Keith Kerman’s case for cleaning up New York City’s fleet starts on a Brooklyn ball field in 1994.
He was running parks operations then, out doing field inspections in Prospect Park on a day when people were playing baseball and softball. A Parks Department garbage truck came through on its rounds, doing its job, emptying barrels.
“There was so much pollution spewing from that truck that it stops the games, and all the players stop playing, and they start walking away from the truck,” Kerman said. “I’m sitting there thinking, I’m pretty sure that’s not what we’re supposed to be doing.”
Three decades later, Kerman is deputy commissioner at the Department of Citywide Administrative Services and the city’s first chief fleet officer, responsible for roughly 29,000 vehicles across more than 50 agencies. The reasons have shifted since Prospect Park, from air quality and asthma to climate to something more prosaic, which is that a lot of this now saves money.
That kind of long view was the common thread when Kerman joined three counterparts at WSP in the U.S.’s offices at One Penn Plaza for an ACT News livestream during Climate Week NYC. Representatives from Penske Transportation Solutions, NFI, the New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services, and Siemens, leaders who have been running these deployments since the first trucks showed up, offered up the roadmaps they traveled to reach the goals they set. Attendees then took those roadmaps into small discussion groups, where the panelists continued the conversation at close range.
“Climate Week fills the city with commitments for climate action, with promises to adopt clean technology, too often without a commitment to follow through,” said Jannet Walker-Ford, U.S. business line executive for WSP’s advisory and planning business.
The morning was all about the follow-through: what happens after the announcement, when somebody has to buy the vehicles, build the charging, work with the utility to install the chargers, and keep service running while all of it changes underneath them. The fleets that make durable progress, Walker-Ford argued, treat this as capital planning rather than technology procurement.
John Wesley Heaton IV, a lead project manager with WSP’s zero emission fleets team, introduced the panel and explained why these four were on stage: each has kept investing through swings in incentives, technology and regulation. They keep investing because it lowers operating costs, makes energy costs more predictable and improves how assets get used.
Shantelle Dreamer, who leads WSP’s national clean transportation practice, moderated the panel; she opened by asking what the panelists saw before anyone required them to see it.
For Alexa Branco, director of energy and sustainability at NFI, the answer was customers. Tesla’s Semi announcement in 2017 sent questions into the logistics provider from clients wanting to know whether NFI would be switching, which pulled the company into demonstration programs with Volvo and Freightliner.
Nine years on, the sharpest numbers came from NFI’s depot in Ontario, California, out in the Inland Empire where the warehouses are. The site runs 90 battery-electric Class 8 trucks, 50 of them deployed through the JETSI project, a state and regionally funded effort to prove out electric drayage at scale. The trucks shuttle between the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, nearby rail yards and local warehouses, typically two port runs and about 200 miles a day, then come back to 38 chargers rated at 350 kW apiece.
The chargers are not what makes the economics work. Behind them sit a megawatt of on-site solar and roughly seven megawatt-hours of battery storage, enough that NFI describes the depot as running a little like a microgrid, and one of the largest in the South Coast Air Basin.
What the battery solves is timing. California utilities charge the most for electricity in the late afternoon and evening, which is exactly when a drayage fleet is working hardest and plugging in between port runs. The storage lets NFI buy power overnight when it is cheap, hold it, and run the chargers off the battery during the expensive hours instead of pulling from the grid. The same electricity, bought at a different price. The batteries also keep the yard running when the grid goes down.
Branco laid out what that did to cost per mile, measured against diesel at what she called semi-normal California prices. Before the storage came online in the middle of this summer, the electric trucks were already running about 25% cheaper per mile than diesel. The battery took that to 50%. California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard credits, which the state pays back quarterly for displacing petroleum fuel, took it to 75%. Three steps, each worth roughly another quarter of the cost of a mile.
“For us, that is a clear indicator that EVs work in California,” Branco said.
Then NFI took 10 trucks to Virginia, and the trouble was not the trucks. The utility’s on-peak window there runs from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m., and from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. in winter. “For a trucking fleet, that’d be the equivalent to say you can’t fuel your diesel from 7:00 AM to 10:00 PM,” Branco said. California offers time-of-use rates without demand charges, plus credits and grant funding that helped pay for the microgrid. Repeating Ontario somewhere else starts with the tariff, not the truck.The Virginia drivers surprised her. She had braced for resistance from people with no exposure to electric trucks. Coming up from operations herself, she knew how that conversation usually goes. It only took a couple of test runs.
“We got a call a week later, and we were hearing that they were all telling each other, ‘drives like a Cadillac and we are not going back.’”
