Where the site is
Ontario sits east of Los Angeles, where the SR-60 and I-15 freeways meet. EV Realty describes the surrounding area as the West Coast's largest and most concentrated warehousing submarket. Trucks serving the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, the intermodal yards in Los Angeles and San Bernardino, and the air cargo operations at Ontario International Airport all run through it. Ontario airport is among the top ten US cargo airports and handles freight for UPS and FedEx.
"Ontario sits at the convergence of the nation's largest container gateway and the densest warehouse cluster in North America," said EV Realty CEO Patrick Sullivan.
Layout matters more than charger count
Commercial truck charging is not a scaled-up car park. Trailers need pull-through bays, wide turning areas and quick motorway access, because a driver who has to reverse a loaded tractor into a bay loses time that lands straight on the operating cost. EV Realty has designed its earlier hubs around that, and the Ontario property has the acreage for it.
For scale, our report on New York's first lamppost charger covered a 9.6 kW unit delivering roughly 30 miles of range per hour at $0.39/kWh. That is a sensible answer for a parked delivery van. A Class 8 tractor covering 400 miles a day needs the substation, not the post.
27 MW in a region short of power
Grid capacity in Southern California is tight in many areas, and EV Realty treats that as the commercial argument for the site. A hub with several megawatts of secured capacity is worth more to a fleet than a hub with a convenient address and no power. The company has not published charger counts, individual power levels or tariffs for Ontario.
Truck supply is moving the same way. Tesla says the Semi is in volume production in Nevada, BYD built its 150,000th commercial new energy vehicle, and Volvo's updated electric line-up quotes up to 700 km of range. Chargers that arrive in 2028 will meet trucks ordered in 2027.
What diesel at $8 a gallon means per mile
Take a Class 8 diesel tractor at 6.5 mpg and diesel at $8.00 a gallon, the price that started the current round of commentary in the US press. Fuel costs $1.23 per mile, or $123 per 100 miles. An electric tractor on the same duty cycle uses roughly 2 kWh per mile, so 200 kWh per 100 miles. At $0.30/kWh that is $60. At $0.45/kWh it is $90. The saving lands between $33 and $63 per 100 miles, and it vanishes somewhere above $0.60/kWh.
Those are assumptions, not a test result. A loaded tractor on a mountain route can exceed 2.5 kWh/mile, and depot charging on an industrial tariff is cheaper than public fast charging. The arithmetic is the same one our charging cost calculator runs for passenger cars: consumption multiplied by price per kWh. Anyone comparing US truck hubs with European sites should start from the price per kWh rather than the headline power figure. Our supercharger price list, drawn from the 483 European locations in our database, shows how far apart the cheap and expensive ends sit within a single continent.
Who pays for the grid connection
In Europe, public money is part of the answer for heavy vehicles. Bucharest secured €87.44 million from EU modernisation funds for 40 e-buses and 45 trolleybuses, depot works included. EV Realty is building in California without that structure, on the bet that fleets will treat charging as an operating cost rather than a capital project.
Depot charging as a grid asset
Trucks have an advantage that passenger cars do not: predictable schedules. That makes them the easiest vehicles to aggregate, and in a constrained grid area a hub that can also push power back at peak times is worth more than one that only draws. The EU's €9 million EV4EU project ended with a bidirectional CCS prototype and four pilot results. That is a prototype, not a product, and nothing suggests the Ontario site will be built as one.
What to ask before signing a charging contract
For a fleet looking at hubs of this type: ask for secured capacity in megawatts rather than the number of posts, and for the price per kWh and whether it is indexed. Ask about pull-through clearance and queueing at peak. Ask who absorbs the demand charges. Then check the calendar. EV Realty's Ontario chargers are not expected before 2028, so a fleet that needs power in 2027 will have to source it somewhere else.