Today I Learned – February 2026

NACFE does most of its work in the field at industry events and staff members hear a lot of interesting things each month. Here are some things we learned recently. Contact us if you want to ask questions about where and how we learned what we share here.

The EPA is expected to lock in 2026 RFS biofuel quotas by early March and keep them close to the June ’25 proposal (24.02B gallons total), while dropping a planned import “penalty” that would’ve reduced credits for renewable fuels/feedstocks — small policy change, potentially big impact on diesel blend costs.  

— Dean Bushey, Director of Programs

Nevoya, a participant in NACFE’s recent Run on Less – Messy Middle, is securing 40 EV Class 8 semi-trucks in cooperation with the Center for Green Market Activation, Smart Freight Centre, Amazon, Meta, eBay, and Etsy for Texas high-volume freight operations on the Houston and Dallas corridor.

— Rick Mihelic, Director of Emerging Technologies

Geotab reports that the average battery degradation for an EV is 2.3% per year and largely impacted by speed of charge and the daily charge routine.  

— Ken North, Emerging Technologies Consultant

The buzzword at CES 2026 was ‘Agentic AI.’ We are moving beyond simple ‘software-defined vehicles’ to trucks that act as independent agents — capable of negotiating their own charging sessions, diagnosing their own maintenance needs before a fault code appears, and autonomously handling logistics tasks like finding specific parking spots without driver input. 

— Emilia Sibley, Emerging Technologies Consultant

Pilot Travel Centers has entered into an agreement with Tesla to install Semi Chargers to facilitate heavy-duty electric vehicle truck charging at select Pilot locations along I-5, I-10, and several major corridors. The first sites are expected to open in summer 2026.

— Mike McHorse, Director of Industry Engagement

Intermodal has been limited in the past due to longer, and more variable delivery times than trucking. Schneider implemented “Fast Track” and worked with the major rails to develop “truck-like” lanes which allows them to reach competitive truckload delivery times and costs while yielding significant emissions reduction. 

— Jeff Seger, Clean Energy Consultant

CALSTART’s Zeroing in on Zero-Emission Trucks report tracks deployment of zero-emission trucks (ZETs) as of June 2025. Key findings: Most ZETs are BEVs (only 197 FCEVs of 59,000 ZETs). Half as many ZETs were deployed in the first half of 2025 vs. the first half of 2024. Normalizing ZET deployments by overall truck deployments identifies CA, WA, WI, NJ, and GA as most efficiently deploying ZETs.

— Rob Graff, Senior Technical Consultant

In December China sold a record 45,300 new electric heavy-duty trucks domestically, representing 54% of total heavy-duty truck sales for the month, and 29% total truck sales for the year 2025. Driving the overall sales trend in China – total cost of EV ownership. 

— Ken North, Emerging Technologies Consultant

A 200-car train carrying double-stack intermodal containers requires 400 trucks delivering the containers to the railhead and 400 trucks taking them away at the other end – one train like this inherently involves 800 truckloads for first- and last-mile freight handling.

— Rick Mihelic, Director of Emerging Technologies