Catalyst Mobility (formerly CALSTART), a clean transportation nonprofit, and the Smart Freight Centre announced that a coalition of the world’s largest cargo-owning shippers have enabled the largest electric truck order to date in the United States — 2,500 battery-electric Class 8 trucks.
The organization said this single deal nearly doubles the U.S. electric Class 8 fleet.
The order is organized through the Zero-Emission Truck Shipper-Carrier Alliance Leading Electrification (ZET SCALE), a program jointly operated by Catalyst Mobility and the Smart Freight Centre. They said that by aggregating freight demand at a scale that "no single company could reach on its own," ZET SCALE is building a market for electric trucks that did not exist before. The Alliance expects to scale its battery-electric fleet to 10,000 trucks.
Founding shippers in ZET SCALE include Microsoft and PepsiCo, among others.
“You can have good technology and still not have a market,” said Catalyst Mobility CEO Michael Berube in a statement. “What is different about ZET SCALE is that the demand was organized so manufacturers could price at scale. That is how costs move, and that is how clean trucks leave the pilot phase.”
“Microsoft is working to turn our sustainability commitments into operational reality,” said Nico De Golia, Director of Sustainability for Cloud Supply Chain Global Operations at Microsoft, in a statement. “Our participation in ZET SCALE does that for road freight, by signaling real demand for electric trucks so the low-carbon option becomes competitive for moving our cloud infrastructure.”
This aggregated shipper demand has reduced electric truck prices through large-scale volume orders. In the Alliance’s independent, competitive request for proposals (RFP), enhanced volumes allowed every truck maker in the running to provide competitive pricing and improve the business case. After evaluating price, range, charging capability, and production capacity, the Alliance selected Tesla as its primary original equipment manufacturer (OEM) for the initial 2,500 trucks. The Alliance also includes Kenworth, RIDE, and Volvo as secondary OEMs that carriers can utilize as additional options that may meet their specific operational needs.
ZET Financial, a strategic partner to the Alliance, is issuing the purchase order for the initial 2,500 trucks in RFP 1 and will deploy the trucks through its fair market value lease program. ZET Financial’s lease structure, “ZET Lease,” eliminates the residual-value risk to the fleet operator.
Beyond financing, ZET Financial brings years of Class 8 truck leasing, life cycle data analytics and asset management services to fleets participating in ZET SCALE. ZET Financial works directly with corporate fleets and carriers to integrate them into ZET SCALE by providing an analysis on the true cost of running a truck built around each fleet’s actual data, duty cycle, and operational metrics, as well as advisory services for infrastructure and charging solutions.
ZET SCALE concentrates deployments in high-density freight hubs with the strongest initial routes and economics. For this first round, the freight hubs will primarily be located in 10 places: Southern California/Los Angeles, Northern California/Stockton, Central California/Bakersfield, Seattle/Tacoma, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, the Chicago area, Atlanta, and Northern New Jersey/Newark/New York City.
