America’s leading trucking association believes the industry dodged a bullet with a recent change in policy concerning electric vehicle mandates. And while California is the only state directly impacted by the move, other states are following suit and pulling back on their proposed mandates as well.
The question is what happens next.
The American Trucking Associations recently took a bow for its role in rolling back California’s requirements that medium- and heavy-duty truck manufacturers sell an increasingly large percentage of zero-emission vehicles until 2035 – at which point all such vehicles sold in these categories would have been required to be zero-emission.
That mandate is now canceled, as Congress passed legislation in June revoking an EPA waiver that allowed California to impose it. The move has national implications, because California is such a large market that manufacturers view what’s required of them in California as a de facto national mandate.
A press release from ATA explained why the issue is so important to the industry:
“Electric truck technology and charging infrastructure have not caught up with the wishful thinking of unelected Sacramento bureaucrats. Compared with the 15 minutes it takes to fuel a diesel truck to go 1,200 miles, it takes six to eight hours to charge an electric truck that at best can travel 200 miles on a single charge. More trucks would be needed to move the same amount of freight, at a much slower rate, while in search of nonexistent charging locations. The added costs would have decimated the trucking industry and left consumers facing massive delays in shipments of vital goods, like groceries and health care products.”
It also pointed out that the trucking industry’s impact on the environment is not what it was decades ago:
“Trucks today produce 99 percent fewer nitrogen oxide (NOx) and particulate matter emissions than those on the road decades ago, and new trucks cut carbon emissions by over 40 percent compared to trucks manufactured in 2010. As a result, 60 of today’s trucks emit what just one truck did in 1988.”
Other states, likely seeing the writing on the wall, have also halted their EV truck mandates. Oregon and Vermont are among those to do so, as Transport Topics reports:
In the span of a few days, leaders in both Oregon and Vermont reversed plans to limit sales of diesel-powered trucks in favor of electric trucks in their states. The Oregon program affected 2025 model year trucks, while Vermont’s plan was set to launch with the 2026 model year.
Vermont Gov. Phil Scott explained one of the reasons he halted implementation of the mandate:
“We’re hearing from the manufacturers and what they are doing to the dealers. They’re forcing the dealers to take some of the EVs and the dealers aren’t able to sell them,” Scott said. “I think we have to be practical here. We have to allow the technology to catch up. We have to allow for the charging infrastructure to catch up. We want to make sure that we weren’t impacting our economy and I think we are. Every state isn’t impacted by this, only those of us who are tied to the California standard there.”
The question now is what comes next. While the industry will resist California’s attempt to impose heavy-handed mandates on the entire country, some sort of national standards are probably inevitable.
Other state associations asking their state governments to halt EV mandates include Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York and Washington.
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