The idea that heavy freight would be the last redoubt of diesel has been repeated for decades, often with confidence and rarely with evidence. In December 2026, that idea finally collapsed. Battery electric heavy duty trucks crossed 50% of new sales in China, a segment that had long been treated as immovable because of weight, range, duty cycles, and the presumed need for liquid fuels. This was not a pilot program, a niche urban category, or a short term policy artifact. It was a market-wide shift in the most energy-intensive road transport segment in the world’s largest vehicle market. If battery electric trucks can dominate new sales in China at that scale, then many of the assumptions that have shaped global energy debates are no longer fit for purpose.
It is important to stress that this transition was not driven by environmental virtue, although that played a policy role. It was driven by cost, reliability, and industrial strategy. Chinese manufacturers built electric trucks from clean sheet designs rather than retrofitting diesel platforms. Charging infrastructure scaled alongside vehicles, often in depot based or corridor focused deployments. Grid upgrades and storage deployments ensured that electricity supply kept pace. Once electric trucks became cheaper to operate and competitive to purchase, adoption accelerated rapidly. The idea that heavy freight must rely on diesel or hydrogen simply failed in the face of real world economics.