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It’s a tough time for electric trucking in the U.S. The Trump administration has cut off funding for heavy-duty vehicle charging and port infrastructure. Republicans in Congress are trying to rescind states’ authority to set clean vehicle mandates. And tariffs are throttling incoming cargoes to U.S. ports, hampering the business of trucking as a whole while likely also driving up the already-high price of battery-powered trucks.
But in Southern California, the transition away from diesel trucks, which emit a disproportionate share of the transportation sector’s planet-warming and health-harming emissions, is moving forward despite federal policy obstacles. Two big all-electric charging depots opened in April to serve clean trucks operating in the region, which is home to the busiest seaport complex in the country and is the epicenter of U.S. electric truck adoption.
The first, located in Rancho Dominguez, 12 miles north of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, is owned and operated by Terawatt Infrastructure, a startup with more than $1 billion in capital and that is working with a consortium of companies including Ikea, Maersk, Microsoft, and PepsiCo. With 7 megawatts of capacity at 20 fast-charging stalls, it can charge up to 125 trucks per day.
The second site is in Colton, a city about 60 miles east of Los Angeles in California’s Inland Empire, a region crowded with massive distribution warehouses. That site is owned and operated by Greenlane, a more than $650 million joint venture of Daimler Truck North America, utility NextEra Energy, and investment firm BlackRock Alternatives. It has 12 pull-through sites for trucks hauling trailers, which are equipped with 400-kilowatt dual-port chargers, along with 29 “bobtail” lanes — sites for trucks without attached trailers — equipped with 180-kW chargers. In total, it can support just over 10 megawatts of charging.
These facilities are the latest in a line of big truck-charging depots springing up across California, built by major firms like Amazon and PepsiCo, freight companies such as NFI Industries and Schneider National, logistics operators like Prologis, and startups including Forum Mobility, Voltera, and WattEV. This proliferation is in response to the state’s ambitious truck electrification goals, which include a target for completely zero-emissions fleets by 2045, and to the the hefty incentives it has put in place to accomplish that.
Terawatt’s and Greenlane’s newly opened electric truck stops represent a new class of charging site meant to serve the next phase in the Southern California electric truck charging evolution.
Early truck-charging sites were designed to serve shorter-range trucks that deliver goods from a central warehouse before returning to recharge overnight. But Terawatt’s and Greenlane’s new depots are meant to function more like a classic highway stop for battery-powered trucks looking to deliver goods hundreds of miles away.
The new stations will support more routes per day from Southern California’s crowded ports to its distribution warehouses further inland, said Emilia Sibley, lead of Terawatt’s heavy-duty business unit. Terawatt’s newly opened site, which serves the trucks of customers ranging from relatively small freight haulers like Hight Logistics to global corporates like PepsiCo, is “meant to be an enabler for on-the-go charging,” she said — a place to get a “top-off charge to get from the port to the Inland Empire multiple times per day, rather than once a day.”
This infrastructure will allow truck owners to “extend the range and economics of these heavy-duty assets,” she said. Owners and operators measure the value of trucks not just on up-front price and long-term operating cost, but on the revenue the vehicles generate over their useful life. Being able to run two trips per day instead of one could essentially double a truck’s value.
The same dynamic applies to electric trucks looking for a recharge at the end of delivery routes in the farther reaches of the Inland Empire, said Andrea Pratt, Greenlane’s vice president of government and utility relations. Unlike most truck-charging depots today, Greenlane’s Colton site is open to any electric truck, in the traditional “truck stop–type model,” she said. “We are publicly facing, and we will always have charging available for trucks to come up and charge ad hoc.”
These big new charging depots are also the launchpads for a broader eastward expansion of truck-charging capacity. Greenlane’s Colton site is the first of a string of electric truck stops being planned from Long Beach to the Mojave Desert cities of Barstow and Baker as part of its I-15 commercial EV charging corridor project. And Terawatt and its partners are planning several large-scale charging sites along the I-10 highway from California to Texas.
The routes and use cases open to electric trucks will further expand as the next generation of longer-range trucks from mainstream manufacturers and those from all-electric specialists like Tesla or Windrose Technology become available, Pratt said. Tesla said this week that full-scale production of its long-delayed Semi will begin in 2026.
