China's EV Shift Is Four Separate Transitions, From Buses to Heavy Trucks

China has reached a stage of vehicle electrification that is easy to miss if the only number being watched is national EV market share. New urban buses are now essentially all electric, and in many cities the procurement question is no longer whether to replace a diesel bus with a battery bus. It is which new electric bus should replace the electric bus bought during China’s first major electrification wave.

That is a more important milestone than another record year of EV sales because it shows a transport segment completing its first adoption cycle and entering routine replacement. The International Energy Agency estimates that almost 70% of China’s more than 680,000 electric buses were already deployed before 2020, so a significant part of the current market consists of older electric fleets being renewed rather than diesel fleets being converted for the first time.

China’s 2025 equipment-renewal programme explicitly supported replacement of new-energy city buses and even complete traction-battery replacement, with the programme continuing into 2026. Policy is still involved, but its job has changed. It is supporting renewal inside a market where electric propulsion has already become the normal technology.

That replacement cycle is the starting point of my TFIE Strategy Briefing analysis of China’s electric transport markets. Looking across buses, cars, heavy trucks and coaches shows why “China’s EV adoption rate” is increasingly the wrong denominator.

Passenger cars are at a different point. Electric cars accounted for just over half of Chinese new-car sales in 2025, and buyers had nearly 700 electric models available by the end of the year. The IEA estimates that nearly 70% of battery-electric cars sold in China were cheaper than comparable conventional cars even before incentives, which means electric propulsion is no longer a specialist alternative for Chinese car buyers. It is one of the normal choices across much of the market.

Heavy trucks are behind cars in absolute market share but are moving much faster. Electric heavy trucks reached about 29% of Chinese sales in 2025, roughly twice their 2024 share. Their strongest markets are not random: ports, mines, steel plants and industrial logistics operations give trucks relatively predictable routes, high utilization and places where charging or battery swapping can be organized around the work.

That is what makes commercial vehicles particularly interesting. A private car may spend most of its life parked, so fuel savings accumulate relatively slowly. A hard-working truck can cover enough kilometres that lower energy and maintenance costs affect the business case much faster, especially when infrastructure can be concentrated at depots or along fixed corridors.

Intercity coaches show why even that logic cannot simply be extended to every transport category. Battery-electric coaches were only about 10% of Chinese coach sales in 2025, despite sales growing strongly from the previous year. At first glance that looks like a category lagging badly behind urban buses. The difference is not simply that coaches need bigger batteries. They compete with another electric technology that China scaled decades earlier than most countries: rail.

China ended 2025 with more than 50,000 kilometres of high-speed rail, while its railway system carried more than 4.5 billion passenger trips during the year. High-speed rail reaches almost every Chinese city with more than half a million urban residents, and it provides one- to two-hour journeys across many 500-kilometre city clusters and roughly four-hour trips across some 1,000-kilometre corridors.

A battery coach can replace a diesel coach on routes where road transport still makes sense, but it does not have to capture every long-distance passenger trip that might otherwise have gone by bus. Some of that mobility has already moved to an electrified mode with better performance on dense intercity corridors.

This is why national EV percentages can obscure more than they clarify. City buses, passenger cars, heavy trucks and coaches all have wheels and batteries, but their economics are very different. They operate for different numbers of hours, return to different places, carry different loads, use different infrastructure and face different alternatives.

A useful forecast starts with the work being done rather than with a single adoption curve. Fixed-route urban buses electrified early because batteries matched the duty cycle and public procurement could coordinate charging. Passenger cars followed as battery costs fell, model choice expanded and purchase prices became competitive. Heavy trucks are now accelerating where high utilization turns operating savings into a strong commercial incentive.

Coaches will electrify too, but their addressable market is shaped by what rail has already captured. That is not a weakness in China’s transport electrification story. It is evidence that the objective is mobility with less fossil fuel, not forcing every existing vehicle category to grow into an equally large electric market.

There is also a data caveat worth preserving. Chinese sources have historically used overlapping categories such as “new energy bus,” and successive IEA editions have revised classifications as better data became available. The precise shape of the early bus curve is less certain than the large pattern: urban buses moved first and are now saturated, cars are mainstream, heavy trucks are climbing quickly and coaches remain much less electrified.

For policymakers outside China, the implications are practical. A country with a low national EV share should not assume every transport segment will crawl upward at the same rate. Some categories can move very quickly once vehicles, operating economics and infrastructure align, while other categories may remain smaller because another mode does part of the job better.

That changes how public money should be spent. Rather than subsidizing every electric vehicle category equally, governments can identify the uses where electrification already fits the work, remove the infrastructure bottlenecks and allow those markets to move first. Buses, depot-based fleets, high-utilization trucks and other predictable commercial applications often provide clearer starting points than trying to make an entire transport sector move together.

China’s experience suggests that the mature endpoint will not be one smooth EV adoption curve. It will be several different transitions unfolding according to the work each vehicle performs and the transport systems around it.

The full TFIE Strategy Briefing compares the sales trajectories for Chinese urban buses, passenger cars, heavy trucks and coaches, including why high-speed rail changes the coach denominator and why replacement rather than first adoption is now driving much of the urban-bus market.