Truth be told, we could use “California Air Resources Board (CARB)” and “misstep” in the same sentence on a multitude of fronts, but today we talking specifically about their Advanced Clean Fleet (ACF) rule. CARB received its final approval late last year to move forward with the rule, but the problem is, they did not have the required waiver from US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Without the waiver, CARB has no authority to implement or enforce the rule.
The California Trucking Association (CTA), who has a lawsuit challenging CARB on various aspects of the ACF rule, sat down with CARB to negotiate what is next for the agency and the rule. The result was the CTA agreed not to pursue the planned preliminary injunction in exchange for CARB not enforcing the rule until they receive the EPA waiver. The CTA’s litigation is unaffected by this deal, and CARB reserves the right to remove diesel trucks entered into the drayage database in 2024 once the waiver is issued, which generally takes between nine and twenty-four months to process and approve.
As a refresher, the ACF rule established an aggressive timeline to replace diesel drayage trucks with zero emission (ZE) drayage trucks starting January 1, 2024. Any diesel truck registered into the CARB database by December 31, 2023 was considered “grandfathered” and could remain in drayage service for no more than eighteen years or 800,000 miles, whichever comes first. However, any new truck entered into the database beginning January 1, 2024 would have to be ZE. And ALL drayage trucks would have to be ZE by 2035.