Last year, I was offered a weird opportunity. I got to ride over to Michigan to drive the prototype Class 4 commercial trucks of Bollinger Motors, a company that originally wanted to make sweet electric off-roaders before shelving them. The company had its doubters, but Bollinger beat everyone’s expectations as it just put the B4 into production. You’re going to see these trucks soon, so let’s take a look.
This news comes to us from Automotive News. According to the publication, Bollinger is sitting on orders for at least 240 of its all-electric B4 commercial trucks, valued at around $35 million. On September 16, the very first production truck began to make its way down the Roush Flexible Assembly line in Livonia, Michigan.
This is exciting news! It seems so many startup companies make ambitious promises, just to never deliver their product. Bollinger Motors, majority owned by Mullen Automotive (a “Southern California based company that owns and partners with several synergistic businesses, all working towards the same goal of creating clean and scalable electric vehicles and energy solutions”), was feared to be another one of those names. Now, slowly, the company is proving it has some bite to match its bark.
The Rollercoaster Of Bollinger
If you haven’t been following this story, I’ll give you a recap of why people thought these were going to be vaporware.
Robert Bollinger founded Bollinger Motors in Hobart, New York nine years ago. At the time, Bollinger had ambitious plans, stating: “Trucks have had the same design flaws for a hundred years and someone needs to do something about it.” How ambitious are we talking about, here? Bollinger said he was going to build the “world’s first all-electric on- and off-road sport utility truck.”
[Editor’s Note: I feel like I should mention, in the interests of full disclosure, Bollinger once wanted me to sign some legal documents because they were having a patent dispute with rival EV truck maker Canoo over front beds and tailgates, something I had drawn and written about and published in 2013, long before the first Bollinger came out with a similar setup in 2017. If I recall correctly, Bollinger wanted to stop Canoo from getting a patent, citing my posts as prior art or something. It’s all documented here. – JT]
Now, keep in mind that this was before today’s popular electric trucks and SUVs hit the road, so this statement had impact. So, Bollinger announced an electric SUV and an electric pickup truck; from my B4 commercial truck first drive:
Bollinger’s truck ideas rose from a need. See, Bollinger’s enjoyed a colorful career working for Manhattan ad agencies before pivoting to an organic hair and skincare company then finally landing at co-founding a grass-fed cattle farm. While running the farm, Bollinger felt that there really wasn’t a truck out there that was both a practical farm vehicle and a fun off-road toy. This motivated Bollinger to fulfill a lifelong dream and he created Bollinger Motors with the idea of creating a heavy-duty Sport Utility Truck that got work done during the week and had fun on the weekends.
In 2018, the company moved to Ferndale, Michigan, to grow its team and take advantage of proximity near automotive suppliers, engineering talent, and potential manufacturing partners. A year later, Bollinger moved again to Oak Park, Michigan. Bollinger had been working on the B1 SUV and B2 Pickup for years. Development started with a team of engineers who lived with each other in a bunkhouse before the truck was first unveiled in 2017. Bollinger then missed its delivery targets multiple times as development continued. The company also briefly flirted with a panel van concept and chassis cabs.
Bollinger disappointed waiting fans in 2022 when it canned the B1 and B2. Then, it was revealed that Bollinger had been quietly working on a commercial truck platform, and large fleet operators were interested in it. The company already had most of its workers aiding in the development of the commercial truck, so shelving the B1 and B2 was even easier.
Robert Bollinger, who has since stepped down as CEO, says he’s not giving up on his ultimate electric pickup truck dream, but for now the company is going to chase what makes the most sense. Still, Bollinger already effectively killed two vehicles, so some folks understandably had little confidence that the commercial trucks would hit the road.
The B4 Is A Ton Of Fun
One of the biggest differences between the old off-roader project and this commercial truck project was a change in design philosophy. The B1 and B2 were supposed to be designed and built from a blank sheet, using as many bespoke components as possible.
The B4 commercial trucks are the exact opposite. Bollinger’s engineers told me that they partnered with as many suppliers as possible to reduce inventions down to the bare minimum. Everything from the truck’s cab to its battery comes from an army of suppliers, and the trucks are assembled right there in Michigan by Roush.
