EVwire brief: A group of the world's largest shippers has made the largest electric truck order in US history, ordering 2,500 battery-electric Class 8 trucks in one go to hit the US roads. Tesla was picked as the only primary manufacturer, with Kenworth, RIDE and Volvo named as secondary OEMs that carriers can pick instead.
The order runs through ZET SCALE, a new private-sector alliance jointly operated by Catalyst Mobility (the nonprofit formerly called CALSTART) and the Smart Freight Centre. The Allianceโs ambition runs to 10,000 trucks and beyond.
They're calling it the largest electric truck order to date in the United States, and a single deal that nearly doubles the country's electric Class 8 fleet.
Dan Priestley, Director of the Tesla Semi Program, kept his comment on operating cost:
The Tesla Semi is designed for lower cost per mile operations than diesel. ZET SCALE's goals are exciting because they take the operational cost advantage and predictability that electricity provides and amplifies it at scale. We are proud to have been the primary selection in this RFP and look forward to giving shippers and carriers a new competitive edge.
via Catalyst Mobility
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You can have good technology and still not have a market. What is different about ZET SCALE is that the demand was organized so manufacturers could price at scale. That is how costs move, and that is how clean trucks leave the pilot phase.
Microsoft and PepsiCo are among the founding shippers, and Smart Freight Centre has 220+ member organizations working to decarbonize freight and logistics with โฌ15t market capitalization represented by SFC Members.
As we know, PepsiCo has been running a Tesla Semi fleet since the very start, with at least 86 in operation now.
Tesla won the slot through an independently-run competitive RFP.
Catalyst Mobility says pooling the freight volume let every truck maker in the running bid more aggressively, and the alliance scored those bids on price, range, charging capability and production capacity.
ZET Financial is issuing the purchase order for all 2,500 trucks in what the alliance calls RFP 1. The trucks then reach fleets through its fair market value lease, branded ZET Lease, which is structured so the operator doesn't hold the residual-value risk when the term ends.
Not knowing what a five-year-old electric truck will be worth at the back end has kept plenty of carriers parked on the sidelines.
Christoph Wolff, CEO of the Smart Freight Centre, said
โEvery part of the freight industry wants cleaner trucks, but until now each company faced that transition โ and its risks โ alone.
ZET SCALE aligns shippers, carriers, manufacturers, and financiers around a single real demand signal. When the risk is shared across the whole chain instead of resting on any one player, the industry can finally move at scale.โ
On the shipper side, Microsoft's Nico De Golia, Director of Sustainability for Cloud Supply Chain Global Operations, said the company's participation "does that for road freight, by signaling real demand for electric trucks so the low-carbon option becomes competitive for moving our cloud infrastructure."
Jason Gies, who works on Tesla's Semi team, posted his own reaction on LinkedIn within hours of the announcement.
This one feels personal. [...] I'm proud to play a small part in bringing Tesla Semi to fleets across the country. [...] A lot of people have put years of work into getting electric Class 8 from pilots to real freight operations at scale.
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Details of the ZET Scale electric truck order:
Order size: 2,500 battery-electric Class 8 trucks, the alliance's RFP 1
Primary OEM: Tesla
Secondary OEMs: Kenworth, RIDE, Volvo
Financing: ZET Financial, through its ZET Lease fair market value lease
Founding shippers: Microsoft, PepsiCo, plus others the release doesn't name
Run by: Catalyst Mobility and the Smart Freight Centre, under the Fleet Electrification Coalition
Alliance target: 10,000 trucks and beyond
First-round deployments concentrate in 10 freight hubs:
Southern California / Los Angeles
Northern California / Stockton
Central California / Bakersfield
Seattle / Tacoma
Houston
Dallas
San Antonio
The Chicago area
Atlanta
Northern New Jersey / Newark / New York City
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Context:
One number is missing, and it's the one every Semi watcher wants.
The release says Tesla is the primary OEM for the initial 2,500, and describes Kenworth, RIDE and Volvo as "additional options that may meet their specific operational needs."
ZET Financial's own site lists the Tesla Semi as the program's primary OEM vehicle. But no split has been published anywhere, so treat any Tesla-specific count you see today as somebody's guess.
The doubling of e-truck fleet claim does hold up.
CALSTART's own deployment data, from its June 2026 Zeroing in on ZETs report and as tallied by Trucks, Parts, Service, counted 2,509 heavy-duty zero-emission trucks deployed nationwide from 2017 through 2025, out of 72,309 zero-emission trucks of all sizes. Nearly 89% of those were cargo vans.
So this is one order roughly the size of everything heavy-duty that landed in the previous eight years put together.
For scale on the Tesla side, the previous record holder was Einride, which ordered 500 Semis in August and later confirmed 75 of them land in 2026 with the remaining 425 through 2027. Before that it was WattEV, at 370.
What we donโt know exactly yet, is whether Einrideโs number is also within this 2,500-order. Based on the comment from Director Autonomous Electric Transport (AET) at Einride, Zeljko Jeftic, it just might (just our speculation, nothing else)
The Einride article itself, from EVwire:
The timing is hard to miss. Tesla's dedicated Semi factory near Giga Nevada opens on September 24, two days from now, on a line built for 50,000 trucks a year.
The hub list also maps onto ground Tesla has already covered. Bison Transport has been testing Semis in Chicago since August, and IMC Logistics committed to 50 of them across California drayage and long-haul routes last week.
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