Range’s CEO talks Rizon deal, future of EVs in 2026
While 2025 was a bumpy year for electric trucks, Range Truck Group, a zero-emissions vehicle dealership, finished out the year as the newly minted official dealer for Daimler Truck’s Rizon brand. With this step, the dealership, which opened its first brick-and-mortar location in Fife, Washington, in August 2025, will now be offering Rizon’s Classes 4 & 5 EVs through authorized service centers.
However, Range CEO Johannes Ariens doesn’t only see the Rizon deal as a boon for the dealership, but as a positive, more sustainable step forward for an EV market that has “missed the mark,” Ariens said.
According to the CEO, the EV market’s struggles display a particular disconnect between manufacturers and consumers. For instance, he cited how EVs can and have fit certain transportation segments, such as last-mile delivery providers like FedEx (with their BrightDrop Zevo 600 and Ford E-Transit vans) and Amazon (with their Rivian vehicles). Plus, he noted how EVs can operate well and are less expensive due to fewer maintenance costs. Finally, he noted that even if there are no more federal incentives for purchasing EV vehicles, there’s still state-funded options.
And yet, “people just aren’t buying,” Ariens stated. To him, this signifies that something’s wrong with the EV supply chain, something that the segment has failed to reckon with.
“If we just keep doing the same thing again, why would we expect a different outcome?” he asked. “That's basically what we saw going on, is this industry is just trying to continue to force adoption and we're not seeing changes in outcome.”
A trust challenge
To Ariens, EV supply chains and demand aren’t just challenged by infrastructure costs and implementation, but by a lack of consumer trust and volatility, from bankruptcies to criminal scandals.
“If you look at the last five years of commercial EVs in this industry and the companies that are trying to get it, I would say one of the biggest things missing is trust,” he noted. “The whole space is just completely devoid of the one thing that matters most when you're trying to bring a new technology to market.”
This lack of trust is not only tricky for consumers, but dealers, especially if EV OEMs need dealer buy-in to invest in distribution and demand aggregation.
“Existing dealers have long-standing relationships with customers built on trust over years and years and years with established legacy brands,” Ariens said. “Why would they go take a winger on any of the commercial EV companies that have gone bankrupt in the last four or five years, which is plenty?”
This leads to what Ariens sees as one of EVs' main problems: They need to represent businesses that can turn a stable profit, without being consistently propped up by incentives. By extension, EVs need dealers that can aggregate demand so that these vehicles are easily accessible, and dealers need to know that they’re investing in stable companies.
This is why Range’s deal with Rizon is so impactful, Ariens said.
“For us, getting a company like RIZON on is a big deal because it represents a stabilized, well-backed product that has tons of immediate product market applications for customers,” he explained. And it represents “the evolution of acceptance by the industry, with what we would define as legacy players [acknowledging] that, ‘Hey, this distribution and go-to-market model is broken, and we need something else.’”
With this kind of stability, Ariens said he hopes Range will be able to invest more in EV brands that work.
“Eventually we hope to have, frankly, fewer OEMs that are stronger,” he added.
EV demand for 2026?
So, Ariens feels confident in Range’s stability and work. But what about the EV market at large, especially after the tumult of 2025?
“Over 5% of new car sales are electric, and year-on-year in commercial, [adoption] is unequivocally going up,” Ariens asserted.
The only issue is that the industry isn’t looking at EV growth with a long enough viewpoint, especially considering the scope the project of transitioning away from ICE. After all, the U.S. developed its current transportation sector, including gas and diesel distribution through decades of work and billions of dollars, he said. This means that transitioning away from that system needs a similar timeframe, measured over years.
But for most companies in the U.S., as soon as you go public, then you’re on the quarterly clock for profit, which Ariens said is the “wrong clock to be using on a hardware-based problem” like EV batteries and infrastructure.
“The shortest measurement [for EV adoption] is year-on-year,” Ariens emphasized. “And year-on-year, this is absolutely working. There's absolutely continued transition, it's happening, bar none, so then it gets into a matter of ‘How should these be companies looking to grow? What's their time frame and how this all works?’ And it should be 30 years.”
For Range’s next year, Ariens said that he’s most excited by local and municipal investment in EVs, especially as the dealer’s home state is implementing the Washington Zero-Emission Incentive Program (WAZIP). The program is funded by the Climate Commitment Act and managed by the Washington State Department of Transportation, and provides point-of-sale discounts to make ZEVs more affordable.
Modeled after California’s HVIP and CORE programs, Ariens said Range has been very involved in developing Washington’s program, with two main changes regarding customer and OEM caps. Taken together, these caps will limit how much money goes to certain OEMs and customers based on their delivery of vehicles, allowing for greater focus on companies that can “put trucks on the road,” he said.
About the Author
Alex Keenan
Alex Keenan is an Associate Editor for Fleet Maintenance magazine. She has written on a variety of topics for the past several years and recently joined the transportation industry, reviewing content covering technician challenges and breaking industry news. She holds a bachelor's degree in English from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado.