San Bernardino Is Building the Charging Network the Mandate Was Supposed to Require
From the Editors of The Citrus Belt Review · 2 min read
The California Air Resources Board voted September 25 to repeal the drayage and private-fleet purchase requirements at the core of its Advanced Clean Fleets regulation — the endpoint of a settlement with a 17-state coalition led by Nebraska and an earlier agreement with the California Trucking Association, after the agency withdrew its federal waiver request in January 2025. The 2036 diesel sales ban survives on paper, but CARB agreed not to enforce it unless it secures an EPA waiver it isn't getting. Final repeal paperwork is due to the state's Office of Administrative Law by August 31. The conventional reading was that truck electrification in the Inland Empire died on that date. Six months of construction along I-215 says otherwise.
In February, WattEV more than doubled its San Bernardino depot — its busiest site, which had been averaging roughly 700 megawatt-hours of charging a month and couldn't keep up. The expansion took the site to 11.5 megawatts and up to 200 trucks a day, with megawatt-class connectors for next-generation rigs. In April, EV Realty opened a 76-port, 9-megawatt hub near the San Bernardino Intermodal Facility, sized for more than 200 medium- and heavy-duty trucks daily, with J.B. Hunt, Gate City Beverage, and Nevoya as anchor customers.
The geography is the argument. Both sites sit on the port-to-warehouse freight lane, in a corridor EV Realty says holds nearly 17,000 medium- and heavy-duty trucks and more than 60 million square feet of warehouse space. Drayage is the duty cycle where the unit economics close first: short, predictable, return-to-base runs well inside current battery range, with fuel costs that hold steady while diesel swings. And the shared-site model turns electrification from a multi-million-dollar capital project into an operating expense — the difference between possible and impossible for the region's fragmented drayage market.
One regulatory lever survived the repeal, and it's local. The South Coast AQMD's warehouse indirect source rule never depended on a federal waiver because it regulates buildings, not trucks. It requires roughly 4,000 large facilities across the basin to earn points tied to truck activity or pay mitigation fees of $1,000 per point — and AQMD's own program data shows hosting charging infrastructure and attracting cleaner truck visits among the actions warehouses are actually using to comply. The demand pull now comes from landlords and 3PLs managing compliance costs, not Sacramento. Public money still greases the buildout — the EV Realty site drew Carl Moyer and EnergIIZE grants — but nobody is being ordered to buy a truck.
The capital signal closes the case. Days after the first Tesla Semi rolled off the new Nevada production line, WattEV ordered 370 of them — the largest single electric truck order in California history, worth roughly $100 million. Most of those trucks are headed to a Port of Oakland program, and that's the point: the economics proven on San Bernardino drayage lanes are what the capital is now scaling statewide. EV Realty raised $75 million from NGP, Prologis built a charging depot into its Ontario footprint with NFI, and powered land near the intermodal facilities is becoming its own asset class. The mandate is dead. The buildout is accelerating.