This week, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) released the final draft of the Advanced Clean Trucks (ACT) standard, following an earlier draft from December.

The regulation seeks to accelerate adoption of zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) in the medium-and heavy-duty truck sector and reduce emissions from on-road sources.

The most prominent change was to increase manufacturers’ sales targets for battery or fuel cell electric vehicles in California across all vehicle categories. The targets start in model year 2024.

The Union of Concerned Scientists assembled the enclosed chart that outlines the sales percentage increases. Further analysis can be found in this UCS blog post.

Highlights of the proposed changes include:

• Increasing the percentage of ZEV sales in California across all vehicle groups from 2024 to 2030 and to increase the percentage requirements from 2030 to 2035 rather than keeping them constant during that period.

• Including pickups in the ZEV sales requirement for the Class 2b-3 vehicle group (3/4-ton pickups) beginning with the 2024 model year, rather than excluding them until 2027.

• Increasing sales percentage requirements for Class 7 and 8 tractors to meet the goal of achieving an all zero-emission drayage fleet by 2035. This would intend to increase ZEV sales in all vehicle size categories and to achieve carbon neutrality by 2045.

• Allowing additional flexibility for manufacturers that produce a small number of tractors each year, and changes to ZEV and NZEV credit lifetimes to align credit life for manufacturers with California's Greenhouse Gas Phase 2 regulations.

• Extending NZEV (near-zero emissions) credit for an additional five years from 2030 to 2035 for NZEVs that achieve more than 75 miles of all-electric range.

• Streamlining reporting by eliminating the requirement for reporting facility-based information along with weekly truck trip counts. CARB says it will still seek to gather this information through other means, including potentially a separate non-regulatory contracted survey.

• Lowering the vehicle count threshold for the reporting requirement to fleets with 50 or more trucks and buses rather than the originally proposed 100 vehicle fleet size.

A public comment period follows, leading up to a vote on June 25-26.