A sense of gloom pervades the electric truck industry these days.
Regulations that would smooth the path to adoption are gone or under threat. Funding for crucial projects has been yanked. Startups are going bankrupt. Tariffs are hitting. And the vehicles are as expensive and hard to charge as ever.
“When you have a national government that is actively working against the industry, like heavy-duty electric trucking, it is always going to make it difficult,” said Rustam Kocher, an industry veteran who worked at auto manufacturer Daimler and with an Oregon power company to charge electric trucks.
President Donald Trump delights in dissing electric trucks. On the campaign trail, he described their shortcomings in detail, depicting them as Biden-mobiles that were detached from commercial reality.
“Fifty years ago, a truck was better than the best electric truck today,” Trump said at a New Mexico rally in October.
His administration has asked Congress to rescind the 2022 climate law’s financial incentives for factories and tax credits for truck buyers, frozen some of that grant money unilaterally and promised to undo regulations that promote electric trucks. Trump has also implemented tariffs that could make electric trucks more expensive.
Still, analysts say electric trucks are likely to continue an uphill grind toward acceptance — just in a slower gear. Truck manufacturing is an international business, curbing the impacts of U.S. policy on the industry, and truck-makers have incentives to move away from diesel power beyond tax credits and pollution limits.
While diesel trucks comprise the overwhelming majority of today’s truck fleet and will be on the road for the foreseeable future, cleaner-running trucks will make up an increasing percentage of sales, said Andrej Divis, an analyst at S&P Global Mobility.
“If you’re looking 20 years down the road, I think we would say the energy transition is still happening,” he said.
And in a perverse twist, the most anticipated new electric model — the one that some think might finally turn the trucking industry toward acceptance — is the Tesla Semi, the brainchild of none other than Trump’s right-hand man, Elon Musk.
Finding customers
The hesitance to embrace heavy-duty electric trucks makes American an outlier among its global economic peers.
The Chinese bought 82,277 heavy-duty electric trucks last year, according to data compiled by the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT), a nonprofit research group. Europe added 3,400.
The United States? 1,476.
The average U.S. battery-electric truck is 2 ½ times as expensive as a diesel truck, costing almost $429,000 for the 2024 model year compared to under $171,000 for a diesel model, according to data compiled by ICCT.
“The biggest challenge right now is finding enough customers,” said Adam Browning, the policy head of Forum Mobility, which is constructing heavy-duty charging stations near West Coast ports. “And the biggest challenge there is the cost of the trucks.”
In just the last few months, two promising electric-truck-makers have collapsed. Nikola, a maker of electric and hydrogen-powered heavy-duty trucks, went belly-up in February. Lion Electric, which offered a heavy-duty tractor, went bankrupt in December.
Now, Bollinger Motors, a commercial-truck-maker outside Detroit, faces rumors of insolvency.
Tesla still weighs on electric big-rig momentum in the U.S., as freight companies wait to see what it will do.
The company is building out a cavernous new Nevada factory for the Semi, a heavy-duty tractor that Musk unveiled as a concept in 2017. Tesla is forecasting lower sales prices and better range than other truck-makers.
At the same time, reports suggest Tesla is struggling to meet its costs and deadlines.
Kocher said he is reminded of the days before the Tesla Model 3 came out and changed expectations for the price and capability of an electric passenger car. “We are in the same moment with trucks right now,” he said.
Truck customers may be holding out, reluctant to make a big investment right before the next big thing comes along.
However, one thing that buoys truck-makers, despite U.S. headwinds, is that truck manufacturing is a more international business than the making of cars.
That means it’s more in tune with emissions regulations in Europe — which matches the makeup of the industry. Leading players are Germany-based Daimler, which owns the Freightliner brand, and Sweden’s Volvo, which builds Mack trucks.
Even Paccar, the U.S. conglomerate that builds the Kenworth and Peterbilt trucks, relies on Europe and other foreign countries for more than 40 percent of its sales.