Combs had the same story from further back. In 2018, on Penske’s first deployment, he and a colleague got into a rental car and followed the truck all night, leaving a distribution center around 5 p.m. and getting back at four or five in the morning. The driver had been with Penske Logistics for 25 years and was delivering coffee to a national chain, same route as always.
“The first stop, he gets out, and we could not believe how happy he was,” Combs said. By the end of the shift, the man was gamifying his regenerative braking. “He said, ‘I can hear stuff in the truck that I never heard before.’”
Asked what they wish they had known earlier, the panel got specific about assumptions that cost real money. Adam Orth, U.S. head of fleet, mobility services at Siemens, said the company went in believing every vehicle needed its own charger, and that the assumption kept stacking onto other assumptions until it became strategy.
“Quickly, we proved we don’t need one-for-one vehicle to charger.”
Daily mileage was the other one, and it is still the objection Orth hears most often from people who have not tried an electric vehicle.
“Everyone assumes that they’re driving 500 miles in a day, and it’s not possibly going to be able to work,” he said.
Then the vehicles went into service and the field reports came back saying something else.
“This light-duty pickup truck actually is getting 400 miles-plus of range. The smaller SUV is getting all of its advertised range. And oh, by the way, we’re still maintaining business,” he said.
Orth’s remedy for the rest of it is unglamorous — put people in the driver’s seat. The assumptions Siemens carried about how these vehicles would behave tended to fall away the first time someone actually drove one, his own included. The company is now roughly halfway through converting a fleet of a little more than 8,000 assets.
Kerman built New York’s network, the largest in the state at 2,600 ports, mostly on Level 2 chargers, and has spent years fielding the same question.
“A lot of people would say, ‘why aren’t you doing more fast charging?’” said Kerman, quickly answering, “Because I don’t need to do more fast charging right now.”
The city added fast charging when it moved into policing, emergency services and trucks, including a new public site at Forest Park. His advice to anyone starting out was to resist the upgrade.
“If I can plug a unit into an inexpensive level two charging and charge it overnight off-peak, and that’s really what I need, go for it.”
Where electrification does not reach, both Kerman and Combs landed on the same fuel. New York City no longer burns fossil diesel anywhere. Fire apparatus, sanitation plows, off-road construction equipment and all seven Staten Island Ferry vessels now run on renewable diesel made from used cooking oil, waste animal fat and a little soybean oil.
Combs called renewable diesel Penske’s biggest sustainability win. The drop-in fuel cuts lifecycle emissions 60% to 90% depending on feedstock, and every gallon of diesel the company sells in California and Oregon is now renewable, more than 20 million gallons a year in California alone.
Dreamer, who called herself a recovering zero-emission purist, offered the arithmetic that explains why the mixed approach holds. Most fleets can electrify 70–80% of their vehicles without straining a budget. It is the cost of the last 20–30% that lands hard enough to make organizations walk back the whole commitment. “I think it’s really important to take the shame out of partial progress.”
Combs put the same thought in the shape of a warning.
“Progress is not this nice, easy sloping line,” he said.
There are numerous obstacles that can arise. Fleets have to deal with regulations that frantically arrive and quickly leave. There are customers who want no part of it, including the benefits. But in the meantime the incremental benefits are stacking up: improving tire compounds, installing aero kits and managing weight reductions can all amount to 1–3% improvement for each truck.
Kerman offered the argument most likely to work inside an actual budget process, and it runs backward from what people expect. New York City’s budget office never treated electrification as an expense to be justified. It treated it as a savings opportunity and collected in advance. When the vehicles were approved, the Office of Management and Budget cut the projected fuel and maintenance money out of future-year budgets right then, and listed hybrids and electrics in the published budget as pegs, the city’s term for a spending reduction. The agency pays the higher purchase price up front; the budget office books the lower operating cost immediately, before a mile is driven.
“You can actually argue the fiscal case straight up,” he said, on hybrids and most electric vehicles today, though not yet on heavy-duty trucks. He noted that he would have said the same about medium duty five years ago and no longer does.
Walker-Ford had named the pattern before any of the four spoke. The fleets that make durable progress, she said, approach this as capital planning rather than technology procurement. They build a portfolio, they sequence the work, and they bring infrastructure, energy, finance and operations into the room early. The alternative is discovering in year three that the utility tariff, or the maintenance network, or the budget office was the thing that mattered all along. Her larger point was that these stopped being fleet conversations some time ago.
“A fleet decision is an energy decision. It’s an infrastructure decision. It’s an environment decision,” she said. “And increasingly, it’s a community and economic decision as well.”
The four panelists spent the next 45 minutes proving it from four directions. A logistics company that found its answer in a battery bank. A leasing company that found it in a fuel. A municipal fleet that found it in a budget line. And a manufacturer that found it by testing what it had assumed. None of them were describing the same transition. All of them were still buying.
