Electric trucks cost too much. California has a law for that.

This is California Wire, a weekly newsletter from Jeff St. John on the state’s clean energy transition. Subscribe to get it every Wednesday via Substack.

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.

Under SB 1213, starting in 2027, manufacturers will need to share that pricing data with state agencies for trucks to be eligible for incentive programs including CARB’s Hybrid and Zero-Emission Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project and California Clean Fuel Reward rebate program and the California Energy Commission’s Clean Transportation Program.

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.

Meanwhile, in an under-the-radar move, Newsom last week vetoed a bill having to do with community choice aggregators, the city- and county-based entities that serve the energy needs of an increasing share of the customers of California’s big three investor-owned utilities.

Assembly Bill 1761 would have forced utilities to disclose data that goes into calculating the Power Charge Indifference Adjustment. That’s a fee that CCAs pay utilities to make up for revenues utilities will no longer get from lost customers to cover the costs of paying down legacy investments like decades-old power plants.

CCAs have argued for years that the California Public Utilities Commission has taken the side of utilities in disputes over a fair way to true up those cost calculations. That includes a big decision last year that let utilities retroactively shift as much as $1 billion in costs onto CCAs, according to the California Community Choice Association.

AB 1761 was meant to make utilities cough up underlying data to prove out these calculations. Newsom’s veto statement says the bill could lead to ​“improper dissemination of market-sensitive information.” But Beth Vaughan, the California Community Choice Association’s CEO, said in a press statement that the veto blocks a simple step to ​“bring greater transparency and accountability to a charge that affects millions of California electricity customers.”

Fighting back on Trump’s offshore wind attacks

California sued the Department of the Interior earlier this month, calling foul on its deal to return $120 million in offshore lease payments to Golden State Wind in exchange for the developer’s promise to invest the same amount of money in U.S. liquified natural gas facilities and other fossil-fuel projects. But the state isn’t fighting its climate battles alone. Last week, New York and seven other East Coast states filed their latest round of lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s deals to pay back billions of dollars in offshore wind development lease payments.

California’s diesel woes

California has the highest diesel prices in the country right now. The looming threat of a Trump administration U.S. diesel export ban could drive those prices up even higher, according to California energy experts interviewed by Politico. That could make switching to electric trucks even more attractive to fleet owners. Remember, electric trucks cost more to buy but less to operate and maintain in the long run. One of the biggest variables in those total-cost-of-ownership calculations is the price of fuel.

Truck charging everywhere all at once

A final note on electric trucks: They need places to charge. And, hey, a lot more charging stations have been popping up lately. A map from Catalyst Mobility covers the entire U.S. and is updated regularly to show which sites have opened, which are being constructed, and which are on the drawing board.

The screenshot below shows the density of the charging network from the Southern California ports through the Inland Empire corridor. But charging stations are also being built in the Central Valley and in neighboring Nevada and Arizona — signs that the electric trucking industry is extending its range.

The number of charging sites has more than doubled, to over 200 stations, since Catalyst Mobility started tracking the data in 2024, said Jacob Richard, a technical project manager at the nonprofit. ​“Having that public infrastructure is vital to getting fleets to adopt the technology,” he said. 

One more thing

Last Sunday was Temescal Giveaway Day in our old neighborhood in Oakland, and my wife and I went to find some cool free stuff — a lot of books, some succulent clippings, a lovely woven basket — and grab a pistachio croissant at Forma Bakery. Lily the corgi came along, and we think she was glad to smell all the old neighborhood smells — and to check out the street art inspired by one of her relatives.