I thought after previous fuel price shocks that freight companies had a separate line item on their invoices for fuel that was actual cost or close to it.
So I had assumed that the $7-8/g diesel was already passed along to customers.
So I had assumed that the $7-8/g diesel was already passed along to customers.
While that won't help most current truckers, the shift to electrical trucks is going to create some opportunities for the companies that buy them to undercut diesel trucks on price. Electrical trucks are still scarce and expensive and infrastructure is also lacking (in the US at least, EU/China is a different story). But of course with diesel prices spiking this high, it only exaggerates the benefits. And it looks like price uncertainty in general is could be here to stay with e.g. Russia probably needing many years to rebuild their oil infrastructure and the middle east also needing a lot of time if/when some sense of normality is restored there.
There are likely to be a lot more EV trucks on the market over the next years. China is already heading for 40+% of trucks sold (of all types, including heavy trucks) to be electric. They are way past the testing and experimenting phase there.
Transitioning the whole truck fleet in the US will take many years of course. But with Tesla bringing their factory online, other truck companies are likely to also increase production. This could quickly go from thousands of trucks sold per year in the US to tens of thousands. Tesla alone has the ambition to do 50K semis per year. We'll see if they manage. But it's going to disrupt truckers that are highly dependent on diesel prices when whole fleets start becoming immune to diesel price uncertainty.