This certainly appears to be by design. The California Air Resources Board essentially taking 80,000 trucks off of California's roads is certainly not going to help the problem at all. What I think will happen is that the newer trucks will short haul the loads to the California border and then the long haul trucks will take the loads to their final destinations. This will essentially get around the rules. There will be new truck depots spring up along the I8, I10 and I40 routes out of southern California.
Lots of people don't realize the emission system on modern diesels absolutely destroys their dependability. Where an older engine could go 1/2 a million miles with just basic maintenance, these newer systems (def, dpf, egr, and so forth) break down often. Some people are reporting multiple failures after 20k miles. This is further exacerbated by the fact that parts for those emission systems are back ordered now due to the very same supply chain problems they created. This is one of the reasons Caterpillar, which used to make some of the most dependable engines, completely exited the commercial trucking market.
The solution is going to end up being to use ports in mexico. This will be a huge bonus to the cartels which already control the ports.
(post is archived)