Business
California still bullish on EV trucks, despite industry opposition and setbacks in Washington
It seemed like the death knell. The state of California failed to get required federal permission from the Biden administration — the Biden administration — to enforce new regulations that would phase out sales of diesel big-rig trucks to fleet operators at the state’s seaports, forcing them to buy zero-emission vehicles instead.
The regulations, known as Advanced Clean Fleets, faced pitched opposition from the trucking industry. But California plans to carry on anyway, hoping the carrot of subsidy money and the stick of other state regulations will accomplish its goals.
Infrastructure improvements will help. Liane Randolph, chair of the California Air Resources Board, was among officials on hand at the Port of Long Beach recently for a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new electric truck charging depot — 25 chargers and 44 dispensers to serve up to 200 trucks a day.
“We are committed in California to continuing this process,” she said.
The $10-million-plus depot, funded through a mix of private investment and state, local and federal tax credits, subsidies and grants, will be run by a San Francisco startup called Forum Mobility, one of several heavy-duty truck charging companies seeking a foothold in a new business category called TaaS, or trucking as a service.
Forum charges truck fleet operators monthly “subscriptions” to use its charging depots. It also buys or leases electric trucks, in turn leasing them to truck fleet owners as part of a subscription package.
The success (or not) of companies such as Forum could determine whether California achieves its ambitious quest to slash local pollution and global greenhouse gas emissions by converting the state’s massive population of diesel trucks to zero-emission versions.
By January, the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency had not acted on California’s 15-month-old request for a waiver to federal rules that would allow Advanced Clean Trucks rules to move forward. CARB withdrew its waiver request in January for fear the Trump administration would turn it down. Biden’s EPA never explained what was taking so long to reach a decision.
The rule would have applied to drayage trucks — semitrucks that haul shipping containers into and out of seaports. The goods are carried to nearby distribution centers, most of which are then transported by long-distance trucks and trains.
Because drayage trucks concentrate fume-pumping diesel engines in a tight location, the air quality in residential areas adjacent to ports suffers. To combat this pollution and global warming, the state is pushing for electric vehicle transport.
The rules would have applied to any truck operator who owned or leased between one and 50 trucks, if annual revenue topped $50 million, or to any truck fleet larger than 50 vehicles.
Forum Mobility electric trucks from Volvo, charging up.
(Kevin Krause / Forum Mobility)
Forum and other electric truck service providers aren’t panicking. While the state cannot now force fleet operators to buy electric trucks, it can still require truck manufacturers to sell them through its Advanced Clean Trucks regulations.
It’s similar to California’s Advanced Clean Cars program, which doesn’t require consumers to buy electric vehicles, but penalizes manufacturers if they don’t phase out sales of gasoline and diesel cars and light trucks by 2035. Truck manufacturers have until 2036 to fully convert to zero-emission sales of new trucks.
Most major U.S. big-rig truck and engine manufacturers signed a deal with the state in 2023, agreeing to go along with the plan and not file lawsuits against it, in return for more regulatory certainty — at least at the state level — and flexibility in meeting the state’s strict diesel pollution rule. That deal could protect the program from any action against it from the Trump administration. Signers include Ford, GM, Navistar, Volvo, Paccar, Cummins and others.
But with no state rules forcing zero-emission trucks on truck buyers, the budding electric truck industry will have to rely more on salesmanship — operating costs are cheaper for electric trucks — and more on government subsidy money to pay for the currently enormous costs of electric trucks.
“We’ll move forward with more carrots than sticks,” said Adam Browning, policy chief at Forum Mobility.
Truckloads of carrots will be required, and they’ll have to come from state and local governments, because federal support for electric trucks appears doubtful in the Trump administration.
By far the biggest barrier to diesel-to-electric conversion is the cost of electric trucks. Few electric big-rig assembly lines yet exist and an electric big-rig cab can cost up to three times as much as a diesel version — around $450,000.
Scaling up production — in a big way — could result in great cost reductions. State officials thought a diesel ban combined with state subsidies would sufficiently boost demand. Now it’ll have to rely mostly on subsidies.
How much the state will pay out is unclear, hinging partly on demand and partly on how much state revenue is available. CARB said it has paid $1.5 billion to subsidize purchase of commercial electric trucks, nearly $200 million last year alone.
