Advanced Clean Fleets

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) will conduct a public hearing on October 27, 2022, to consider a proposed regulation that would require all new medium- and heavy-duty vehicle sales in the state to be zero-emission vehicles starting in 2040.  CARB’s proposed Advanced Clean Fleets (ACF) regulation — not to be confused with the Advanced Clean Trucks rule, which targets manufacturers — that would require fleets to replace gasoline, diesel and natural gas, and other ICE vehicles with battery-electric or hydrogen-fuel-cell electric trucks.

The regulated community will find implementation of the ACF regulation challenging and the stakeholder concerns have been largely ignored by the agency. These concerns include vehicle availability (at scale) and supply chain issues that intensify affordability concerns, the necessity to incorporate workable emergency response exemptions, obvious infrastructure readiness questions, regulatory timing, and process concerns (including transparency for determining ‘commercially available’ vehicles), and the need for flexible low carbon fuel alternatives, amongst others. Since these issues have not been resolved, industry representatives are extremely concerned that the proposed ACF rule will be unworkable in the real world and could result in compromising the delivery of essential goods and services to Californians.