Aftermath: China Is Electrifying Freight Trucking
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Today, we’ll talk about Chinese EV freight trucks.
Are We Still at War?
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz recently said that America is being “humiliated” by Iran. “The Iranians are obviously very skilled at negotiating, or rather, very skillful at not negotiating, letting the Americans travel to Islamabad and then leave again without any result,” he said. The only issue with this argument is that Donald Trump is such an erratic lunatic that arguably no real negotiation has ever taken place and may not actually be possible. Principally what Trump has done is post random nonsense online. Among Tuesday’s posts was one in which he claimed that “Iran has just informed us that they are in a ‘State of Collapse.’ They want us to ‘Open the Hormuz Strait,’ as soon as possible.”
This did not happen. It is what it is, and it’s not going to get better so long as Trump remains president.
China Is Ditching Diesel Trucks
Freight trucking has long been considered a poor fit for electrification. Semitrucks are huge, they pull very heavy trailers, and therefore they have poor aerodynamics. Those three things are notoriously the kiss of death for regular EVs. Ford’s F-150 Lightning (RIP) can tow only about a third as far as the gas-powered version of the same truck.
GM’s Silverado EV is the only consumer American EV that can tow serious distances, and that’s because it has a preposterous 212 kilowatt-hour battery, meaning it weighs about 9,000 pounds—and that’s for family stuff. Surely an 80,000-pound tractor trailer would be far more difficult to electrify. That impression was only reinforced when Elon Musk’s Tesla semi was repeatedly delayed. Ten years after the initial announcement and seven years after the deadline for delivery, there’s a semi factory in Sparks, Nevada, that is supposed to be starting mass production soon. There’s also an anticipated supercharging network that has yet to be built.
But it appears to be totally possible to electrify freight trucking, as evidenced by the fact that China is doing it right now. And China’s transition away from diesel trucks will certainly accelerate thanks to Donald Trump’s Iran war—with most of the rest of the world following suit, sooner or later.
While Donald Trump was putting the American automobile industry on a road to obsolescence and death by repealing Joe Biden’s EV subsidies, China has been leaping ahead. As recently as 2024, EV heavy trucks made up only a bit more than 4 percent of the Chinese market, but as climate analyst Dave Borlace points out, by the month of December 2025 that soared to 54 percent. It’s all thanks to several subsidies for trucking companies to go electric, and a huge government build-out of charging infrastructure.
The basic strategy is the same one used by the Silverado EV, only more so. Chinese EV trucks use immense batteries, and are fueled by special-built truck chargers along freight routes that can cheaply deliver as much power as possible. The latest chargers can deliver up to 1,500 kilowatts of electricity—about as much as you need to run a medium-sized factory—into a single truck. (Compare that to the Tesla charging network, which has less than ten charging locations that can even hit 500 kilowatts.)
Aftermath
This story first appeared in The American Prospect’s free Aftermath newsletter, a series on the economic consequences of the war in Iran.
With that kind of power delivery, a truck with a mind-boggling 636 kilowatt-hour battery, like the Sany SE Standard, can charge from 20 to 80 percent in less than half an hour. (Some of these facilities can charge a regular car in about five minutes, if it is capable of taking that much juice.)
Other companies like CATL are focusing on battery swap stations, which make a lot more sense for trucks—which do almost all their charging on the road—than passenger cars. That can reportedly take as little as five minutes.
At present, Chinese EV trucks are more expensive than diesel ones, but operating costs for fuel and maintenance are much lower. With the subsidy, the investment reportedly pays for itself after about a million kilometers of shipping, but with EV prices coming down across the board, that will only improve in future.
The EV trucking policy fits neatly into China’s general electricity and climate strategy. While the government has been building out electricity-gulping EV truck chargers, it has also been investing in renewable energy at a breakneck pace. For years now, it has accounted for more than half of all the solar and wind installations in the world. A lot of that power would soon lack a buyer if it weren’t for these huge new sources of demand.
A principal motivation for China’s transition is energy security, and boy has that been proved correct over the last two months. China is the largest single consumer of oil from the Persian Gulf, in part because it has very little domestic supply. Obviously, if you get rid of gas- and diesel-powered vehicles and replace them with electric ones, and generate that electricity domestically, you reduce that dependence on foreign energy. And trucks, because they are huge and driven very heavily, account for a giant fraction of energy consumption. If the whole freight fleet is electrified, it would cut Chinese oil demand in half.
I should emphasize that, as my colleague David Dayen has written, China is suffering serious problems because of the Hormuz crisis. In the short term, it might even disrupt the production of new EV trucks, especially because it’s creating a serious shortage of battery ingredients. But over the short to medium term, the Chinese government is certain to double down on electrification.
In addition to national security, there are manifold other benefits to ditching diesel freight. For instance, despite only accounting for about 6 percent of all Chinese vehicles, big trucks produce something like 63 percent of nitrogen oxides and 96 percent of total particulate matter emissions produced by vehicles. That pollution causes all manner of illness, including heart disease, strokes, and various cancers.
So by embracing EV freight trucks, China can improve its national security, save businesses and the public money, grab a firm foothold in yet another industry of the future, help the climate, and greatly cut down on illness and death suffered by the Chinese people. A more obviously correct policy is hard to imagine.
Links
Indonesia, where the just-as-critical Strait of Malacca hugs their shores, briefly considered a tollbooth of their own. They dropped the idea—for now. (Firstpost)
BP saw profits more than double in the first quarter. (CNBC)
There are large and important data cables under the Strait of Hormuz. Yikes! (Stimson Center)
The war has cost consumers over $28 billion so far. (Brown University)
Democrats have floated a war powers lawsuit over continued hostilities in Iran. (Time)
Update, April 29: This article has been updated to make note of Tesla’s semi factory reportedly starting production soon.
The post Aftermath: China Is Electrifying Freight Trucking appeared first on The American Prospect.