These trucks are used for maintenance and supervisory staff at remote locations where there is no electricity. They often travel more than 150 miles per day. They are not “homed” at the corporate headquarters every night for easy charging. And for charging in less than 12 hours they require 220 or 440 charging facilities which are not typically available at an employee’s residential locations.

Recently undated CARB rules have established deadlines for transitioning most construction equipment and machines to near-zero emissions at a cost of billions to the industry. To achieve those goals many companies will just have to shrink their fleets and become smaller due to the high cost of new excavators, bulldozers and scrapers that can run into the millions of dollars each. Adding the electric trucks which can be double the cost of a diesel truck will eliminate many employers in this industry.

Since the beginning of this regulation development, CARB has always said it would be only the largest fleets (50 or more trucks and $50 million in revenue) that would be subject to this new rule. Now Board members are proposing a last-minute change to lower the fleet size from 50 trucks to just 10 trucks. There has been no economic analysis of this added financial burden. There is no staff analysis on the availability of the tens of thousands of additional trucks needed to meet this new goal. And the small and medium fleet owners have not been contacted by CARB about their inclusion in this new rule.