“As battery technology increases and as prices come down, you’re really going to see a change in the market,” Pratt said.
Both Greenlane’s and Terawatt’s new charging depots also offer fancier versions of the typical truck stop amenities, such as a lounge area with food and drink for sale, restrooms, free Wi-Fi, and round-the-clock security and customer support. Those are important both for on-the-go truckers spending a half hour to an hour to top up their batteries for the next leg of their journey and for trucks reserving bobtail spots to recharge overnight.
“Sites like ours can really de-risk the zero-emissions vehicle journey,” Pratt said, particularly for the vast majority of U.S. trucking fleets that own 10 or fewer trucks. “You may be less likely to need to put down a lot of capital to electrify your property if there’s a Greenlane or a Terawatt or a Forum down the street — and there will be someone there if something’s gone wrong.”
This build-it-and-they-will-come approach to electric trucking comes with its fair share of financial risk — particularly in the shadow of the second Trump administration.
The administration has frozen or restricted billions of dollars in grant funding authorized by Congress in the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law and the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. Those actions have left states and companies uncertain about whether they can rely on billions of federal dollars for building charging infrastructure on major transit corridors and for projects to invest in clean ports.
The Trump administration also plans to roll back federal transportation emissions regulations and has made clear it won’t support states’ efforts to put more stringent emissions mandates into effect. In January, California withdrew its plans to seek federal approval of its Advanced Clean Fleets mandate, which set statewide zero-emissions truck purchasing quotas on most large truck fleets.
Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress have introduced resolutions seeking to rescind federal waivers that allow California and 10 other states to impose Advanced Clean Trucks mandates, which require manufacturers to sell increasing numbers of zero-emissions trucks. That move comes despite findings from the Government Accountability Office and the Senate parliamentarian that Congress lacks the legal standing to take these actions.
Economic troubles are compounding the regulatory uncertainty. President Donald Trump’s crushingly high tariffs imposed on China have led to a major reduction in cargo being shipped to U.S. ports, including the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles. That dropoff is almost certain to cause a slowdown in business for freight companies, making it less likely they will look to buy any new trucks — electric or diesel.
Those tariffs will also drive up the cost of lithium-ion batteries, most of which are made in China today. Battery costs are the biggest reason why electric trucks remain two to three times more expensive up front than diesel trucks in U.S. markets.
These headwinds further complicate the inherently uncertain economics of electric truck charging. Companies like Greenlane and Terawatt do have some levers to pull to secure demand for the charging infrastructure they’re building, however.
While Greenlane is opening its Colton chargers to all users, “that doesn’t mean we don’t have customers,” Pratt said. Last week’s ribbon-cutting featured one major anchor customer — Nevoya, a startup that’s renting office space at the site and is pledging to use it to charge up to 100 electric trucks it plans to bring onto Southern California roads.
Nevoya cofounder and Chief Commercial Officer John Verdon said the startup is working directly with “shipping customers looking to achieve sustainability goals.”
“We hire the drivers, acquire the trucks and trailers, and charge the trucks,” he said. “There are lanes where we are price-competitive with diesel — and in those markets we’re very aggressive.” But other markets are “quite candidly not price-competitive” due to challenges around charger availability and vehicle range and price.
It will take some careful planning to expand charging at the proper pace and scale to match the trucking industry’s demand for electrifying its fleet. “We’re building these things with a lot of intention and strategy behind it,” Pratt said, using such inputs as the telematics data from Daimler trucks to understand where route lengths and freight volumes allow electric trucks to compete, and how much charging is needed at which sites to support that.
“At the end of the day, for fleets, it’s all about dollars and cents and making the economics work,” she said. That puts pressure on states like California that want to keep growing the clean freight sector to keep up support, she said.
California has been a leader on incentives to expand electric trucks, she noted. The state’s Hybrid and Zero-Emission Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project offers lucrative financial support to defray the up-front cost of electric trucks, which cost less to fuel and maintain over their lifetimes than diesel-fueled trucks.
”These are really small margins that companies are running their trucks on,” Pratt said. “If we want a long-term viable market, we need carrots and sticks — and maybe more carrots than sticks in the beginning.”
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