The transitioning of commercial truck fleets to electric power is not a feasible short-term goal — and possibly not a medium-term one, either, according to one industry expert. 

Manufacturers can’t currently produce enough electric vehicles to replace trucks equipped with internal combustion engines (ICE), says Richard Kilgore, associate professor at Maryville University and Ford Motor Co.’s former capacity planning analyst. Even a company as big as Amazon.com is struggling to meet its EV goals, he notes. 

ICE-powered trucks number in the millions, Kilgore says, adding that Amazon’s vow to acquire 100,000 EVs by 2030 represents less than 1% of the units needed to meet the Biden Administration’s goal of having 30% of all medium- and heavy-duty truck sales be EVs by that year. 

Kilgore likens the current capacity strain to the transition from horse-drawn carriages to commercial vehicles in the 1910s. Twenty years passed before the available supply was able to meet the global demand for automobiles. Horses were still being used into the 1930s because there weren’t enough cars being made to meet commercial demand, he explains. 

A similar problem is arising over 100 years later with EVs. “You just can’t snap your fingers and increase capacity in the auto industry from 100,000 to 1 million,” Kilgore says. 

He argues that manufacturers aren’t interested in making commercial EVs for the transportation sector because they’re still raking in major profits from passenger models. “There’s no reason for their shareholders to want to do that type of business,” he says. 

Kilgore believes the EV transition will eventually happen, because those vehicles can save companies between 30% and 50% in production costs compared to ICE automobiles. But he says it will take time to make the necessary investments to bolster assembly lines. 

Kilgore adds that there’s not enough electrical grid capacity to charge the EVs that companies want to put on the road. Even long-range goals are unrealistic, he says, “barring a “magical solution” that delivers charging power without the need to rely on coal or oil to generate electricity. 

“Net-zero carbon emissions are [possible] in EVs only if you have net-zero production of the electricity that the vehicles are going to consume,” Kilgore says. 

John McCaw, vice president of sustainability for Breakthrough, a provider of transportation-management technology and market intelligence, agrees that EVs won’t help industry meet near-term emissions goals. Nor are they practical, he says, noting that EVs can only go about 250 miles on a single charge, while ICE-powered vehicles can travel up to 1,500 miles on a tank of gas. 

What’s more, McCaw says, there aren’t enough charging stations to support long-haul transportation. “In comparison to diesel trucks, where there are fueling locations at every interstate exit across the country, that’s just not the case when it comes to EV charging infrastructure.” 

Experts say the number of additional charging stations needed to accommodate a nationwide network of electric trucks could number in the thousands. McCaw doesn’t think the U.S. will be able to fill in the gaps until at least 2030, saying that “we’ll be well into the next decade before it’s broadly viable.” 

New fuel mixtures could help to alleviate the problem in the short term. B5 biodiesel fuel (consisting of 5% pure biodiesel and 95% petroleum) can reduce emissions by 8.3% over the next two years, McCaw says. B20 fuel (20% pure biodiesel and 80% pure petroleum) can decrease carbon outputs by almost 11%. Even renewable natural gas — a biogas derived from waste material — can reduce emissions by 9.5% over that time, despite its own infrastructure problems. 

By comparison, companies that currently use EVs can only reduce their emissions by 2.4% over the next two years, according to Breakthrough. “It’s why we advise our clients to think about poly-fuel and other solutions,” McCaw says. 

Kilgore thinks technological advancements, like Toyota’s development of solid-state batteries, will help get the transportation sector closer to its near-term emissions goals. 

“There’s only one future, and that’s solid-state batteries,” he says. “The transportation sector wants to see them replace the lithium- and nickel-based batteries, and I think that’s going to happen.” 

In the end, Kilgore believes, current long-term emissions targets are not attainable based on the timelines provided by corporations and government agencies. 

“I don’t think any of these aspirational projections are going to happen,” Kilgore says. “The world is too complex, and business is too bottom-line oriented, to change from what is currently a very profitable business into one that is going to be very risky.” 

“With current climate-change problems, I think there could be a desperate 2030s and 2040s where we realize we screwed up and have to fix it quickly,” Kilgore says. “But I don’t think that time is yet.”