Before you think that cab comes from Isuzu, it doesn’t. It actually comes from a manufacturer in China because, as you could guess, no big name manufacturer was willing to sell a cab to a potential competitor. At any rate, Bollinger isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel, but fill a hole in the market for a Class 4 electric commercial truck that offers up good dynamics and low running costs.
For those of you not obsessed with trucks, those classes refer to the Gross Vehicle Weight Rating, or your truck plus what it’s hauling in its cab and box. A Class 1 truck is under 6,000 pounds like a Chevy Colorado or Toyota Tacoma while a Class 8 goes up to and beyond 80,000 pounds like a Tesla Semi or a Freightliner Cascadia. Class 4 trucks are between 14,001 pounds and 16,000 pounds.
Driving one is a total ball, from my first drive:
The Bollinger B4 surprised me in how much it didn’t drive like a commercial truck. The Mcity proving ground was too small for me to really find the limits of the Bollinger trucks, but I got to do things with those trucks that I’d never try with my bus or any of the other trucks I’ve driven.
Out of the gate, I decided to punch the accelerator. The B4 moves like any other EV. It takes off with a satisfying kick of torque and the electric motor gets the speedometer rising way faster than you’d expect a commercial vehicle to go. I’m sure you’ve gotten stuck behind garbage trucks and the like at stoplights. Well, the B4 accelerates fast enough that it could be a garbage truck that is faster than you are between stoplights. The B4 is not “fast,” as in, it’s not going to pull your face’s skin back, but it’ll make a comparable diesel look like it’s sitting still. It’s fast enough that Bollinger tells me some customers want a power limiter so that drivers don’t have too much fun.
That quick dose of power is supported with surprisingly good handling. See, “handling” and “delivery truck” don’t tend to jive well. Try to go full lock and full throttle in a regular truck and you might have a bad day. Bollinger’s trucks have their center of gravity so low that the engineers actually encouraged going full lock while hard on the throttle. There was tons of body roll, sure, but the truck felt planted even when I was at full lock and pushing the truck harder and harder. The tires gave up traction long before the truck felt unstable.
Bollinger’s engineers even convinced me to do a slalom. I giggled all of the way through because come on, I was driving this like I would a Mazda Miata or a Saturn Sky, but this was a freaking box truck!
A lot of the reason the B4 drove so well comes down to the engineering. Yes, Bollinger used as many existing parts as possible, but some real thought was put into implementing them.
For example, Bollinger says its frame rails are 40 inches wide, compared to about 32 inches or so found in most ICE Class 4 trucks. Doing this allowed the company to put the battery and drive system in the middle of the frame rails and down low, close to the ground. The result is that the vast majority of the trucks’ base weight is hugging the road, which you can’t say about the typical ICE Class 4.
They Actually Did It
Bollinger also came pretty much on target with the specs as they were presented during the drive event. These trucks have a GVWR of 15,500 pounds, or down about 500 pounds from the ICE competition. The engineers told me the target was closer to 600 pounds down from the competition, so they did better than expected. The production truck’s payload is an equally healthy 7,325 pounds.
Our Next Energy (ONE) in Novi, Michigan provides battery power through its scalable Aries LFP system. The B4 wears two 79 kWh Aries LFP packs, which adds up to 158 kWh of power and 800 volts.
Bollinger quotes a range estimate of 185 miles, but that may vary wildly in either direction depending on how the fleet operator upfits and operates the truck. Topping up that battery from dead takes 9 hours on a Level 2 charger or 1.5 hours on a DC fast charge.
Bollinger says the choice to go with Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP) chemistry offered numerous benefits. ONE says its batteries can survive 5,000 charge cycles and they shouldn’t see accelerated degradation from repeated full charges to 100 percent. Also, Bollinger says LFP is less likely to catch fire.
The prototype trucks were powered by a Dana e-Axle good for 363 HP and 702 lb-ft torque. These trucks were already quick, probably even faster than some of the slower cars on the market today. Yet, as Automotive News writes, the production trucks are pumping out 400 HP. So, the fun I had shouldn’t have gone anywhere.
