China’s 50% Increase in EV Truck Sales Wipes Out Global Diesel Demand
China’s electric truck boom which has taken the country by storm and really shocked a lot of the west. They had no idea this was happening. This has decimated the demand for diesel. A boom in the electric heavy truck sector, not just semis but more more so short hall trucking and that is the majority of the market has decreased global diesel demand significantly with sales of electric trucks surging by more than 50% in China driven by subsidies falling battery costs and also government mandates. This is leading to forecasts of declining oil consumption and it’s forcing guys it’s forcing refiners to pivot to prochemicals while also creating power grid challenges. I mean, who would have thought, right? This transition affecting the world’s second largest truck fleet is happening faster than expected with EVs potentially taking over half of new sales by the end of this year. as in electric trucking is being utterly disrupted. No one’s really talking about this, but within the space of 12 months, electric trucks have gone from kind of like a maybe type thing, not really happening to just taking over the entire industry in China. We’re going to say the same thing. It’s going to happen everywhere. This is going to be a global revolution. And there’s very key reasons to why the entire global trucking industry is about to be disrupted within a very very short pace of time, much much quicker than the car industry has been disrupted. Today, we’re not talking about cars. We’re talking about the backbone of the global economy. What brings you food? What brings everything you need? And that is heavy trucking. I got news that fundamentally changes the financial conversation about freight electrification. I mean, we’re talking big changes here that are drastically changing demand for diesel. Drastically, global demand is going down for diesel. The Chinese price war we saw in passenger cars, you know, prices coming down so low that they’re now cheaper than internal combustion in many cases. Well, it has officially landed in the world of 40tonon trucks, semi-truckss that deliver all our stuff. Price war has hit them and this is going to be a really good thing. Hello my friends, welcome to the show. I’m Sam Evans. You’re watching the electric Viking. For years, right, the West framed the electrification of heavy trucking as a longhaul hydrogen problem. Bill Gates himself said electric semis are impossible. He literally said they’re impossible a couple of years ago. He said Tesla Semi would never work. Even though today uh DHL did a return trip in a Tesla Semi doing 400 m with a fully loaded 75,000 ton payload. Yeah. Anyway, big expensive long range that was apparently going to be powered by hydrogen. Well, China has shattered that idea by focusing on simple, cheap, and effective short hall battery electric trucks. And the price tags are so low they are forcing every Western manufacturer from Volvo to Dameler, by the way, Dameler still says the future of trucking is hydrogen, to rip up their business plans. I guess Tesla got this one right as well. Yeah. Now guys, one of my contacts on the ground in Wuhan recently saw something incredible. 400 kwatt hours or 600 kWh electric trucks priced between 58,000 and 85,000. That’s US dollars. Uh that’s like the price of a an MPV. Crazy. I don’t know how this is happening. I don’t know how you can get this many batteries in a truck and it can be this cheap, but it’s happening. So think about that. These aren’t diesel platforms with batteries welded on, which is exactly how many Western automakers, OEMs, started their EV journey. They basically took internal combustion diesel powered trucks and just tried to like stick some batteries on them, which obviously made them very inefficient. These are actually purpose-built electric trucks. Lithium phosphate batteries, integrated E axles, and simplified architecture built from the ground up to actually be fully electric. and therefore much more efficient and therefore the most cost effective form of transport in the world. The reason the price is so low is actually pretty simple. They’ve removed the entire costly complex mechanical ecosystem of a diesel truck. The engine, the gearbox, the emissions controls, the exhaust system, the thousands of parts that are needed for all that to work. They built it at massive Chinese scale and they achieved a cost structure that is unrecognizable to the west. Uh Volkswagen even said that it’s 50% cheaper for them to build EVs in China than what it is in Europe. But this is a different scale even than Volkswagen. Now for the critical comparison. Once you add the necessary upgrades, better seats, stronger HVAC, EARK certified tires, proper crash protection for western roads, of course, the total cost for a short hall Chinese semi EV is around 80 to 120,000. That’s um it’s much cheaper than what diesel trucks cost. Compare that to a Western EV truck today, which often starts near 250,000 uh and goes much higher. We’re talking about a 3:1 cost advantage. If you’re a short hall fleet operator, you’re going to look at a $100,000 truck versus a $300,000 truck and ask one very simple question. Which one meets my actual needs, my actual duty cycle? The massive secret the west missed is that the majority of freight is not longhaul. People have been saying this for a long time. The majority