A new study by the Pembina Institute shows that a third of the commercial trucks and vans on Toronto’s roads are ready to electrify today – while nearly half could be electrified by 2030.

A new analysis by the Pembina Institute titled Electrifying Fleet Trucks: A case study estimating potential in the GTHA finds that as many as a third of trucks in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) could go electric today, rising to more than half by early 2030s — insulating businesses from rising fuel costs and reducing harmful air pollution that drives up health care costs. What’s more, the report found that battery range and charging access are less of a barrier than expected.

“Real-world travel data from Canadian trucks, collected over summer and winter months, shows that electrification is possible today,” says Chandan Bhardwaj, Senior Analyst at the Pembina Institute. “In fact, with a staggered approach, the GTHA — home to over half the province’s vehicle stock — could reach 50% sales for lighter trucks by 2030, helping offset lower adoption rates for heavier trucks.”

So, what’s holding back electric vehicle adoption? According to the study’s authors, it’s a matter of public policy. But without the right policies in place, the study argues, businesses face unnecessary hurdles in making the switch.

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“Our analysis shows that Ontario has a clear path to accelerating the transition to zero-emission trucks — unlocking economic opportunities, improving public health and positioning itself as a leader in clean transportation,” says Adam Thorn, Transportation Director at the Pembina Institute. “With the right policies in place, businesses can reap the benefits of lower costs while the province strengthens its manufacturing sector and energy security.”

We already knew this

If all of this sounds a bit familiar, it’s probably because you’ve heard this before. The California Air Resource Board (CARB) came to very similar conclusions in their report, titled, Determining energy use patterns and battery charging infrastructure for zero-emission heavy-duty vehicles and off-road equipment.

CARB staff believe that several heavy-duty ZE vocational trucks are ready to be electrified because of their low daily mileage demands (<100 mi). Long-haul Class 8 trucks continue to be a challenge to fully electrify because of the long operation range (300+ mi) and on-demand charging need.

CALIFORNIA AIR RESOURCE BOARD

In fact, the California study came to almost the exact conclusion that the Toronto study did when examining the heavy-duty Class 7 and 8 EV market. Which is to say: it’s not a question of capability, but a question of availability.

“The availability of on-road heavy-duty ZE trucks has increased in recent years,” reads the report. “But their numbers remain significantly lower than their diesel and natural gas counterparts. As of 2022, an estimated 2,300 on-road ZE medium- and heavy-duty vehicles are operating in California, with the vast majority located in South Coast Air Bassin (Figure 1). On-road heavy-duty ZE transit buses account for the majority of all on-road heavy-duty ZEVs in California, but, as of 2023, sales of ZE heavy-duty trucks and medium-duty step vans have outpaced other vocations, indicating that these vehicles will be more prevalent in fleets in the near future.”

That’s proven to be true, with sales of Class 2 vans and other medium-duty EVs rapidly outpacing the general public’s adoption of EVs as new options became available in 2024, with no signs of slowing down in 2025 (at least, where the right policies are in place).

Here are some of the key takeaways from the Pembina Institute study from the Toronto truck market. Obviously, it won’t directly translate to every city’s truck fleet – but take a look at Toronto’s demographics and some of the key variables involved (truck size, average loads, miles driven, etc.) and you might be surprised at how similar your city and your fleet might be.

• Businesses can save up to 40% of fuel and maintenance costs by switching to electric trucks.  
• Electric trucks eliminate tailpipe emissions, cutting harmful air pollution and improve public health.  
• Traffic related air pollution in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area leads to 700 premature deaths and 2,800 hospitalizations every year, costing health care system $4.6 billion annually.  
• Ontario’s Driving Prosperity plan highlights the need for increased electrification, while the City of Toronto is targeting 30% of all registered vehicles to be electric by 2030.  
• Governments worldwide are embracing electrification, setting ambitious sales targets for zero-emission vans and trucks.  
• By 2030, jurisdictions like Europe, China, California, British Columbia and Quebec aim for about 35% of new truck sales to be zero-emission, ramping up to nearly 100% by 2040.  

SOURCES: CARB, Pembina Institute, via Electric Autonomy; featured image by PACCAR.

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Tesla’s former head of artificial intelligence, Andrej Karpathy, who worked on the automaker’s self-driving effort until 2022, warns against believing that self-driving is solved, and fully autonomous vehicles are happening soon.

Karpathy is a very respected leader in the field of artificial intelligence.

In 2017, Musk poached him from OpenAI and he quickly became the head of Tesla’s AI effort, including leading neural nets for Autopilot and Full Self-Driving.

He left Tesla in 2022 and return briefly to OpenAI in 2023 before starting his own in AI education company, Eureka Labs.

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The Slovak-Canadian computer scientist is widely regarded as one of the top computer vision experts and he pioneered Tesla’s vision-only approach to self-driving.

Karpathy gave a talk at Y Combinator’s AI Startup School event this week and made some interesting comments about self-driving.

He recounted when a friend working at then Google self-driving company, now Waymo, gave him a ride in a self-driving car in 2013:

We got into this car and we went for an about 30-minute drive around Palo Alto, highways, streets and so on, and that drive was perfect. Zero intervention. And this was 2013. It was about 12 years ago.It kind of struck me because at the time when I had this perfect drive, this perfect demo, I thought “well, self-driving is imminent because this just work. This is incredible.” But here we are, 12 years later, and we are still working on autonomy. We are still working on driving (AI) agents. Even now, we haven’t actually solved the problem.

12 years later, Waymo currently operates over 1,000 vehicles in California, Arizona, and Texas where it completes hundreds of thousands of autonomous rides with paying customers every week, but Karpathy explains that this doesn’t mean autonomy is solved.

He continues:

You may sees Waymos going around and they look driverless, but there’s still a lot of teleoperation and lot of humans in the loop in this driving.

Waymo has confirmed that it uses some teleopeartion, but it’s not clear to what level. It’s clear that it at least communicates commands to the vehicles remotely when they get stuck.

Kaparthy adds:

We still haven’t declared success, but I think it’s definitely going to succeed at this point, but it just took a long time.

The engineer added that “software is tricky” and that he believes that “AI agents”, which is a term often use to describe AIs that can perform tasks for humans, like driving a vehicle, are going to take time. He believes this is not the year of AI agents, but the decade of AI agents.

Here’s the full presentation:

Electrek’s Take

While Kaparthy didn’t name Tesla, the timing of his comments as Tesla is launching its “Robotaxi” service this weekend is interesting.

It certainly contracdits what his former boss, Elon Musk, is saying: that self-driving is solved.

He highlights the fact that humans are still “in the loop” in Waymo’s vehicles, but we recently learn that this is even more true with Tesla’s Robotaxi launch, which involved not only teleoperation like Waymo, but there’s also a Tesla employee in the front passenger seat ready to press a kill switch.

As we have often highlighted in recent weeks, Tesla’s Robotaxi launch is simply a game of optics for Tesla to be able to claim a win in self-driving after years of broken promises and missed deadlines just as Waymo is rapidly expanding its own self-driving services.

I think Kaparthy, who led Tesla’s computer vision effort behind self-driving, knows that has yet to solve the problem and will require human supervision for a while longer.

Based on the best data available, Tesla currently achieves a few hundred miles between critical disengagement with FSD and it needs to get into tends of thousands of miles to achieve a true level 4 autonomous systems.

We are still a few years away from that at best.