🌐 Forum Mobility Brings the Clean Energy Playbook to Heavy-Duty Freight

Adoption Archetype: 💳 Financing as the Unlock
Make it affordable — new models remove upfront cost.

The Trucking Dilemma: A Billion-Mile Bottleneck

We’ve all seen those massive container ships—row upon row of metal boxes stacked like Jenga towers, floating just offshore. They carry our clothes, laptops, and coffee beans. And if my ten-year-old daughter has her way, endless Le Boo Boos.

Until recently, I’d never thought much about how those containers actually get off the boat. Turns out, that overlooked stretch—just the first few miles from ship to warehouse—is called drayage.

And in California, which dominates America’s port industry, it amounts to a billion diesel-powered miles per year.

This is the frontline of freight. Thousands of 18-wheelers—most owned by small, family-run carriers—shuttling shipping containers day in, day out. With every mile, spewing emissions into the communities that surround America’s busiest ports.

Electric trucks offer a better answer. They’re clean, quiet, and powerful. They’re also proven.

But they cost half a million dollars each, and the charging infrastructure is patchy. For small fleet operators, switching is too risky. 

The tech is here. The adoption is stuck.

That’s the gap Forum Mobility is built to close.

From Solar to Semis: A Familiar Playbook

Matt LeDucq knows this kind of inflection point. He saw it twenty years ago, on rooftops in San Francisco, hauling solar panels into place—before solar energy became easy to finance. Before it was bankable. He rose with the industry, eventually leading distributed generation at NextEra, one of the largest renewable energy companies in North America.

The pattern was always the same: cheaper and better panels alone didn’t unlock the market. Finance did.

“In solar, we dragged the useful life out to 30 or 40 years,” Matt told me. “Then we stacked the cheapest capital we could find on top of it. That’s what brought the price down.”

Now he’s doing it again—this time with heavy-duty freight.

Drayage is the entry point. It’s where the trucks are dirtiest, the routes are short, and the business case is tight. But it’s also where 75% of the miles are driven by small, independent carriers. 

Forum Mobility’s Innovation: Make the Trucks Bankable

In 2024, Forum Mobility opened the world’s largest electric truck charging depot at the Port of Long Beach, the third busiest port in the U.S. (behind only Los Angeles and NY-NJ). Nine megawatts of capacity, enough to power two football stadiums. Forty-four ultra-fast chargers. Built to charge hundreds of trucks a day.

But Forum Mobility isn’t a trucking or charging company.

Its product is the business model: EV Trucking-as-a-Service

With Forum Mobility, carriers don’t buy trucks. They don’t install chargers. They don’t file rebate paperwork or troubleshoot downtime.

They pay one monthly price for everything—vehicle, maintenance, charging, support. 

The trucks come from trusted OEMs like Volvo and Freightliner. The charging depots are staffed and built for reliability.

And critically, the whole package is structured with long-term infrastructure capital, not short-term vehicle financing. That means a lower cost of capital, driving down the cost per mile.

“This is the age of affordability,” Matt said. “We need to beat diesel. Not in theory—in practice.”

The Forum Mobility Playbook

Here’s how to scale zero-emission freight, starting at the ports.

1. Build charging before it's needed
   Forum invests in megawatt-scale depots with full grid upgrades—so charging never slows the system down.
   

2. Use trucks institutional lenders already finance
   Proven equipment from Freightliner and Volvo builds lender trust and lowers capital costs.
   

3. Match long-life assets with project-grade capital
   Forum Mobility stretches asset life and attracts infrastructure capital—just like the clean energy industry did.
   

4. Secure freight demand through shipper preference
   The company works with shippers to specify zero-emission freight for drayage. That stable volume de-risks the model.

“It’s the people who put the stuff in the containers. The Walmarts, the Targets, the Amazons, the solar panel manufacturers. Having their procurement teams push to use zero-emission trucks has an unfathomable impact on the market,” says Matt.

5. Bundle everything into a fixed monthly service
   Truck, charging, maintenance, and support—no grant paperwork, no upfront costs, no range anxiety.

Why It Works. Why It Matters.

Forum Mobility isn’t solving for trucks and chargers. It’s solving for the people who keep freight moving. It wins by de-risking adoption. That means removing all the friction between “I’m not sure” and “Sign me up.”

No massive upfront cost. No charging uncertainty. No downtime risk. No paperwork scramble.

And when structured with infrastructure-grade capital, the economics beat diesel. Now switching from heavy-duty diesel to zero-emission trucks isn’t just cleaner—it’s cheaper.

That’s how companies use financing as the unlock to drive adoption.

“We’re not trying to help carriers survive,” Matt told me. “We’re helping them win.”

That mindset matters. Forum Mobility is not an energy outsider offering tools to the freight world. It’s embedding directly within it. Matt’s background—his years as a tradesman, his family’s union roots—shape how he’s building the company.

They staff their depots. They meet truckers at 6 a.m. They prioritize uptime like livelihoods depend on it—because they do.

Beyond the Ports: A Freight Market in Waiting

Drayage is just the start. Forum Mobility is already expanding up the coast—from Oakland to the Inland Empire to Washington state.

As trucks get longer range and faster charging, the company is preparing for broader freight categories: regional haul, LTL, food, and grocery delivery. These markets are 10x bigger and primed to benefit from Forum’s business model

Anticipation surrounding the Tesla Semi’s rollout in the coming months runs high. But more advanced technology alone won’t shift the industry.

What will?

A bankable business model that makes it work for the carriers who move our nation’s goods.

🌐 Supercool Takeaway

Forum Mobility proves electrification scales when it’s structured to financially outcompete the default legacy option—diesel.

Operator Takeaways:

• Electrification doesn’t need reinvention—it needs bankability.
  Trusted trucks, proven chargers, and contract-backed service make it investable at scale.
  

• Adoption is about capital efficiency as much as equipment performance.
  Structuring trucks like energy assets opens the door to cheaper financing.
  

• Simplicity and cost competitiveness are a potent force.
  Forum wins by bundling truck, charging, and maintenance into one predictable price.

This Week’s Podcast Episode

The Clean Energy Transition Is Cooking: Copper's Battery-Enabled Appliances Unlock Home Electrification

🎙️ Listen on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and all other podcast platforms.

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Stat of the Week: 6.3%

That’s the share of U.S. carbon emissions produced each year by medium- and heavy-duty trucks.

Quote of the Week:

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Related

Bill Gates vs. Elon Musk: The Future of Heavy-Duty Freight

Bill Gates and Elon Musk are in a perpetual spat over whether electric trucks can really handle heavy-duty freight. Our Supercool take: we side with Elon on this one.

As Matt LeDucq told me on the Supercool podcast: “The Tesla Semi is just like the Model 3 was—it’s a true catalyst. An unbelievable product that opens up the aperture of what we can do in heavy-duty freight.”

The Tesla Semi is already on the road too. PepsiCo and other corporate carriers have been testing fleets for several years.

Here are the trucks that are already in commercial fleets today:

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Where Supercool traveled this week:

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🌐 thinkPARALLAX: When climate goals meet reality: What should companies do when they miss the mark?

Podcasts:

🌐 AI-Curious with Jeff Wilser: How AI Could Help Solve Climate Change with Josh Dorfman

🌐 Up Next with Gabriella Mirabelli:Josh Dorfman — Evolving Your Personal Brand

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