Buyers can qualify for subsidies worth from 40% to 90% of the cost of an electric big-rig cab.
The state believes the cost is worth it in the long run, with reduced pollution improving public health and lowering medical costs, and greenhouse gas reduction helping to address hazards partly attributable to global warming. If left purely to the marketplace, any shift to zero-emission vehicles would take much longer than the state believes is necessary.
There are many sources of subsidy money in California for trucks and truck charging, including two carbon cap-and-trade programs, the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and the Low Carbon Fuel Standard. Money is also available from CARB, from state air quality districts, from cities and from container fees levied by port operators.
With enough demand, truck manufacturers will scale up and add production lines, sending costs down. If the cost ever becomes competitive with diesel trucks, truck fleet owners, especially those with short- to medium-haul routes, may well find electric trucks more appealing.
Rudy Diaz is an early adopter. He owns Hight Logistics, a medium-size fleet operator for trucks that transfer freight in and out of the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. His drayage trucks are natural candidates for electric early adoption. With a typical range around 200 miles, heavy truck batteries don’t yet have the range to meet the demands of long-haul transport. But it’s plenty for most drayage jobs.
Rudy Diaz, chief executive at Hight Logistics, with an electric truck at Hight headquarters in Long Beach.
(William Liang / For The Times)
Diaz grew up in Watts and worked in freight logistics before launching Hight from his house with a small fleet of diesel cabs. Hight now operates a warehouse and truck yard near the Long Beach airport, with 70 trucks — 50 diesel, 20 electric. He’s hoping to grow the electric share.
He’s been a customer of Forum Mobility since December 2021.
“Forum reached out to me saying they were a startup company and wanted to start a program with turnkey solutions” — truck leasing, maintenance and charging, including chargers installed at the Hight truck yard.
“At the time I had no idea what a battery-electric truck was or even how you’d charge one,” he said.
But he’s an outdoors lover, a bicyclist, trim and fit, with a personal dedication to improving air quality.
“I genuinely do care about the environment,” he said. “If the environment is not considered, our survival is in question.”
Subsidies from state, local and federal sources flow through to Forum and Hight, allowing Diaz’s electric trucks — from Volvo, Daimler and BYD — to make a profit. But no question, he said, the electric truck market will have to stand on its own at some point to attract sufficient private capital and grow big enough to displace diesel technology.
Hight carries everything from clothes to car parts to consumer electronics, but the electric trucks are allowing it to branch out. The EV component was key to Hight’s getting a freight contract with Lime Micromobility, the electric scooter company.
“Decarbonization of the economy underpins everything we do,” said Lime co-founder Adam Savage. “We want to go carbon free as fast and aggressively as we can, whether producing our own vehicles our moving freight.”
One of Hight’s drivers, Marco Garrido of Anaheim, recently shifted from diesel to electric, and became an instant convert.
“I love it, I love it,” he said. The trucks are quiet, no exhaust, no cumbersome gear shifting, and the new models are fitted with the latest safety equipment, including backup sensors. It adds up, he said, to less stress.
Although it’s highly questionable whether federal money makes its way to the nascent electric truck market over the next four years, a nonprofit financial group called Climate United last August locked in nearly $7 billion in funding from the EPA to help for clean energy projects, part of which will be spent to boost truck maker production and pave the way for private lenders now stuck in neutral.
One way to do that: create a market in used electric trucks. Not only are electric trucks expensive, no one knows how much they’ll be worth once their leases run out.
“Traditional lessors are not set up to take risk on what that amount will be,” said Jacqueline Torres, head of finance at Forum.
That can scare private finance away, said Brooke Durham, the organization’s communications director. With the EPA money, it will buy trucks and lease them to Forum and other trucking-as-service companies, taking on the risk of creating a used truck market. As used truck prices become clearer, private lenders and investors will have hard data on which to base their financial decisions.
“This will be catalytic to have private capital step in,” said Forum Mobility Chief Executive Matt LeDucq.
The company is hoping that’ll help spark big new orders.
“Something needs to break the chicken or the egg loose,” said Forum’s Browning. “Once a 500-truck order comes in, the flywheel really gets going.”
California’s clean transportation goals depend on that happening.
