City and County Fleet Electrification under California’s Advanced Clean Fleet Regulations: Preliminary Findings on Progress and Key Challenges
Executive Summary
California’s Advanced Clean Fleet regulations (ACF) set ambitious goals for adopting zero emission vehicles (ZEVs) for medium and heavy-duty fleets. Under the regulation, in many cases, 100% of new purchases of medium and heavy-duty vehicles covered by ACF must be zero-emission by December 2027. Since Spring 2024, a research team at the Bill Lane Center for the American West, in collaboration with the Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz), has investigated how local governments, especially cities and counties, have sought to comply with the ACF. The research team, including four undergraduate students, conducted 26 interviews with local and state government officials, energy providers, and utility representatives, to learn about their efforts to comply, their successes and challenges they have encountered. This report summarizes preliminary findings from this on-going research effort.
Given that the ACF was recently finalized in fall 2024 and only limited data is currently available about the status of fleet transitions, it is not yet possible to conduct a detailed assessment of compliance progress. Analysis of data on state-funded vouchers from the HVIP Program shows that public agencies had purchased a relatively small number of vehicles that would likely be subject to ACF prior to its implementation, when compared to transit and school buses for which earlier incentive programs had been established.
Our conversations with city and county officials focused primarily on understanding what the process of ACF compliance looks like from the local government perspective, and the barriers that cities and counties have encountered. We found that the compliance process is quite involved, including the creation of a complete fleet inventory, understanding ACF’s specific requirements, planning out future vehicle purchases and necessary charging infrastructure, and seeking out necessary funding. Barriers experienced by local jurisdictions fall within six broad themes:
- EV procurement challenges
- Funding availability and staff capacity
- Inadequate technical assistance
- Uncertainty/dissatisfaction with current EV technology
- Safety and charging logistics
- Grid capacity constraints
The city and county staff we spoke with shared suggestions for overcoming these barriers, ranging from improving awareness about the ACF’s provisions, increased state support for technical assistance and grants, and loan programs to help support the purchase of ZEVs. Our findings so far lead us to recommend the creation of regional technical assistance hubs across the state to: 1) expand outreach and awareness about ACF requirements and resources, 2) deepen and expand technical assistance; and 3) expand and simplify grant support, especially targeted to support jurisdictions experiencing staffing and budget limitations. Next steps in our research include development of a potential design and implementation path for these regional hubs. In addition, we are investigating opportunities and strategies to encourage the private sector to transition medium and heavy-duty fleets to ZEVs, given that ACF is not being enforced for these entities. We welcome feedback on this project, and will also continue to update the list of Publicly Available ZEV Transition Resources that our team compiled during the research process.