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Beast Electric 4X4: Off Road Vehicle

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A stand-on electric 4×4 that the U.S. military is actually buying.

The EZRaider HD4 doesn’t look like anything else rolling through a motor pool. It’s not a scooter, and its makers get visibly annoyed if you call it one. It’s a $19,200, all-wheel-drive, all-electric off-road platform built to crawl over terrain that would stop a quad bike, and it’s just cleared operational evaluation with U.S. special forces units, who are now ordering more of them.

• The HD4 runs four independent 1,200-watt brushless hub motors with matching sine-wave controllers capable of peak outputs up to 18,000 watts, drawing from a 60V, 3,000 Wh lithium-ion battery pack.
• Top speed sits around 28 mph (45 km/h) with a range up to 50 miles (80 km), riding on 22×7-10 tires with 10 inches of ground clearance.
• Both the U.S. Armed Forces and the Israeli Defense Forces have run operational evaluations on the HD4, and Israeli border police are already deploying it in patrol units.

Built By a Dakar Buggy Engineer

The HD4 traces back to Erez Abramov, an Israeli motorsports engineer who built Dakar Rally buggies before turning his attention to off-road personal mobility. Abramov built his first gas-powered prototype back in 1990, then spent two decades refining the concept before redesigning it in 2010 around a patented floating suspension system, a tubular chassis, and a full electric powertrain. That history matters: this isn’t a startup’s first attempt at a rugged vehicle, it’s the product of thirty years of chassis and suspension work applied to an all-electric drivetrain.

The current HD4 pairs its four hub motors with chromoly driveshafts and Japanese precision bearings, the kind of componentry you’d expect on a race buggy rather than a personal mobility device. Every wheel gets its own dual-piston hydraulic disc brake, and the regenerative braking kicks in hard enough off the throttle that riders need a lap or two to adjust to the pull.

Suspension and Power Numbers That Matter

What separates the HD4 from an oversized electric scooter is Abramov’s patented six-axis, 360-degree floating long-travel suspension, engineered to flatten uneven ground rather than transmit every rock and rut into the rider’s arms. Combined with the four-wheel-drive system and 10 inches of ground clearance, it’s designed to let an experienced rider crawl over surfaces that would high-center a typical ATV.

Its creators claim it’s the most capable off-road platform in the world — and the U.S. Armed Forces apparently agree.

The battery management system behind the 3,000 Wh pack is doing real work here too, feeding four dedicated controllers that can spike to a combined 18,000 watts on demand. That’s the difference between putt-putting over a trail and actually powering through mud or loose sand without bogging down.

Military and Border Patrol Adoption

The headline use case is defense. Both the U.S. Armed Forces and the Israeli Defense Forces have put the HD4 through operational evaluation, and after successful testing, orders are going out to additional units. The appeal for special forces is straightforward: it’s silent, it runs a low infrared profile compared to a combustion engine, and it can move a soldier and gear through terrain a Humvee can’t touch. Israeli border police are already using it in the field, and it’s drawing interest from campus security and other patrol outfits, alongside its more obvious ranch, hunting, and utility applications, where it can also tow an optional powered electric cart rated for 550 pounds on top of the vehicle’s own 441-pound payload capacity.

That kind of dual-use crossover between recreation and defense procurement is becoming a pattern in electric platforms generally, something covered in our look at the craziest new technology used by the military today. It also sits alongside a broader wave of stand-on and single-rider electric platforms pushing into terrain no wheelchair-shaped vehicle was ever meant to handle, a trend we’ve tracked in pieces like 5 awesome personal transportation machines you can buy now and 10 most unusual vehicles.

For now, the HD4 remains a niche, expensive piece of kit — $19,200 puts it well out of casual buyer territory. But with special forces units reordering after evaluation and Israeli border police already running it operationally, the next real test isn’t recreational at all. It’s how many more units the Pentagon and IDF end up putting on order once the current evaluation units log more field hours.