Early in April, Ruben Hallali got an unusual alert on his phone: The evening temperature at Paris Charles de Gaulle International Airport had jumped about 6 degrees Fahrenheit in seconds.
Mr. Hallali, the chief executive of the weather risk company Sereno, had set up notifications for extreme weather swings. Then, nine days later, it happened again.
“It was an isolated jump, at one single station, early in the evening,” said Mr. Hallali, who added that he noticed another strange coincidence about the spikes: The timing was just right for somebody to reap a windfall on the betting site Polymarket.
He wasn’t the only one who sensed a problem. Météo-France, the country’s national meteorological service, filed a complaint last week with the police and local prosecutors, saying it had evidence that a weather sensor at Charles de Gaulle, the country’s largest airport, may have been tampered with.
The temperature swings, experts said, coincided with a period of unusual activity on Polymarket, one of the leading online prediction markets, which allow users to wager on the outcome of virtually anything.
One increasingly popular area is weather betting, where speculators can make real-time wagers on temperature readings, rainfall totals, the number of Atlantic hurricanes in a year and much more — with payouts in the thousands of dollars and higher.
As the stakes rise, so has the temptation to tamper with the instruments used to generate weather readings in hopes of engineering a lucrative outcome. Experts warn that this could have dangerous ripple effects, like degrading the information that underpins safe air travel.
Temperature data is used in a host of calculations at airports, helping determine correct takeoff distance, climb rate and whether crews need to apply frost treatment to planes. It’s crucial to airport safety, Mr. Hallali said.
“The Charles de Gaulle incident is not an isolated curiosity,” Mr. Hallali said. “It is what happens when financial incentives meet fragile data infrastructure.”
On April 6, the temperature reading at Charles de Gaulle jumped from 64 degrees Fahrenheit to 70 degrees at 7 p.m., before slowly falling over the next hour, according to data from Météo-France.
On April 15, the recorded temperature climbed even more sharply, from 61 degrees at 9 p.m. to 72 at 9:30 p.m., then dropping back to 61 a half-hour later.
In both instances, the spikes set the high temperature for the day, the metric on which some Polymarket wagers rest.
Laurent Becler, a spokesman for Météo-France, said the service contacted the police after noticing the discrepancies in temperature data. He declined to comment further on the case, saying it was under investigation.
Mr. Hallali said that after the first instance, experts and commenters on the French weather forum Infoclimat began to search answers. Theories were floated, including user error. But after the second spike, commenters zeroed in on the unusual Polymarket wagers, which totaled nearly $1.4 million over the two days, according to the company’s data.
The sums bet on April 6 and 15 were hundreds of thousands of dollars higher than on typical days this month.
It is not the first time that strange bets on prediction markets have raised accusations of insider trading.
On Thursday, a U.S. Army special forces soldier who helped capture President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela in January was charged with using classified information to bet on outcomes related to Venezuela, making more than $400,000 on Polymarket. Late last year, another trader on the site made roughly $300,000 betting on last-minute pardons from President Joseph R. Biden Jr. before he left office.
Polymarket did not immediately respond to a request for comment. While the site used to tie some bets to temperature readings at Charles de Gaulle, this week, after Météo-France filed its complaint, the platform began using temperatures taken at another airport near the city, Paris-Le Bourget, according to recent bets on the site.
Representatives for Charles de Gaulle airport declined to comment beyond saying that the case was under investigation. The airport police also declined to comment. The Bobigny Public Prosecutor’s Office, which is handling the case, declined to answer questions about the investigation but said that no complaint had been filed against Polymarket.
As to how the instruments could have been tampered with, a number of theories have been offered online, including by use of a hair dryer or a lighter. Mr. Hallali said that the precision of the spike on April 15 suggested the use of a calibrated portable heating device, although he declined to speculate about what kind.
“Markets are expanding into every domain where an outcome can be observed, measured, and settled,” he said. “As these markets multiply, so does the surface area for manipulation.”
As the war in Iran strangles the flow of oil around the globe, California’s jet fuel reservoirs are running low.
The state — which refines much of its own fuel in El Segundo and elsewhere but still relies on crude oil imports — has seen its jet fuel stock decline by more than 25% from last year’s peak to a level not seen since 2023, according to data from the California Energy Commission.
