Bollinger Motors advances amid uncertainty: Insights on the electric B4's production and future in a shifting EV landscape

After nearly a decade since its founding, this past fall, Bollinger Motors finally began production on its Class 4 Bollinger B4—an all-electric commercial vehicle. Its founder, Robert Bollinger, started the company with a dream of building a smaller sport utility vehicle, but over the years, the company shifted its focus to the commercial market.

Bollinger’s dream of becoming a true OEM with a vehicle in production was finally realized, and FleetOwner was there to watch it happen. With a crowd of media, Bollinger employees, and government officials, Robert Bollinger took to the stage in celebration of his company doing the extraordinary.

“The odds of us getting to this are so astronomically against us, and we actually did it,” Bollinger said in September 2024.

Two months later, an election happened.

New president disrupts EV industry

Americans voted in a candidate who opposes providing any government funds to aid in the transition of electric vehicles, and who, on his first day in office during his second term, signed an executive order to unwind vehicle emission standards.

The election of President Trump has caused the automotive industry to come to a halt. The most recent industry event FleetOwner covered, NTEA’s Work Truck Week 2025, is typically an event full of OEM announcements on new technology, new powertrains, and future direction. But this past year’s WTW was much quieter than years’ past.

The uncertainty surrounding the president’s next move or next blow to the electric vehicle industry—which nearly all OEMs are spending millions of dollars to produce—has kept OEMs from announcing much this year, and instead, their focus at WTW 2025 was on celebrating past achievements.

Fortunately, the OEMs at most of these industry trade shows have many gas- and diesel-powered vehicles already in production. Each purchase of one of these vehicles helps fund research and development in the EV segment. But an OEM that produces electric vehicles exclusively, a company like Bollinger, doesn’t have that luxury.

An update on the industry’s newest OEM: Bollinger

At Work Truck Week, when FleetOwner talked to Jim Connelly, Bollinger’s chief revenue officer, the sentiment was hopeful, but not ambitious—which is a shift away from the energy he and the rest of the Bollinger team typically display.

He provided an update.

Since the launch of production on the B4, Bollinger has made several deliveries of the B4, both on the East Coast and the West Coast. Connelly said the company is focused on “delivering those vehicles” and “building the dealer network.”

“We have roughly about 50 points, if you count service points and sales points,” and more are on the way, he said. “So, we're just mapping out where the holes are.”

Moving ahead in a not-so-EV-friendly environment

As for what Bollinger expects out of its EV sales this year, “I would say the first half of the year is going to be a little slower, just because everybody's got to play an audible at this point, because we don't know where we're going,” Connelly explained, referring to the state of the industry with the change in administration.

For Bollinger, these uncertainties revolve around incentives, which many OEMs rely on to entice buyers to purchase EVs. Without the government to foot the bill for these incentives, or for those incentives to run out without being renewed, is an aspect of business where Bollinger is looking for solutions, Connelly said.

But even without an EV-friendly administration, Connelly expressed some hope.

“There may be a little bit of a turbulence on the federal level, but if you look at some of the states that are currently EV friendly, there's still interested customers,” Connelly said. “I think the states where there are incentives are key states for us to focus on: California, Massachusetts, New York.”

There are also companies that will work toward their sustainability goals regardless of the political environment, Connelly said, and Bollinger will focus its sales efforts on those companies as well.

In times of uncertainty, it also pays to be creative, which is something Connelly said his career has prepared him for.

“In my previous lives, I used to say I was a firefighter. I'd get all the problems, and I’d have to figure out solutions for them,” Connelly said. “So, I'm very comfortable in a turbulent environment ... You have to learn how to pivot, and you have to plan long term.”

Pivoting to find sources of customers from different types of applications could be another focus for Bollinger.

“I truly believe I have a very versatile vehicle from an upfit perspective,” he said. “That clean frame design ... really allows me to have any type of upfit application, and so I can really target those different industries at the state levels from a municipality perspective.”

Worth noting: The Bollinger B4 is available on the Sourcewell contract, where many municipalities purchase their vehicles.

What’s to come for Bollinger Motors

The future might not look so bright for government assistance with the transition to EVs, but Bollinger is aware of that. The goal now is to service those customers that have an interest, regardless—even if that means spreading into different applications.

Connelly teased that the OEM has started looking into upfit solutions for the telecom space after utility companies expressed an interest in the B4. He even said to keep an eye out for an announcement to come regarding utility bodies at “a later date.”

Another Bollinger strategy, and a goal for the OEM in 2026, is to sell the B4 on the other side of the Northern border, which Connelly said the company is currently “mapping out.”

Overall, although Bollinger is the youngest OEM in the industry that has placed all its eggs in the EV basket, Connelly said the fact that it’s a new entrant is what helps it keep that competitive edge when building future products.

“As a startup OEM, we take the customer input very seriously because that's what's going to give us a competitive edge over some of the larger OEMs that just build it and think ... people will buy it,” Connelly said. “We’re hyper-focused on what we think the customer wants, and ... we can listen to those customers and implement those changes quickly.”

Connelly hopes that by the end of 2025, the company will be in a position where it’s “in the midst of engineering the B5, a Class 5 [EV] that is the big brother” to the B4, with an expected launch in 2026. Soon after that in 2027, Bollinger will plan the rollout of its Class 6 B6.