of freight is not long haul. No one listens to this cuz it’s more of an emotional discussion than a logical one. It’s actually regional distribution, urban deliveries, depo shuttles. These trips are typically less than 250 km, less than 150 mi, and involve repeated stop start movement where electric motors excel. They’re more efficient. They’re easier to operate, they’re faster, and that’s all a big positive because they’re also cheaper to run. And but did I mention they also last a lot longer as well? Economic councils in France and Germany have concluded that solving short hall electrification first delivers most of the benefit for the environment and the economy and everyone. And the lowcost Chinese trucks map perfectly onto this need. Now look what happened in China’s market. In China, this transition is already well underway. In the first half of 2025, the consumption of diesel is falling close to 50% right of new sales. So, it’s been a 50% fall in demand for diesel trucks. It’s complete annihilation of the diesel trucking industry in China. Complete disruption. It’s happened so quickly that people are just absolutely shocked. Battery electric trucks have soared to roughly 22% of new heavy truck sales. But this disruption is happening incredibly quickly, quick, much quicker than what the EV car disruption happened. And what about the so-called bridge fuel? Natural gas trucks are facing the exact same pressure as diesel. And hydrogen, it’s a literal rounding error, amounting to less than 1% of the market. China’s experience is very clear. Battery electric is the answer. It’s not hydrogen. So, this is where it gets tough for giants like Volvo and Damelot, right? They entered the electric truck market with platforms that already, well, they already understood how they worked, right? They already were used to using internal combustion engine trucks. Taking a diesel frame, stripping out the engine, and hanging batteries underneath is what they’ve done to make their electric versions of those trucks. This kept their production lines moving, the same production lines they’ve been using for decades. But it resulted in a compromised, heavier, less efficient, and critically far more expensive electric truck. And if you don’t believe me, look at the efficiency of Tesla Semi compared to Volvo and Dameler electric semis. They’re in a different league. The Chinese solution was simple. Start fresh like what Tesla have done. Design the platform around the lithiumion phosphate battery and the eaxle from day one. Now, why lithium phosphate? Well, because they’re just so much cheaper than NMC batteries. That shift toward a purpose-built electric tractor is only now underway for Western OEMs like Volvo with their new FH electric and Dameless Eacturros. Now, getting back to those LFP batteries, I should also mention they also last longer. So, Western firms now face a brutal challenge. They need to match the Chinese cost structure while maintaining their rigorous safety, comfort, and service expectations. Can they do that? Well, this is the definition of a price war on an uneven battlefield. I mean, look at China’s market. It’s much bigger than Europe. It is. The number of cars sold in China is more than double than Europe combined. More than double. Same thing for trucks. Yeah. More than d more than twice as many trucks are sold in China versus what are sold in Europe. So, this gives these Chinese manufacturers a big advantage. They have a huge captive market. that market in China are they’re not really beholden to some sort of fuel. They’re not like, “Oh, we want diesel. We want burn baby dig baby dig.” They’re not Trumpsters. They’re just people who are saying, “Well, what’s the best model? What’s the best for our business?” This is going to be hard. It’s going to be really difficult because the truth is China’s already disrupting the global auto market in the car sector and buses and it’s about to do it with a storm of heavy trucking. And the story is here. Heavy trucking is no longer a slow migration to a distant expensive hydrogen solution which is going to come in maybe a decade. It’s a rapid transition. It’s happening right now driven by lowcost battery electric vehicles out of China. Yeah, they don’t have a lot of access to the US market. Except they kind of do actually. BYD has been selling trucks and buses along with other Chinese companies in the United States now for decades. No one talks about this, but um yeah, it’s sort of a Trojan horse, you might say. The economic logic here is actually pretty straightforward. For most fleet operators, electric is becoming cheaper than diesel across the majority of realworld duty cycles. If freight electrification can happen at 1/3 the expected cost, the pace of decarbonization will be much faster. And this is a massive positive. The only question left though is how quickly could the West adapt to a reality that China has already created? Let me know what you guys think in the comments. Thanks for watching. [Music]
China’s electric truck revolution is accelerating faster than anyone expected. With EV truck sales surging over 50% in a single year, global diesel demand is collapsing — and traditional fuel markets are facing their biggest disruption in decades. This shift is reshaping logistics, energy consumption, and the future of transportation worldwide.
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