The operator of the Port of Los Angeles' largest container terminal claims a fleet wide electrification first, but its own numbers show roughly 60 percent of the fleet has converted and the workers who will run the new trucks are still finishing training.
APM Terminals Los Angeles says it has become the first container terminal at the Port of Los Angeles to fully electrify its on-dock rail drayage fleet, the short-haul trucks that shuttle containers straight from ship to train at the terminal's rail yard. The operator of Pier 400, the port's largest container terminal, will reach 60 battery-electric terminal tractors through a 40-unit expansion contract with Orange EV announced this week. The remaining 41 of the terminal's 101 tractors are still diesel.
The framing is the company's own. Every operational number that supports the milestone, including 98.8 percent uptime, 42,000 zero-tailpipe-emission operating hours, more than 40,700 diesel-equivalent gallons displaced, and an estimated 427 metric tons of carbon dioxide avoided, comes from APM Terminals and Orange EV's joint release. None of those figures has been independently audited in the materials the companies have shared.
The 60-of-101 conversion rate is also where the company's announcement and its own yard math stop lining up. A terminal tractor, sometimes called a yard truck, is the heavy short-range vehicle that moves containers inside a marine terminal between ships, stacks, and rail. Sixty of them will run on batteries at Pier 400 once the new Orange EV HUSK-e XP units arrive. Forty-one will keep running on diesel. "Fully electrified," in other words, applies to the on-dock rail drayage subset, not the whole yard.
The fleet can be electrically ready long before the labor force is operationally ready. The terminal's roughly 200 International Longshore and Warehouse Union operators are working through Level 2 electric-yard-truck training, a multi-week program covering high-voltage safety and the different feel of a battery-electric drivetrain. The first operator cohort finished classroom work in late 2025. Power Shop mechanics, the people who service the tractors, completed foundational Orange EV training earlier in 2025 and are now accumulating the supervised on-the-job hours that lead to sign-off. An electric yard-truck milestone and a workforce trained to run it are two different clocks.
The APM Terminals and Orange EV relationship started in April 2025 with a 20-unit order. The new 40-unit contract is, in the companies' framing, a vote of confidence in that initial fleet's performance. Pier 400 has separately tracked emissions reductions from its owned container handling equipment since 2017, though the specific figures from that baseline period were truncated in the public release.
Two open questions sit underneath the announcement. The "first container terminal at the Port of LA to fully electrify on-dock rail drayage" claim is the buyer's and the vendor's. It has not been checked against the Port of Los Angeles' own emissions inventory or against competing terminals such as Fenix Marine Services, TraPac, ITS, and Yusen Terminals. And the 60-of-101 conversion rate, real progress by any yard standard, is also a reminder that a single terminal's electrification story still leaves most of the yard on diesel. The next milestone, when it comes, will be measured against the trucks that have not moved yet.