Other specs remain great as well from the 44 feet of turning circle to the short 158 inches of wheelbase. The 30- HP Terzo e-PTO even sticks around, offering businesses even more practicality. The trucks are also thoroughly modern with a forward collision warning system, lane departure warning, and a warning system to hopefully keep you from running over cyclists and pedestrians.
LaFontaine Automotive Group in Detroit will sell and service the $158,758 B4 and the first trucks are expected to reach the dealer group next month. Qualifying customers can get up to a $40,000 tax credit per vehicle and California customers can see a credit of up to $60,000. Roush and Bollinger expect to build a truck a day at first to ensure quality is right. Then, production will eventually ramp up. Bollinger says Roush has the capacity to build 5,000 B4s a year.
Once the B4 line is fully up and running, Bollinger wants to go bigger and more powerful. Next on its list is putting a Class 5 electric truck into production. For now, it’s just awesome to hear that the company actually pulled through on the B4. So, if you’re at a light next to a silent box truck, it might just be a Bollinger.
(Images: Author, unless otherwise noted.)
Cool! Here’s hoping they actually survive and thrive from this endeavor!
“See, “handling” and “delivery truck” don’t tend to jive well.”
Jibe.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/jibe
People began confusing jive and jibe almost immediately after jive entered our language in the late 1920s. In particular, jive is often used as a variant for the sense of jibe meaning “agree,” as in “that doesn’t jive with my memory of what happened.” This use of jive, although increasingly common, is widely considered to be an error. Jibe, however, is accepted as a variant spelling of an entirely different word, which is gibe (“to utter taunting words”).
Language is fluid and “jive” is the modern accepted use. Asking someone to use an archaic word because you think it is “more correct” isn’t needed.
Interesting. So its an isuzu cab and chassis, so heaven forbid you take out the cab (which isnt hard) You can actually replace it.
Not Isuzu.
I do wonder how standardized these cabs are, though. How much work would it be to replace it with a junkyard Isuzu cab if necessary? Or do those 40-inch frame rails mean that a custom-made cab is needed?
I’m reminded of how, in India, truck cabs are made of wood so that local artisans can replace them…
I’m happy that Bollinger is staying afloat. It’s a tiny glimmer of hope for the B1/B2 project to come back from the dead. But I’m not holding my breath, this is a terribly expensive Isuzu N-Series lookalike. Not sure this is a clear path for economic viability.
Isn’t Bollinger now owned by Mullen?
Reading the article is a great way to read the article.
$40k tax credit?! Good lord.
Basis for a full electric RV?
That was my thought too.
Aren’t RVs meant for long distance traveling?
Oof with that price, but seems like a great product. I kind of enjoyed driving an old work NPR even with a blown turbo, so this sounds like it would be fun and I’m not a truck person.
I’m curious how the after-rebate price compares to trucks from Isuzu, Hino, etc. I have no frame of reference for what a new box truck should cost.
Me, neither. I used to see used ones for relatively cheap (fantasy shopping because of the shitbox my company had), but that wasn’t new and that was about 20 years ago. It sounds expensive to me, but what doesn’t nowadays? Yeah, yeah, I could look it up, but ehhhh.
I found a 2024 Isuzu NPR box truck for $68,000 in Medford Oregon so after tax credit these appear to $30‐50,000 more for electric. This is probably a mix of the added cost of the battery pack and low volume production
At risk of sounding like an EV stan, as I understand it, a bunch of the rest of the math with EV trucks gets different enough to be interesting – in particular, the fuel costs vs electricity costs and the durability of the electric parts make the math go positive for EVs very quickly.
There’s not a lot of commercial EV trucks out there right now, but I’ll be interested to see how the math works for these sorts of trucks – feels like heavy-duty hauling should be a sweet spot for EVs because of all the torque.
For heavy-duty hauling you kinda have to stick to short distances with an EV truck because of all the juice being drained. Which doesn’t mean it won’t work but that it only will for certain use cases.
