Roughly 850 electric trucks already work the Los Angeles and Long Beach port complex, and a second round of California HVIP vouchers has just generated 1,000 new orders — doubling, in one year, everything the program has placed since launch.

That surge is the sharpest signal yet that port drayage is going electric faster than most of trucking. But the operator with arguably the deepest experience in the space says the hard part isn't the trucks. It's the plug in the ground.

Rudy Diaz, founder and CEO of Hight Logistics, runs 2,500 electric trucks — BYD units and Volvo VNREs, plus Tesla Semis — out of the two ports. Speaking on FreightWaves Today, he distilled four years of operating history into one blunt warning for fleets placing orders now.

"If you're going to go this route, you have to secure your charging," Diaz said. "You're not plugging in a blender, you're not plugging in a toaster. If you don't have this figured out and you have an order of 50 trucks, and you have 2 chargers, then you're gonna run into a lot of issues."

What do the current trucks actually do?

The numbers Diaz cited set the real operating envelope. Current-generation BYD and Volvo VNRE units deliver a realistic 200 to 220 miles per charge. A full recharge takes 2 to 3 hours. And each truck carries a weight penalty of 6,000 to 8,000 pounds against a comparable diesel — mass that eats payload and accelerates tire wear.

Price is the other friction point. Electric trucks run roughly $400,000 apiece, a figure Diaz said his own company could not absorb without grant funding and incentives. At that sticker, the HVIP voucher money isn't a nice-to-have. It's the difference between a business case and a hobby.

For drayage, though, the math works. Hight's runs repeat a roughly 60-mile loop between the ports and the Inland Empire, comfortably inside the 200-mile envelope. And with California diesel prices near $8.50 a gallon, Diaz now calls EV the superior technology for short-haul port work.

Why did fleets switch at all?

Regulation, plainly. California's Advanced Clean Fleets rule pushed Hight Logistics into EVs about four years ago, Diaz acknowledged, and he was candid that he wouldn't have moved otherwise. Without the mandate and the incentive money, he'd have stayed diesel.

"Diesel works," he said. "It's not that it's broken."

That honesty matters for carriers elsewhere watching Sacramento. The technology is winning converts on cost in this specific duty cycle — but the adoption wave at San Pedro Bay was regulation-first, economics-second.

Tesla is expected to capture the majority of the 1,000 new HVIP orders, a development Diaz called encouraging, noting Tesla engineered the Semi from the ground up rather than converting an existing diesel platform. For a program of this size, that's a meaningful vote of operator confidence in a truck that has spent years in limited fleet trials.

What was the steepest learning curve?

Not the drivers. Diaz said drivers adapted quickly to the quieter, automatic, regenerative-braking trucks. Dispatch was the problem.

Route and charge management forced Hight to rethink every deployment. Early on, the company deliberately pushed trucks past their usable range to find the real-world limits — and had to tow a few back. That trial-and-error discipline is now embedded in how it runs the fleet.

The lesson for a fleet signing orders today: budget as much planning effort into charging schedules and route assignment as into the trucks themselves.

The ecosystem has matured, Diaz said. Financing, insurance and truck availability — hurdles that were nearly prohibitive four years ago — have all improved. His long-term target is a 100% EV fleet.

"At Hight Logistics, we've demonstrated that it works," he said. "If you fast forward from 4 years ago, it's a lot easier for a carrier to get into an electric truck."

With 1,000 voucher-backed orders now queued behind 850 units already in service, and diesel near $8.50 a gallon at the pump, the San Pedro Bay drayage fleet is on track to keep doubling — so long as the chargers arrive before the trucks do.