China's electric heavy trucks pass 50% of sales as charging fight begins

China crosses the halfway mark

Sales of electric heavy trucks rose 34% from a year earlier.

That matters well beyond China. Fleet operators in Europe and the United States face a straight choice between megawatt charging and battery swapping, and Chinese volume will shape the price of both. What is still unknown is which approach wins for heavy trucks, and whether Chinese truck makers can repeat their car export push.

China briefly crossed the 50% line in December last year, before subsidies ended, and sales dipped the following month. The current run looks different: it comes after the subsidies were cut.

Diesel demand and the cost case

Diesel's share falls to roughly 40% once LNG trucks are counted. China's diesel demand is on track to fall by about 230,000 barrels per day this year, even with more freight moving.

The shift comes down to economics rather than policy. Electric trucks are now cheaper to own and run than diesel in China, and higher diesel prices have widened the gap. Each electric truck sold displaces far more fuel than each electric car, because of how hard the vehicles work. That is why the truck numbers move global fuel balances in a way that passenger car sales do not.

Diesel trucks could soon make up less than a third of sales.

Swap stations versus megawatt charging

China plans 28 million charging points by the end of 2027. That is up from 21 million last March. The build-out reaches past the big cities into rural areas that have been slower to electrify. Several companies are also building battery swap stations for trucks, setting up competition between the two approaches.

For trucks, the case for swapping rests on time. Even the Tesla Semi, a Class 8 electric truck, reportedly reaches 60% to 70% charge in 30 to 45 minutes at fast chargers.

Smaller experiments are already running in North America. The US startup Revoy announced a swappable battery retrofit for Class 8 diesel trucks last summer, a unit that sits between cab and trailer and swaps in minutes. It cuts diesel emissions by up to 85%.

The swap model has proof elsewhere. Nio added 10 million battery swaps in 88 days, taking its total past 130 million. Those are passenger cars, not trucks, and their duty cycles differ.

In North America the truck pieces are smaller still. Electrovaya announced a $26 million supply agreement with Janus Electric. The Australian firm is bringing Class 8 diesel-to-electric conversions to the United States and Canada. The sum covers only the initial phase of orders for the two markets.

What Europe and the US are missing

The European Union is looking at 2.5% electric share of truck sales this year. The United States is under 1%. China accounted for roughly 90% of all electric truck sales worldwide last year, and that share is set to grow.

China is on pace to sell roughly as many electric trucks per week as Europe sells per year.

Greg Jackson runs Octopus Energy. "It's only when you see 49-ton trucks in China running on batteries that you realize how serious electrification is," he told Fortune. Jackson said incumbency is the single biggest factor affecting Europe. He said European car companies have not yet been able to be competitive at building electric vehicles.