Johannes Ariens sells hydrogen semis, and he thinks the push to clean up trucking is aimed too high. Incentive programs and the broader industry are fixated on Class 7 and 8 tractors, said Ariens, CEO of Range Zero Emissions, in an interview with FreightWaves. The trucks ready to go electric today are medium-duty Class 4, 5, and 6 models, he said.
Range Zero Emissions is a dealer group that sells only zero-emission commercial vehicles. Its brands run from Zero Motorcycles up to Class 8 trucks, and it has no tie to Range Energy, the electric-trailer company that shares its name.
The lineup grew in August. Range became an authorized dealer for Hyundai’s XCIENT Fuel Cell, a hydrogen Class 8 truck, with Washington as its primary territory. It also folded Ziegler Truck Group’s zero-emissions business into the Range brand and bought the West Coast operations of Ethero Truck & Energy. Together the two deals moved the company from one Pacific Northwest location into the Midwest and California, Ariens said.
Most commercial truck users run medium-duty trucks, he said, and many of them can charge on the kind of power a small business already has.
“Charging two vehicles on Level 2 is like, do you have a washing machine and an air compressor at your house? If you do, you can install two Level 2 chargers and charge them overnight and go to work every day for your shift,” he said. “You’re good to go if you’re driving less than 150 miles a day.”
The case for medium-duty trucks first
Ariens describes electrification as a progression, from e-bikes and small cars like the Chevy Volt up to Rivians and the Hummer EV. Each step built charging the next one could use.
“We are so focused on Class 7 and 8 that we’re trying to jump a very natural progression of electrification,” he said. “You cannot charge a Class 8 semi on a Level 2. It literally won’t do it.”
Class 8 charging is still early. Tesla, which formally opened its Semi factory in Sparks, Nev., on Sept. 24, expects more than 30 Megawatt Charging System stations by the end of the year.
“It’s years until that’s proliferated, and until all the legacies jump in,” Ariens said.
Medium-duty trucks already have big buyers. “We’ve got FedEx, we’ve got Rivian, we’ve got Amazon,” he said. In September FedEx ordered 2,000 all-electric trucks from Harbinger, one of the brands on Range’s roster.
Most of trucking’s own ranks are small: of nearly 580,000 active U.S. motor carriers, 91.5% operate 10 or fewer trucks, according to American Trucking Associations data drawn from U.S. Department of Transportation figures as of June 2025. FreightWaves has reported on that long tail. Ariens would steer more voucher money their way.
“We should increase the voucher amounts for Class 4, 5 and 6,” he said. “Just get all these small businesses with five trucks or less into their EVs.”
State incentive programs that refill
Federal support for zero-emission trucks is pulling back, Ariens said, at the same time California and Washington run “the most significant medium- and heavy-duty commercial incentive programs in history.”
California’s Clean Truck and Bus Voucher Incentive Project, known as HVIP, has delivered more than $1 billion since its 2009 launch, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office. In May the state added the California Clean Fuel Reward, a rebate for electric medium- and heavy-duty trucks with $250 million available this year and more than $1 billion expected through 2030, funded by the Low Carbon Fuel Standard. FreightWaves broke down how those programs stack in June. Washington launched its Zero-Emission Incentive Program on April 29 with $112 million in vouchers from the state’s Climate Commitment Act.
“These are continuous, recycled funding streams, usually coming from carbon tax credits, designed to refill,” Ariens said. “They’re not one-shot programs.”
Many commercial fleets replace trucks on a five- to seven-year cycle, he said, and a program that refills fits how they buy.
“I’m not going to buy a new truck and get rid of it next month because I want an EV,” he said. “I’m going to life-cycle that truck, get my full depreciation out of it, and then cycle it.”
Once a technology reaches 5% of new adoption, Ariens said, it tends to stick.
“That’s exactly what these government incentive programs are designed to do: help get from zero to 5, which is very hard,” he said.
Where hydrogen fits in Class 8
Ariens calls the battery-or-hydrogen debate binary thinking.
“I think the future of Class 8 is absolutely both,” he said.
Battery-electric works for drayage, he said, because port trucks need less range and can carry a smaller battery. Weight is the trade-off: federal law gives battery-electric trucks a 2,000-pound allowance on the power unit, up to 82,000 pounds gross. Every added pound is a pound of freight the truck cannot haul, Ariens said.
Hydrogen is starting at ports too, because trucks there run consistent daily routes from a single fueling point. Ariens named Long Beach, Oakland and the Vancouver area as the main places a heavy-duty hydrogen truck can fuel today. Shell built a heavy-duty station at the Port of Long Beach, according to the California Energy Commission, and HTEC opened a station for Class 7 and 8 fuel-cell trucks at the port terminal in Delta, British Columbia, in June.
The 30-truck NorCAL ZERO project runs XCIENTs in drayage out of the Port of Oakland and launched in May 2024, according to the California Fuel Cell Partnership. Ariens watched those trucks at a Port of Oakland event in September.
“Those trucks were going by all day, in and out. No big deal,” he said. “Then those trucks are going 300, 400 miles, and it’s, ‘Cool, let’s put one of these in Sacramento.'”
The XCIENT has also moved east. Hyundai’s Metaplant near Savannah, Ga., began running 21 of the trucks in December 2024, and a Rutgers-led pilot at Port Newark in New Jersey planned to start testing six in early 2026, according to Transport Topics.
For all of that, Ariens keeps returning to the smaller trucks.
“That’s my party line, and the thing I stomp my feet about every day,” he said. “Why are we not making it as easy as possible to go to Class 4, 5 and 6, and then Class 7 and 8 will solve its own problem?”
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