Dive Brief:
- Trucking groups blasted the Environmental Protection Agency’s heavy-duty truck emissions standards, released last week, as impossible for the industry to achieve on current timelines.
- The phase three greenhouse gas emissions standards affect model years 2027 through 2032 and are 40% stronger than previous federal emissions regulations, according to the EPA.
- Clean Freight Coalition Executive Director Jim Mullen said the rules “require the adoption of zero-emissions commercial vehicles at a pace that isn’t possible due to the limits of today’s technology.”
Dive Insight:
The Clean Freight Coalition, which includes the American Trucking Associations, American Truck Dealers and other trucking groups, was launched last year to push back on emissions standards that the industry stakeholders say are unrealistic.
The coalition laid down road spikes before the federal standards by commissioning a Roland Berger study that found the infrastructure needs for full trucking electrification could be as high as $1 trillion.
Mullen, a former acting head of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, noted the reduced range and capacity of electric vehicles and said they “are in their infancy and are just now being tested.”
“Today, these vehicles fail to meet the operational demands of many motor carrier applications, reduce the payload of trucks and thereby require more trucks to haul the same amount of freight, and lack sufficient charging and alternative fueling infrastructure to support adoption,” Mullen said in a statement.
The coalition has advocated instead for initially focusing on electrifying medium-duty trucking, given the use cases the industry has already begun to explore.
Less than 1% of commercial vehicle sales in the U.S. are zero-emission vehicles, American Truck Dealers President Laura Perrotta said in a statement.
Perrotta said the EPA rule “will have unprecedented negative impacts on American commercial trucking, large swaths of U.S. businesses, customers and consumers, and likely overall emissions and the environment.”
The industry opposition to the new rules isn’t unanimous, however. In advance of the emissions standards’ release, Cummins joined Ford, BorgWarner and other manufacturers in the Heavy-duty Leadership Group in calling for the EPA to advance the regulations without delay.
“Phase 3 will provide the regulatory certainty needed to drive industry-wide investment to deliver our next generation of decarbonization technologies,” Shelley Knust, VP of product compliance and regulatory affairs at Cummins, said in a statement in February.
