f150 had something out the other day train yeah so I don't know where that's at in development but we always knew there's gonna be an electric f-150 I always knew there'd be other things out there maybe GM is doing something yeah so from the very beginning we just said let's just do our own thing because we can't I don't want to compete against a Ford f-150 that's not our thing so we're gonna have our own electric pickup truck and be in that segment but ours will just be a good different completely different kind of animal will have a different target audience I believe so I think ours will be our trucks we'll just with the 15 inch ground clearance alone it'll be like that's almost twice of what's anything on the road right now so I think we're a much better truck out of the gate and we're gonna be different you either love it or you hate it if you love it hopefully you buy it if you hate it there'll be other trucks you can go buy and I'm totally cool with that but we don't plan on being a million vehicles a year or anything like that so we'll have our own niche of enthusiasts and people who love us and that's great for us okay so availability is at end of 2020 or yeah end of 2020 is when will be ramping up the production and then the actual ones off the line for sale mostly in 2021 so the peers that Bollinger is making progress along the way to production Robert told me that first customer trucks will arrive in early 2021 and of course stay tuned to TFO truck comm for a lot more coverage not just on Bollinger but all the other electrified trucks coming out including the Ford f-150 hybrid and the all-electric truck as well

Channel: The Fast Lane Truck

Views: 511,304

Rating: 4.763308 out of 5

Keywords: bollinger, bollinger b1, bollinger motors, truck, electric truck, car review, review, ev, bollinger truck, bollinger b1 electric sport utility truck, bollinger b2, bollinger b1 all electric sport utility truck, 2019 new bollinger b2 pickup truck ev 527 hp, sport utility truck, bollinger b1 review, bollinger b1 driving, bollinger b1 e, pickup truck, bollinger b1 car, bollinger b1 electric, bollinger b1 cost, bollinger motors ev, TFLtruck, pickup, lockers, low range

Id: 7yIChwMkpQ8

Length: 21min 0sec (1260 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 13 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Kallenator]

At 12:35, that is a very interesting friction brake solution, very similar to the Citroen DS.

[u/Henri_Dupont]

When can I buy one?