The news
Google is paying for 25 electric Class 8 trucks that will run between Dallas and Houston from early 2027, but none of them will ever carry a Google load. Google gets the emissions savings instead, as certificates it can count against its climate goals. In book and claim, a shipper pays for the clean miles an electric truck runs on someone else’s freight, and the carrier uses the money to buy trucks it could not otherwise afford.
Google’s 25 join a project five other shippers started in January, when Amazon, Meta, eBay, Etsy and Green Worldwide Shipping signed contracts for about 40 trucks through GMA Trucking, a buying group the nonprofit Center for Green Market Activation formed in 2023. With Google in, the project grows to 63 trucks running about 11 million miles a year, which Google estimates will save 92,000 metric tons of CO2e over the contracts. Nevoya, an electric carrier founded in San Francisco in 2023, won the work through GMA’s RFP.
That RFP went out into a market that had all but stopped buying electric trucks. Fewer than 200 zero-emission medium- and heavy-duty trucks were sold in the US in the first half of 2025, against more than 200,000 diesel Class 8s that year, per BloombergNEF and Smart Freight Centre. GMA asked for about 250 trucks anyway, and nine carriers came back offering 760, as many as the whole country had put on the road in 2023. The members bought about 40. Carriers had far more trucks to offer than shippers would pay for, and GMA’s contract closed that gap.
What changed
Five terms in that contract matter, per GMA’s February white paper:
Four years: GMA asked carriers to bid on four-year deals, and one said a three-year deal would have raised its price by more than 45%.
Nothing upfront: members pay only after a certificate is issued, so a truck that does not run earns nothing.
Tiered price: certificates cost more up to a minimum yearly volume and less above it, so the buyer’s average price falls if the trucks run more than planned.
Renewal at a discount: members can extend after year four at a lower price, because by then the trucks and chargers are mostly paid off.
One template: GMA and Nevoya wrote one contract, and each member signed its own copy with Nevoya. GMA is not a party.
Google’s deal uses the same template, plus an advance of capital to Nevoya before the trucks arrive, per Supply Chain Dive.
How it works
A certificate equals one tonne of freight moved one kilometer on an electric truck, checked by an outside verifier against ISO 14083, the freight emissions standard. An empty return trip moves no freight and earns no certificate, so the more loaded miles Nevoya runs, the more it gets paid.
The extra cost of an electric truck is almost all upfront. GMA’s example puts the premium at $200,000 per truck over diesel, before chargers, which financed at 5% costs about $73,000 a year over three years or $39,000 over six. More miles and more years bring the price down: bids assuming less than half the winner’s mileage came in more than 50% higher per certificate, and one carrier said a third more trucks on the same chargers would cut its price 8%.
Because the certificate is separate from the freight, Nevoya can haul for any shipper on the corridor, run its trucks close to around the clock and charge those shippers diesel rates, per GMA. “Book and claim helps unlock the capital and operational certainty to deploy electric capacity where it makes the most commercial sense,” CEO Sami Khan said when the first contracts were announced.
Nevoya picked I-45 because freight runs heavy in both directions between Houston and Dallas, the round trip fits within a Tesla Semi’s range, renewable power is cheap in Texas, and the charging sites were easy to permit and connect, per GMA. Greenlane, the charging joint venture of Daimler Truck, NextEra and BlackRock, plans six-to-eight-lane pull-through sites in Texas with drop-and-hook parking, so a tractor can charge while its trailer moves on.
Carriers report a standard diesel emissions factor to the shippers whose loads ride the electric trucks, so the savings are not counted twice. A shipper that tenders to Nevoya on this lane gets an electric truck at a diesel rate but reports the move as diesel, because the savings belong to whoever holds the certificate.
The competition
The same shippers are buying clean freight two ways at once.
Amazon: holds GMA certificates for a lane its freight never uses, and in April put 75 Einride electric trucks into its own Relay network, where its freight does ride them, per TechCrunch.
Google: did the same for air freight in June, when Kuehne+Nagel began buying up to 5.2 million litres of sustainable aviation fuel and assigning the certificates to Google Cloud shipments on regular flights.
Ocean shippers: got there first. ZEMBA, the maritime buyers’ alliance that joined GMA this month, has nearly 40 multi-year contracts from two tenders, starting with Hapag-Lloyd biomethane on Singapore-Rotterdam.
Road freight has only GMA Trucking, and Google’s 25 trucks are its second round.
The counter
SBTi’s Corporate Net-Zero Standard V2.0, published in June, names book and claim as an allowed method “subject to guardrails,” but tells companies to cut emissions in their own operations and supply chains first. Validation against V2.0 does not open until early 2027, when the trucks start. GHG Protocol’s rules for certificates are still in draft. In 2023, Kuehne+Nagel told SBTi a customer had backed out of a large sustainable aviation fuel purchase over the same uncertainty.
The chargers aren’t built yet either. Greenlane’s only open site is in Colton, California, and it announced Dallas and Houston in May.
The 92,000 metric tons is an estimate too: certificates are issued only as the trucks run, so what anyone can claim in year one depends on how far they drive. GMA also counts “zero-emission” at the tailpipe, leaving out truck manufacturing.
It all took more than three years: 15 months from the alliance forming to the RFP, four months to bid, five to pick a winner, four to sign, and about a year for the trucks to arrive.
What’s next
Nevoya’s trucks are due on I-45 in early 2027 along with Greenlane’s first Texas sites, and GMA is planning a second procurement with Smart Freight Centre that would pair certificates with electric hauls of the members’ own freight, giving a shipper both in one contract. By the end of year one, the certificates the trucks actually produce will show how close they came to the 11 million miles the buyers planned on.
