The upfront price of electric vehicles is one of the biggest barriers to overcome. Though electric buses and trucks cost less to fuel and maintain over their lifetimes, they are still two to three times more expensive to buy than their diesel-fueled counterparts.

But there’s another related barrier that’s making matters worse: U.S. fleet operators can’t access the financing and leasing they need to be able to purchase these fleets. That’s because nobody has figured out how to assign a monetary value to the most expensive, yet potentially most valuable, component of every electric truck or bus — its battery.

Similar problems exist for the used car industry, which is trying to figure out how to evaluate the remaining battery life in used passenger EVs. But it’s an even bigger and more expensive problem for medium- and heavy-duty commercial vehicles, as residual value is critical to business plans.

In fact, this financing gap has largely limited early adopters of electric trucks to deep-pocketed companies that can take on the upfront costs of purchasing them without the benefit of financing or leasing, said Kabir Nadkarni, Calstart EV-industry assessment specialist and author of the report.

​“For the mass-market adoption of these vehicles, we really need to look at what will make the leasing and financing of these vehicles affordable,” he said.