Local deliveries and similar activities (i.e. trash trucks) are where these can shine and justify their price very quickly. Slow-ish stop and go without going very far overall is perfect for electric propulsion.
I bet these would make great garbage trucks, nyc newspaper trucks, wait, scratch the news trucks but those things were awesome back then, maybe distilled water or beer trucks. Any delivery truck or really any truck that has th deal with traffic lights.
And remember, braking is just another name for charging.
I wish them the best, but basing a business that is completely dependant on suppliers for key components is not a very stable position to be in.
That’s most of modern business and manufacturing, though.
Oh man wait til you learn about the global economy
That is pretty much standard fare in HD and to a slightly lesser degree MD trucks.
My company has been making parts for key components for 108 years.
I was gonna say the complete opposite. Finally a startup that does not want to make everything from scratch out of hubris and relies on suppliers.
Once they dial in their product, they can worry about moving some of the value chain in house if they want, but first you gotta get the product out the door and working reliably.
HD trucks have a LOT of standardization of parts. Most of the switchgear and running gear can be had in any brand of truck. Keeps cost down and availability high when you need maintenance or repairs.
Okay, spreading the frame rails to 40″ in order to fit the battery just pissed off every aftermarket bed/box supplier because they’ve been building their stuff for narrower frames since forever.
That was my exact thought when I read that. Not sure that’s the best idea ever.
Me three, that just increased the upfit costs significantly since you’ll need a custom made or at least modified body.
More like incentivized every aftermarket box/bed supplier, because its a premium product that can be premium upcharged on a first-mover status, for what is honestly a really simple engineering/manufacturing change in bed/box design.
Those incentives make this seem like an absolute no-brainer for any fleet that has a use case.
Abt, can you hear me? I think Illinois has huge incentives available. Com-Ed can certainly bring the juice. Just think of the PR opportunity in a blue state. Seriously, someone should hook these two up.
This sounds like a great idea however the price is still too high to be something a small fleet operator can use and still make a living.UPS or some of the FedEx contractors might be interested once it’s established although the price has got to come down.
Fedex is using BrightDrop box trucks in my area. I’m too lazy to figure out how those compare to this though.
Brightdrop is Class 2
I’d daily it. Throw a crew cab on it, shorten the frame so the batteries are just barely kissing the steering gear, put an 8 foot (or 9 foot stretched) dually bed on it, and have yourself a modern electric Corporate Concepts Lieutenant… one of my white whales still yet to be found.
I had to google that and woooooow, 10/10 concept, (inexpressibly small number)/10 for execution.
So a Class 4 NPR new 2024 is roughly 60K. this thing is twice that even with my tax money paying for 40K of it. and it only get 186 mile to a charge with nothing added to it. Man, I am not sure this is really that great of a deal.
Yeah, there wasn’t a stated price when I tested it last year. I can’t say I’m surprised the price gulf is that large. There is a similar thing going on with school buses where electric buses are still about double the price of an equivalent diesel and exponentially more expensive than a gasser.
Edit: The idea, at least for now, is that these EV commercial vehicles will be so cheap to run compared to fueling and maintaining diesels that the gap should narrow. Well, given enough years in service, anyway.
some quick math says maybe $5000/yr fuel savings vs diesel, enough to shrink that gap over time but not tip the scales on its own.
Not sure how other consumables like oil or gear lube play in. Diesels usually have gallons of oil. A fleet buying 10 or so of these would save those costs not needing to stock oil and filters. Almost forgot about DEF for modern diesels.
A company that buys these could probably work out something with their utility to charge these at off peak rates overnight. Some utilities offer good incentives to do that. Basically 2/3 price power. Plus more savings if a power purchase agreement for renewable energy can be done. If the electricity to run these is cheap it makes the upfront cost more palatable.
Remember as well that upfront assets like work vehicles are subject to tax depreciation loopholes (laws, but really), while consumables like gas are not. So take that 60k difference post credit, get a ~20% tax rebate on the whole thing over say 4 or 5 years (another 30,000), and now you have probably 20-40k to offset with fuel and maintenance.
