California’s Advanced Clean Fleets (ACF) rule effectively had its funeral last week before the California Air Resources Board (CARB), as the agency wiped out the two largest parts of the regulation that would have impacted trucking in the Golden State.
The end was inevitable following the decision by CARB in January to yank its request to the Environmental Protection Agency to grant the ACF a waiver under the Clean Air Act.
CARB had long contended it didn’t need that waiver. But in late 2023, when the ACF was on the verge of starting to impact California trucking, and pushed by an industry lawsuit, it changed its mind and submitted the waiver request.
ACF’s core mission was to concurrently mandate and incentivize a growing percentage of zero emission vehicle (ZEV) adoption in the state’s trucking fleet.
But with the Biden EPA not having acted on the request for more than a year–unconfirmed reports held that even that Democratic-appointed EPA leadership was skeptical ACF could work–and the imminent arrival of the Trump administration, CARB made the decision to pull back its submission.
Adding flexibility to what’s left
The formal statement released by CARB last week following its meeting attempted to be as upbeat as possible. “CARB adds flexibility to truck fleet requirements with amendments to help owners continue zero-emission progress” was the headline on the release published after the Thursday hearing.
The flexibility it spoke of regards the requirement for state or local government fleets to buy a growing percentage of ZEVs. That requirement, because it is intra-state and does not involve interstate commerce, would not have required an EPA waiver and has not been withdrawn.
But the government fleet requirement that is still in existence was rarely mentioned in the years of discussion of the ACF’s ambitious ZEV goals and whether they could be met. Instead, the focus of discussion was on two key sections, now both withdrawn.
The first was what California called the High Priority Fleets regulation, which covered fleets with more than 50 trucks.
It had a schedule for ZEV adoption that the state referred to as Milestones. It took three classes of trucks–box trucks and other smaller vehicles; work trucks and day cab tractors; and sleeper cab tractors–and laid out a schedule requiring ZEVs be a certain percentage of new purchases starting in a specific year. For example, a 10% goal needed to be reached by 2025 for the smaller group, 2027 for the work trucks/day cab classification, and 2030 for class 8 trucks with a sleeper cab.
Milestones scaled up until a 100% requirement that took effect in 2035, 2039 and 2042, respectively, for the three groups.
Drayage rules were to kick off in ’24
ACF’s rules on drayage trucks, the second of the two key requirements, was supposed to have been in full swing at the start of 2024.
That requirement would have barred any new non-ZEV trucks from being listed with California’s drayage registry starting at the beginning of last year. It also included rules on phasing out older drayage trucks, with a plan that the combination of the phaseout and the requirement for only ZEVs being able to register as a new vehicle with the state would eventually make the drayage fleet 100%.
But in the first sign that the ACF was cracking, California said in late 2023 that it would not enforce that rule. That came soon after the state’s bravado that it didn’t need an EPA waiver for the ACF was replaced by CARB filing for that waiver after the California Trucking Association filed suit against the regulation.
The brutal starkness of what CARB did last week is visible in a review of the CARB report entitled “The Proposed Amendments to the Advanced Clean Fleets and Low Carbon Fuel Standards Regulation.” (The LCFS is a program to incentivize the consumption and production of low-carbon transportation fuels, such as renewable diesel or hydrogen, by the generation of credits that can be sold by the supplier of a fuel like renewable diesel. It is not being withdrawn).
The entire document looks like this:
That 58-page document is a detailed description of what the state had planned under the ACF. But now, every single word and sentence in those pages is crossed out, leaving no ambiguity about the fate of California’s plans, for now at least, to create a fully zero-emission truck fleet in the Golden State.
CARB’s discussion about flexibility in last week’s action involves its requirement on purchasing ZEVs that will still impact state and government fleets.
The amendments, it said, pushes out by three years a requirement for a government fleet to buy 50% ZEVs, a rule that was to begin with the 2024 model year. A rule to buy all ZEVs by 2027 also was pushed out three years. There also is a Milestones program, as there was with the ACF for trucking fleets, that sets a separate requirement for growing the ZEV fleet according to a published schedule.
But notably, the revised government fleets rule had a strikethrough in the wording that would have applied the rule to outside entities that “(operate) or hires or directs the operations of vehicles in California,” such as brokers or motor carriers.
The ACF was to work in tandem with the Advanced Clean Trucks rule. The former mandated fleet purchases of ZEVs; the latter mandated OEM sales of ZEVs into the state.
Advanced Clean Trucks did receive an EPA waiver, but recently had it withdrawn through a Congressional action. Its fate now rests in a court case.
But even as the rules are tottering, ZEV sales in Callifornia trucking are continuing to grow.
CARB last week released data on ZEV truck sales in 2024. It reported that last year, there were 131,552 ZEV trucks of various shapes and sizes sold in the state. That was about 22.8% of the total.
The prior year, the corresponding figures were 119,570 ZEV trucks sold, 15.9% of the total.
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