The supply is shrinking as a global shortage is already affecting travelers’ summer plans with canceled flights and higher fares. It could even affect plans for people coming to Los Angeles for the 2026 World Cup, which starts in June, said Mike Duignan, a hospitality expert and professor at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.
“People don’t know exactly how this is going to escalate,” he said. “There’s a huge black cloud over the sea for the World Cup and the travel slump that we’re seeing is all linked to this oil shortage.”
As fuel supplies shrink, flight prices are rising. Airlines are adding baggage surcharges to cover fuel costs. Several routes leaving from smaller California hubs, including Sacramento and Burbank, have already been canceled.
Air Canada has suspended flights for this summer, cutting routes from JFK to Toronto and Montreal.
“Jet fuel prices have doubled since the start of the Iran conflict, affecting some lower profitability routes and flights which now are no longer economically feasible,” the airline said in a statement last week.
Europe had just more than a month’s supply of jet fuel left last week, the International Energy Agency said. In an effort to cut costs, the German airline Lufthansa slashed 20,000 flights from its summer schedule this week.
Without a fresh oil supply flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, the situation is unlikely to improve, experts said. The oil reserves countries and companies have in storage are helping fill shortfalls, but the squeezed supply chain could still wreak economic havoc.
“When there’s a shortage somewhere, everything is affected,” said Alan Fyall, an associate dean of the University of Central Florida Rosen College of Hospitality Management. “Airlines are being cautious, and I would say that is a very wise strategy at the moment.”
California’s jet fuel stock reached its lowest levels in two and a half years at 2.6 million barrels last week, down from a peak of more than 3.5 million barrels last year.
The California Energy Commission, which tracks fuel inventory, said the state’s current jet fuel stock is sill sufficient.
“Current production and inventory levels of jet fuel are within historical ranges,” a spokesperson said. “Although supply is tight, no structural deficit has emerged yet. The present tightness reflects short‑term global market stress. As long as refinery operations remain stable, California is positioned to meet regional jet fuel needs.”
Europe has been affected more directly because it relies on the Middle East for the vast majority of its crude oil and many refined products, experts said. California gets crude oil from the Middle East but also from Canada, Argentina and Guyana.
The state has the capacity to refine around 200,000 barrels of jet fuel per day, most of it from refineries in El Segundo and Richmond.
The amount of crude oil originating in the state has been declining since the early 2000s, as state regulations and drilling costs have led to more imports.
California has become particularly vulnerable to supply-chain shocks like the war in Iran, says Chevron, one of the companies that provides jet fuel in the state.
“The conflict in the Mideast Gulf has exposed the danger of California’s decision to offshore energy production,” said Ross Allen, a Chevron spokesperson. “Taxes, red tape and burdensome regulations cost the state nearly 18% of its refinery capacity in just the past year, and we urge policymakers to protect the remaining manufacturing capacity.”
In 2025, 61% of crude oil supply to California’s refineries came from foreign sources, according to the California Energy Commission. Around 23% came from inside the state, down from 35% five years ago.
The state’s refining capacity has also been declining, said Jesus David, senior vice president of Energy at IIR Energy. The West Coast region’s refining capacity has decreased from 2.9 million to 2.3 million barrels a day since 2019, he said.
“California’s had issues prior to the war,” David said. “Nothing new has been built over the past 30 years, and California has closed a lot of capacity.”
The result is higher prices for both gasoline and jet fuel in the state. Jet fuel at LAX costs close to $15 per gallon this week, compared with almost $10 at Denver International Airport and $11 at Newark International Airport.
Gasoline prices have also been hit hard by the global conflict. Average gas prices in California are close to $6 a gallon, around $2 higher than the national average.
The West Coast is a “fuel island” because it’s not connected by pipelines to the rest of the country, United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby said in an interview last month. That means oil and refined products have to be brought in by ships.
“Fuel price is more susceptible to supply weakness on the West Coast than anywhere else in the country,” Kirby said.
Some airlines might not survive the turmoil if oil prices don’t level out soon, he said. Spirit Airlines, a budget carrier based in Florida, is reportedly facing imminent liquidation if it isn’t bailed out by the Trump administration.
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
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