Electric trucks claim half of China’s heavy truck market

Electric models made up 50.3% of heavy trucks sold in China in September, with sales rising 37% year-on-year to 33,100 units, even as the overall heavy truck market shrank by 21%. The shift is already showing up in oil data, with Kpler expecting Chinese diesel demand to fall by about 230,000 barrels per day in 2026, or around 10%.

It should be noted that liquified natural gas (LNG) fleets are also contributing significantly to lowered oil demand. The market appears to have moved significantly faster than the Chinese government actually anticipated: in June, it set a target of 40% new-energy heavy truck sales by 2030, alongside 1.6 million such trucks on the road, and monthly sales have already passed that level. CATL now expects new-energy vehicles to account for half of China’s annual truck sales by 2028, without being isolated to a single month.

Lower running costs are the main draw, but subsidies are doing much of the work to get fleet operators on board. An electric heavy truck remains expensive, and can cost CN¥450,000 (US$64,000) more than a diesel equivalent; trade-in subsidies of up to CN¥140,000 (US$20,000) help close that gap, with some cities adding their own. Their influence was clear last December, when buyers rushed to beat expiring incentives and electric share briefly hit 53.9% before falling back to around 23% by March.

Battery swapping, almost entirely absent in the West, has removed another barrier. CATL plans to run 900 heavy truck swap stations by the end of this year and 2,000 in 2027, and in August agreed to buy nearly a quarter of Qiyuan Green Power, the country’s largest swap operator. Its standardised packs can be exchanged in about five minutes, answering the charging time objection that has slowed adoption elsewhere.

Electric trucks are also overtaking LNG, which was once seen as diesel’s natural successor. Kpler data shows that LNG’s share of heavy-duty registrations fell from 37% in March to 11% in July, while electric counterparts rose from 23% to 47%. Together, the two technologies are displacing around 680,000 barrels per day of diesel, yet electric trucks will still only make up about 8% of China’s heavy truck fleet by year end.

Meanwhile, the West remains far behind. Electric models hold just 2.5% of EU heavy truck registrations and well under 1% of US Class 8 sales, though Switzerland, Norway, the Netherlands and Sweden have all recently surpassed 10%. In the US, an electric Class 8 tractor costs 2.4 times as much as a diesel one, federal tax credits for electrified commercial vehicles ended in 2025 and California has shelved its zero-emission fleet rule following Trump administration pressure.

China’s lesson is arguably every bit as much about sequencing as it is the technology itself. Subsidies carried the purchase price until swap networks made the operating case stand on its own. This gave fleets the option of doing what they always do: choosing the cheapest truck in terms of operating costs.