The commercial EV segment is growing in the face of market slowdown

While the consumer market for electric cars is starting to slow, the commercial vehicle business is still growing.

Registrations for commercial electric vehicles — Classes 3 through 8 — rose 274 percent to 24,871 for the 12 months ended May 31 compared with the same period a year earlier, according to data from S&P Global Mobility. Those include delivery vans, utility trucks and big rigs.

Many of the businesses moving to electric fleets see a cost advantage over combustion engine vehicles, said Jacob Richard, technical project manager at Calstart, a Pasadena, Calif., clean transportation nonprofit.

While there are plenty of reasons to electrify — lower operating expenses, the convenience of starting the day with the equivalent of a full tank of gasoline and route optimization — certain factors are still holding some fleets back. The most important are high upfront costs, underdeveloped infrastructure and policy uncertainty, according to Calstart.