Trump stomps the brakes
Analysts say EV truck adoption is most threatened by the Trump administration’s efforts to cut financial incentives and water down regulations meant to spur production of zero-emission trucks. The president’s new tariffs don’t help either; they may raise prices for all sorts of vehicles and parts, including large trucks.
“We’re definitely expecting a slowdown” in electric truck sales, said Lydia Vieth, an electrification analyst at ACT Research, which forecasts trends in commercial vehicles and freight. “And most of it of course is regulatory.”
Trump’s crackdown on clean trucks is still taking shape. EPA has pledged to roll back Biden-era greenhouse gas standards for trucks that were expected to push the industry to add more electric trucks over the next 10 years.
EPA has also asked Congress to roll back California’s Advanced Clean Truck Rule. The rule would phase out the sale of most new diesel-powered trucks by the mid-2030s across California and 10 other states.
That rollback faces an uncertain fate in Congress. The Government Accountability Office said lawmakers can’t legally overturn California’s regulation using the Congressional Review Act, as did the Senate parliamentarian, but Republicans have indicated they might vote on it anyway.
California itself withdrew another regulation that it had submitted for EPA approval, known as the Advanced Clean Fleet rule, shortly before Trump took office. The rule was designed to help create a market for emissions-free trucks by requiring fleet owners to buy them.
The state killed its own regulation because it knew that the Trump administration wouldn’t grant a required waiver. Even before that, California’s government had suspended its fleet rule in the face of legal challenges from truckers.
The collapse of the ACF rule caused an immediate downturn in demand for electric trucks from those fleet operators who saw only obligation and no opportunity.
“It’s closed down the reluctant fleets,” said Kocher. “They gleefully abandoned their plans.”
Even the states that have piggybacked on to California’s Advanced Clean Truck rules are having misgivings. Legislatures in at least five states — Maryland, Massachusetts, Washington, Oregon and New Jersey — have considered bills that would delay implementing the rules for two years.
Used-truck market
At the federal level, the Republican-controlled Congress is planning to roll back the tax credits for emissions-free trucks that were created by the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act.
The law sparked a boom in battery production and truck building across the country, much of it in Republican-led states. More than 20 Republicans in the House have said they oppose eliminating the tax credit, and its fate is unclear.
But the Trump administration is trying to claw back other IRA programs without waiting for Congress — an effort that has sparked numerous legal challenges. EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin’s attempt to cancel $20 billion in climate grants is already affecting the electric truck industry by delaying the market from learning an important number: the price of a used electric truck.
Climate United, which was awarded a nearly $7 billion grant by Biden’s EPA to set up a “green bank,” planned to use $250 million to buy 500 new electric trucks to help jump-start a used-truck market.
“Climate United is taking this issue head-on in a way no one else is doing it,” said Ray Minjares, the director of heavy-duty vehicle programs at ICCT.
Since a new truck is so expensive, most smaller operators buy their trucks from larger operators after a few years of use. That’s what makes knowing the used price essential. With it, new-truck buyers know what they’ll make, and used-truck buyers know what they’ll pay. Price transparency also enables the used-truck buyer to get a loan, since the loaning bank needs to know the price too.
But Climate United and other green bank loan recipients have seen their funds frozen. Zeldin has said the program is fraudulent but has offered no proof of wrongdoing. Meanwhile, Climate United is facing insolvency.
Price pressure
The tariffs that Trump announced on the auto industry are aimed at passenger cars, but they could hit the truck industry’s supply chain.
Some heavy-duty engines and transmissions are produced in Mexico, and most of the large truck companies have assembly plants outside the United States.
However, the big truck-makers can absorb some of those cost shocks, since they have healthier profit margins than passenger carmakers, said Todd Duvick, an analyst at CreditSights.
And truck buyers are different from car buyers, in ways that make the sticker price less important. Truck owners put a premium on the total cost of ownership, particularly fuel consumption.
“Ultimately, you know, if the cost of ownership of the battery-electric semi is lower than a diesel-powered one, then it’s a simple business decision,” Duvick said.
