Proposed new greenhouse gas emissions standards for heavy-duty vehicles (HDVs) in the United States and the European Union represent the first time manufacturers will need to sell zero-emission trucks and buses to meet the standards. These proposals, from the world’s largest commercial vehicle market (the United States) and the third largest (the European Union), send a clear political signal to commercial shipping markets around the world. But as we will show, the EU proposal sends a much stronger signal, and the US proposal could come closer to achieving transportation decarbonization goals in several important ways.
The European Union was the first mover in February 2023, when the European Commission proposed amendments to high-precision carbon dioxide (CO2) standards that would cut fleet-wide emissions to 64% below 1990 levels by 2050. Although These emissions reductions are deeper than they otherwise would be. As a result of underlying market trends, it is below the EU’s high-level target of reducing emissions by 90% across all transport sectors by 2050.
Two months later, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a proposal for Phase III HDV greenhouse gas emissions standards that would reduce tank-to-wheel carbon dioxide emissions to 31% below 1990 levels by 2050. This would achieve Progress toward meeting U.S. climate goals will not be expected to achieve the 80% to 100% reduction in transportation emissions by 2050 set forth in the National Long-Term Strategy.
Both proposals are performance-based criteria. This means that they do not explicitly specify a sales figure for zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs; the exception is urban buses in the EU proposal). It is therefore important to compare the volume of electricity proposed by the two proposals, and the ZEV shares of new sales in Figure 1 are based on ICCT analysis. (We have converted the EU vehicle segmentation, called VECTO classes, to the US HDV class system, which is based on gross vehicle weight classification, for ease of comparison.) Purchase requirements and total ZEV sales required by California’s Innovative Clean Transportation (ICT) system, Advanced Clean Trucks (ACT) and Advanced Clean Fleets (ACF) regulations are shown for comparison.
