In our spotlight on Business Report, the fight over New Jersey's so-called dirty truck rule came to a head today when the Assembly Transportation Committee heard a proposal to delay new guidelines around getting zero emissions trucks on the roads by two years.

The law is slated to go into effect in January and will require a certain percentage of sales of new commercial trucks to be clean to help reduce air pollution.

But the rules have gotten major pushback from truckers and business groups who say the industry needs more time to roll this out.

Raymond Santana reports.

We respectfully request that you not advance trucking companies like the one I worked for before being in trouble with us.

If this happens.

After hearing more than 2 hours of testimony, New Jersey's assembly transportation Action Committee unanimously voted to advance a bill that proposed a two year delay in implementing the Advance Clean Truck rule, which was set to go into effect in January 2025.

The approved legislation delays a government mandate that would require manufacturers of medium and heavy duty trucks to sell an increasing percentage of new battery powered vehicles each year as a way to reduce air pollution.

The decision was disappointing to environmental advocates, who, in a recent letter to Bill sponsors, warned the delay threatens public health.

A lot of that mix reaction comes from misunderstanding about what advance clean trucks actually does and then selling trucks as an interim increment process to begin electrifying our transportation sector, our trucks.

New Jersey's largest source of emissions is from transportation.

And not only is that a climate change issue, that's a public health crisis.

We have counties that are failing across the state for ozone and other air quality contaminants, and a delay would tell people that they need to continue breathing that dirty air.

But also, if you're saying to a business owner who's coming in to buy a truck, who says, I need to replace these three trucks this year, and you find out that, oh, the diesel I could have bought would have been about $180,000 apiece.

But this electric truck is going to run me about $500,000.

That's a huge gap, a 2 to 3 time gap of cost.

Laura Perata, president of the New Jersey Coalition of Automotive Retailers who testified in support of the delay, says uncertainty amongst business owners has led to a lack of demand for electric trucks.

They need to know that they can operate their businesses in the same way that it won't take times away out of hours of service rules that they live under to operate the vehicles that they can refuel quickly and efficiently, that there's charging and route that they can get the payload or capacity out of the vehicle that they normally would out of a diesel with the battery.

Wait, there's just so many new factors when you're introducing a brand new technology that the customer, the truck buyer has to be really comfortable that this tool, this business tool, this truck will work the same way into the future as it has historically.

Romulo Gabrielli, whose business sells electric trucks in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut, says the advanced Clean truck rule is not a one size fits all.

Gabrielli explained some of the challenges he sees firsthand, including the lack of infrastructure and New Jersey.

So when someone comes and says they want to buy a truck from or they want to buy electric trucks, so we say, okay, great, here's the price, but let's go look at your building now.

How are you going to charge it?

How many hours are you actually using the truck?

26 foot box truck.

Okay, imagine this.

So we use this to distribute our parts.

So we have the the five stores in New Jersey.

We can't make that entire run from Dayton to Bloomsbury to Rockaway to Ridgefield Park, back to Dayton with one charge.

This is too many miles to do that.

So on our way along that path, we have to plug into our parts departments and charge up the trucks.

Nothing against EV trucks.

We think it's an up and coming technology.

But the fact of the matter is we're just not ready for it.

These trucks are extremely expensive, but even more importantly, the consumers don't want to buy them right now because they don't meet the needs of all classes of industry.

We don't have the charging infrastructure in place.

We don't have the electricity to even charge them.

You know, if we did this.

The bill still has a long way before the delay is official.

It now needs to pass a full assembly and the Senate for NJ Spotlight News.

I'm Raven Santana.