But Trump’s tariff broadside may bring a second chill to the truck market, by choking off the goods that those trucks move.
If the tariffs cause a downturn in activity at the nation’s ports, the outlook for the entire freight segment could darken, S&P Global Mobility said in a note to investors earlier this month.
S&P “had been forecasting a recovery period in 2025 for this sector,” the note said. “We now expect this could stall.”
‘This is just noise’
Some truck operators are still optimistic, despite the setbacks and the loss of federal tax incentives.
Kalmar is building the third generation of its electric-powered terminal tractors at a plant in Ottawa, Kansas.
The tractors are designed to shuttle freight trailers for short distances and are frequently used at warehouses and ports. The electric version is more expensive, and about 90 percent of the tractors Kalmar sells are still diesel-powered.
But even without the federal tax credits, the company estimates its customers can make up the difference between the electric and diesel-powered version over five to seven years, said Ryan Sipple, product manager for Kalmar.
“We’re prepared to still sell this product, and we think it still can hold its own without it,” Sipple said.
Harbinger, a small electric truck startup in Los Angeles, came up with a way to cope with the uncertainty around clean-transportation policies.
The company, which specializes in medium-duty vehicles similar to large moving vans, is offering to discount its trucks by the amount of the federal tax credit for the rest of 2025. If the tax credit remains in place in 2026, it’ll ask its customers to make up the difference.
Harbinger sells what the industry calls a “stripped chassis” — basically a frame and an electric drivetrain that its buyers can turn into anything from a box truck to an RV.
The tax credit can be calculated based on the price difference between an electric model and a comparable internal combustion model. So Harbinger’s low-cost chassis operation means the tax credit is a smaller financial hit of $16,000 to $17,000 per unit.
It’s a calculated gamble for Harbinger, which has about 300 employees and is just starting to put its trucks on the road. With so much uncertainty around the tax credits, it’s worth the upfront cost to keep new orders coming in, said Chief Executive Officer John Harris.
“The tone coming from the administration and the breathless coverage in the media is that, you know, the world is ending and the EV market is going to burn down,” he said in an interview. “And so we looked at it and said, ‘Look, all this uncertainty, this is just noise, and we need to help our customers cut through to the real price point to understand what the reality is.’ ”
Still truckin’
One factor gives the electric truck a bit of a tailwind: Not every customer buys because of regulations. Some big companies, from PepsiCo to Ikea, are deploying electric fleets to ship their goods because they face pressure from their customers to cut pollution.
A sign of the industry’s staying power is that several companies still see opportunity in offering the large — and dauntingly expensive — charging stations required to make electric trucks run.
Building such a station can be a herculean task. A truck-charging site needs to provide prodigious amounts of electricity, which utilities are slow to provide. The site also needs to be close to shipping routes, with enough room for trucks to maneuver.
One player with a sense of guarded optimism is Prologis, a California logistics firm that is one of the country’s largest operators of warehouses.
Partnered with shipping firm Maersk, it operates two heavy-duty truck charging hubs in the Los Angeles area. The largest, in Torrance, can charge up to 96 vehicles at the same time.
Size is not the station’s only unusual feature; it also operates independent of an electric utility. The facility has a 9-megawatt microgrid that runs on natural gas generators and a giant battery bank.
Prologis plans to build six more stations in Southern California, and that may just be the start.
Prologis has more than 500 sites in Southern California, and “every one of these locations is potentially a node in a charging network,” said Henrik Holland, the global head of Prologis’ mobility team.
Others are also building electric truck plazas. WattEV now has five of them open in the Los Angeles area, and also runs its own fleet of 30 electric trucks, with which it runs customers’ freight. Another, Forum Mobility, just opened a new depot in Long Beach, California, and plans nodes near ports all along the West Coast.
“We wanted to create a corridor, because you can’t have just one site to electrify an industry,” said Salim Youssefzadeh, the CEO of WattEV.
This story also appears in Climatewire.
