Dennis
Howard

The Man Who Runs America's Oldest Bus Factory

Jacob Gillig opened his carriage shop in San Francisco in 1890. The 1906 earthquake leveled it. His sons rebuilt. By the time the Great Depression arrived, GILLIG had pivoted to school buses. By 1957, the company controlled 70% of Northern California's bus market. Dennis Howard, the current CEO and President of GILLIG LLC, inherited that legacy - and is in the middle of re-engineering it for the electric age.

Howard leads a company that is simultaneously one of America's most durable industrial businesses and one of its most quietly pivotal. GILLIG doesn't run ads on TV. It doesn't court Silicon Valley attention. It manufactures heavy-duty transit buses at a 640,000-square-foot facility in Livermore, California, and ships them to transit agencies, universities, and regional transportation authorities across the United States. The buses carry millions of commuters. The company carries almost no public profile.

That's by design. GILLIG has been privately held by three American families since its founding. There's no IPO roadshow, no acquisition press release, no venture capital narrative. There is, instead, a multi-decade track record of building buses that last - and an expanding portfolio of zero-emission alternatives for the transit systems trying to go green.

From California DMV to GILLIG's Corner Office

Howard's career began in 1978 - in the world of motor vehicle regulation, not manufacturing. He spent years at the California Department of Motor Vehicles across multiple departments including title, dealership, vehicle registration, and non-resident operations. It's an unusual path to a manufacturing CEO seat: he came from the regulatory and administrative side of the automotive world before crossing into the industry side.

He holds an MBA in Accounting and Finance from Seattle University - the financial lens that informed a leadership style built on operational discipline and long-term strategic patience. At GILLIG, the numbers work: roughly $325 million in annual revenue, a 750-person workforce, and a market position that has held through multiple economic cycles, fuel price swings, and now the largest technology transition the transit industry has seen in decades.

The 2017 Move That Changed Everything

For more than 80 years, GILLIG operated out of Hayward, California. In May 2017, the company made its biggest physical bet in a generation: a move to a brand-new 640,000-square-foot facility in Livermore. The new plant wasn't just bigger - it was designed for the clean energy era. The facility includes a 3-megawatt solar installation with 7,800 panels, recycled water systems, and employee EV charging stations.

The timing proved prophetic. Within a year of opening the Livermore plant, GILLIG launched its first Battery Electric Bus. The infrastructure was already there. The engineering capacity was already there. By 2024, GILLIG was showing up at the White House to talk about what it takes to manufacture zero-emission buses at national scale - and it had the factory to back that conversation up.

Five Powertrains, One Strategy

Ask most people to name a bus manufacturer and they'll say nothing, because they don't think about it. Ask a transit agency procurement officer and GILLIG comes up immediately. The company makes buses in five powertrain configurations: clean diesel, compressed natural gas, hybrid electric, battery electric, and - as of 2024 - hydrogen fuel cell. That's not feature bloat. That's coverage. Different cities need different solutions, and GILLIG builds all of them.

The hydrogen fuel cell launch came in 2024, developed in partnership with BAE Systems and Ballard Power Systems. The same year, GILLIG signed a deal with King County Metro in the Seattle area for up to 306 electric buses - one of the largest single electric bus contracts in the country. King County put 10 of those buses into service in early 2025.

The White House Conversation

On February 7, 2024, representatives from GILLIG joined FTA officials, APTA leadership, and transit agency heads at a White House roundtable on Clean Bus Manufacturing. The issue wasn't whether America wanted zero-emission buses - procurement at that scale was already in motion. The issue was whether American manufacturers could produce them fast enough, and whether legacy procurement rules were creating cash-flow problems that would slow down domestic production.

GILLIG came with receipts: a new factory built in 2017, a battery electric product line launched in 2018, a unionized workforce locked in under a five-year labor agreement, and a company-wide posture aligned with where the market was clearly heading. The summit produced three key recommendations around price adjustments, progress payments, and price indices to address manufacturer cash flow - changes GILLIG publicly backed.

Being in that room isn't a small thing. GILLIG's name was alongside New Flyer's parent company NFI Group in the conversation - the two largest transit bus manufacturers in North America, at the White House, making the case for American manufacturing capacity in the clean energy transition.

The Fleet Footprint

GILLIG buses run in the kinds of cities that don't make headlines but move enormous populations: VIA Metropolitan Transit in San Antonio. Big Blue Bus in Santa Monica. AC Transit in the East Bay. The roster includes transit agencies across California, Hawaii, the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, and the East Coast. The buses are on the street. They show up at bus stops. They're not in a press release - they're in the schedule.

The most recent deployments include 27 battery electric buses for the University of Maryland, a 476-vehicle fleet modernization contract for DART, GILLIG electric buses now operating across all four Hawaii island counties, and new routes in Duluth, Minnesota. The geographical spread is deliberate: GILLIG's business case is that every American transit system eventually needs what GILLIG makes.

Career Timeline

Fun Facts & Things You Didn't Know