That seems probable to be worth it in ~5-10 years of use if the vehicle sees decently high use.
I met with them @ their Ferndale location on business (never actually did any business with them) and it’s pretty remarkable that they made it to this point.
Still not convinced that massive batteries are the right way vs other options…but it’s cool that they’re actually to the production stage.
Bollinger, the preferred champagne of James Bond.
Bollinger delivered in a Bollinger?
Too bad about the passenger trucks, they are exactly my taste in retro-futuristic. Hopefully Bob can take some learned lessons and start fresh. I wonder who got the designs in the divorce though, Bollinger or Bollinger?
Bollinger did
Oh really? Huh, I figured it would probably be Bollinger.
Is that a keyed ignition switch in the picture?
That would almost have to be the only EV using a regular key; what a weird blend of old and new mindsets.
How about that shifter, too.
Regular key, regular shifter. Bollinger’s people told me they wanted to keep things simple.
Shifter on a BEV with max torque from 0 rpm? How many speeds?
Fleets like old school keys. Cheap, durable, easy to copy.
Or order them all keyed alike which you can do from some mfgs. That might be why I have a key that worked on my car, my daughters, and my nephews.
This looks like what I thought more manufactures would do (but I was wrong). Take something that already exists and change only what was absolutely necessary to make it an EV.
Great way to take advantage of existing supply chains and efficiencies of scale.
The problem is when the EVangelists see a modified ICE they dismiss it as “not a real EV” or something stupid like that. The absolutism of the EV community is one of the more harmful things for electrification (see also the response to PHEVs).
I just don’t get that. My wife’s Bolt is the most normal EV I’ve driven in and I love it for it. Because it all just works and doesn’t leave me guessing how to adjust the air vents, or how to open the charge door.
I follow the EV world pretty closely and I can’t say that I ever encountered this attitude. I think EVs built on ICE platforms will likely never be profitable for manufacturers, so they will end up having to switch to bespoke EV platforms or go out of business.
The problem with this approach is that it is much more expensive to manufacture an EV from an existing ICE platform than from a bespoke EV platform. I think what it comes down to is that ICE vehicles and EVs have very little in common under the skin, at least in terms of the expensive parts. As a result, manufacturers have to make many sub-optimal engineering decisions in order to make an EV on an ICE platform.
I think the problem is quite the opposite. Quit making a mountain out of a Mole Hill. We don’t need disappearing door handles, remote operated parking, tail-lights that are individually controlled by canbus.
We don’t need optimal efficiency as the goal in round one. Take the gains from the easy win of an EV with current architecture and supply chains. Work towards the perfect EV in the background or iterate over time to get there.
Everyone wants to blank sheet these things and the result is products that are expensive, have serious launch issues, and don’t do the thing that consumers primarily want their cars to do any better than ICE. And so we see people pulling away from EVS and towards… hybrid. Because those things are built more like their ICE counterparts.
I like blank sheet EVs. They are interesting and a big step forward. They are also unnecessarily frustrating and expensive at times and I think part of the problem with the slowing adoption curve.
My point isn’t that EVs need to be different from ICE vehicles in terms of user experience; it’s that they need to be built differently in order to be economically viable. If you adapt an ICE vehicle platform to accommodate an EV drivetrain, you add a lot of cost because the platform was not designed to accommodate the EV components. This is a large part of why “legacy auto” loses money on every EV they sell, and why only the newcomers (Tesla and BYD) actually make a profit on EVs. I agree that it would be better for EV adoption if manufacturers would make the user experience essentially the same as what people are used to in their ICE vehicles. Having said that, I think it’s OK to make changes to the user experience, if the changes are for the better. A lot of people won’t like that, because we humans tend to resist change no matter what is driving it.
My 2021 Seat Mii Electric had a keyed ignition. As did its platform siblings, VW e-Up and Skoda Citigo.
The Citroën ë-C3 and Dacia Spring would like a word.
Yep sorry to both you and the guy above you, I’m not familiar with small Euro only stuff not sold here.
We need more of those in the U.S.