Hello, everyone! We’re back today to talk about trucks — the big and dirty ones — and what to do about them. California has around 1.8 million commercial trucks on its roads, almost all of them running on diesel fuel. They’re responsible for a lot of the state’s carbon emissions, and also harmful air pollution, particularly near the ports of Long Beach and L.A. and the warehouses of the “Inland Empire” of San Bernardino and Riverside counties.
To solve these problems, California has committed billions of dollars in incentives to encourage freight companies and independent truckers to switch to electric big rigs. About 2,000 zero-emission heavy trucks now travel on California roads, far more than in any other state.
But electric trucks still cost two to three times as much upfront as their diesel-fueled counterparts. To meet its aggressive clean-freight goals, the state needs to drive down that price.
Last week, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) signed into law a bill that will help with that. Senate Bill 1213 uses both regulatory sticks and financing carrots to bring “greater transparency and accountability to the clean truck market,” said state Sen. Eloise Gómez Reyes (D), who represents nearly a million Inland Empire residents and authored the bill.
Such transparency is necessary because, it turns out, major truck manufacturers have been charging more in California than in other markets.
In a 2024 report, the California Air Resources Board revealed that the average price of a zero-emission Class 8 truck in California was $436,000 — about $87,000 more than the average price in Europe. Research from the nonprofit International Council on Clean Transportation also found big gaps between U.S. and European pricing.
Commercial trucks don’t have sticker prices like cars do, said Ray Minjares, the council’s heavy-duty vehicles program director. Instead, they’re sold via “business-to-business transactions” between manufacturers, dealers, and customers that “do not operate under a high degree of pricing transparency,” he said.
That data will be anonymized to protect competitive confidentiality, emphasized Guillermo Ortiz, senior clean vehicles advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which sponsored the bill. After all, major truck manufacturers still need to recover costs and earn a reasonable profit, even as upstarts like Tesla challenge them on price and performance.
But more data can also open the door to more fine-tuned incentives and other forms of state-backed financing, Ortiz said. SB 1213 instructs state agencies to explore options like residual-value guarantees to provide banks and other lenders with information on what used EV trucks are worth. Right now, such data is missing from the market, making it hard for banks to underwrite loans and leases, which account for about 90% of U.S. truck purchases.
Financing is particularly important for smaller operators, who make up most of the state’s trucking industry. “Zero-emissions trucks can’t just be luxury goods for corporate fleets,” Ortiz said. Loan-loss reserves to help backstop EV truck financing could also draw more lenders into the market.
My take
California needs all the tools it can get now that its power to limit vehicle emissions and mandate clean truck fleets has been gutted by the Trump administration and congressional Republicans. At the same time, states can’t afford to pay half or more of the cost of every electric truck forever. The sooner California can encourage private-sector lenders to do their part, the better. After all, don’t truck manufacturers want to capture a share of the country’s top market for the freight-hauling technology of the future?
What else I’m watching
It’s Sept. 30, which means Newsom has until midnight tonight to veto the bills remaining on his desk from this legislative session or pass them into law. I’ll be tracking the fate of these bills in upcoming Canary Media stories.
