Three things from late September worth your time, and one thing I would do about them.
1. 2,500 electric semis, and nobody named the charging
A buyers' group called ZET SCALE, run by Catalyst Mobility (formerly CALSTART) with Microsoft and PepsiCo as founding shippers, ordered 2,500 battery-electric Class 8 trucks with Tesla as the primary supplier and Kenworth, Volvo and RIDE as backups. The trucks go to ten freight hubs, including Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Chicago, Atlanta and Newark/New York. Electrek and electrive both say it nearly doubles the electric Class 8 fleet on US roads. FreightWaves counts 875 zero-emission heavy trucks sold in all of 2025.
What the announcement doesn't have: delivery dates, or who builds the charging. Tesla held its Semi rollout event at its new Sparks, Nevada factory two days later.
Why it matters: this is a chicken-and-egg problem with three chickens. Do you build the depot first, wait on the utility hookup, or wait for the trucks to show up? Electric trucks have been "coming" for a long time, and the Semi has been a thing for years without showing up in droves. An order is not a truck on the road.
Then there's the money. Return-to-base trucks at a metro hub are the easy case. The moment these trucks want charging in the middle of nowhere, the utility isn't going to build that for free. Somebody pays the make-ready, and the electricity is likely to cost more where the infrastructure is scarce. That flows into demand charges, into site operating costs, and into the price per kWh you need to recover it all.
Which gets to the only question a fleet actually asks: is this still cheaper than diesel? As much as I'd like to think everyone is doing this for the greater good, it comes down to dollars and cents. FreightWaves puts the 2025 median electric Class 8 at $411,200 against $172,500 for diesel. Energy savings have to carry that gap. If early infrastructure costs push energy prices up, the savings shrink right when the fleet is deciding whether this works. It levels out as the infrastructure gets paid down. The first few years are the hard sell.
2. California cuts charger red tape
Governor Newsom signed six EV bills on September 20. For people building sites, the three that matter:
- SB 969 modernizes inspections so manufacturer-tested chargers get online faster.
- SB 1283 makes streamlined permitting cover the work around the charger: trenching, electrical upgrades, solar canopies and battery storage.
- AB 1820 lowers permitting barriers and fees for charging at apartments and mixed-use buildings.
California says it has more than 20,000 public DC fast-charging ports, and zero-emission vehicles were 19.1% of new sales in Q2.
3. New EV sales down by half, used EV sales up
Cox Automotive's August EV Market Monitor had 78,895 new EVs sold, down 46.9% from a year earlier and 5.7% of the market. Used EV sales went the other way: 44,350, up 14.7%. Used EVs now sell about as fast as used gas cars, 42 days' supply for both, the first time Cox has seen parity.
What I'd do
If you're a developer pitching one of these fleets, price the energy with the infrastructure in it: make-ready, the utility upgrade, demand charges, amortized over the real term. Then compare cost per mile to diesel, year by year. If electric only wins once the infrastructure is paid down, that is the pitch. Just don't pretend it wins in year one.
The fleet charging guide covers depot design, and the fleet charging calculator lets you put your own numbers in. The business guide explains how demand charges work.
