CALSTART released the 2025 update to its ZET Ahead Dashboard, an interactive visualization of the progress 23 states (and the District of Columbia) have made toward accelerating the adoption of zero-emission buses, vans, and trucks. A Q&A blog post accompanies the release. 

CALSTART’s Updated ZET Ahead

The 2025 update to ZET Ahead includes detailed profiles of six new states: Illinois, Michigan, New Mexico, Texas, Georgia, and Florida, as well as progress updates to the 17 states originally featured on the dashboard.

This year’s dashboard update also adds a new Economic Development market dimension, analyzing complementary tax and workforce development policies that encourage clean transportation investment.

The ZET Ahead Dashboard is used by policymakers, investors, industry stakeholders, and advocates to stay informed about the most impactful state actions and investments supporting zero-emission trucking. The dashboard also provides a framework for states looking to kick-start their transition to zero-emission medium- and heavy-duty vehicles.

The Benefits of ZET Ahead

In an era of constrained funding and increasingly complex and competing priorities, the ZET Ahead Dashboard provides state staff with a concise playbook for initiating, growing, and sustaining an ecosystem for zero-emission medium- and heavy-duty vehicles, according to CALSTART officials. 

Based on three decades of experience, CALSTART said it has identified the most impactful actions for states working to decarbonize their transport sector, using a strategy that requires not just one program or one policy, but rather a suite of complimentary deployments across a range of targeted areas such as: Targets, Planning, Economic Development, Vehicles Incentives, Infrastructure, Innovative Policy, and Regulations.

What is equally noteworthy in this year’s release is the newly added Economic Development dimension, which encompasses industry strategy and clustering, public financing, tax incentives, streamlined permitting, business assistance, and workforce development, among other key areas. Low-carbon, zero-emitting technologies, vehicles, and infrastructure are critical growth areas for the global economy, and states with strong market and regulatory support for these technologies will be attractive sites for manufacturing, service, and support, according to CALSTART. 

“Our ZET Ahead dashboard provides actionable information and much-needed guidance. In fact, the data we’re seeing this year make clear that the groundwork to enable zero-emission trucking is no longer regionally clustered. And favorable market conditions are now spreading out across the entire US,” said Alissa Burger, regional policy director at CALSTART. “Every state in the country — red or blue, urban or rural, big or small — can take steps today to enable freight modernization with zero-emission trucks tomorrow.”