The propaganda machine in the US has tricked a huge number of Americans into sabotaging their own industrial future, merely to give fossil fuel infrastructure stocks a few more years of slightly higher profits.
When large corporations fail to adapt to changing technology, it gives smaller companies a chance to break in and take over markets.
We are seeing exactly the same thing happening right now with China catching up to the US economy. And by refusing to adapt to better technology that saves us money, we are seriously handicapping our future.
In my opinion, the dramatic change coming isn't just about combustion. The economics of electricity and energy are about to change profoundly over the next 20 years.
We are simultaneously witnessing the potential demise of the Western economic empire and the rise of the Eastern economic bloc (specifically China, Southeast Asia, and India), alongside the global shift to a new electricity age.
I frequently hear people argue that solar power isn't feasible for their specific location, but this perspective may soon render them economically uncompetitive. Trends clearly show that the production of almost everything is transitioning to electricity. Crucially, solar and battery storage are rapidly becoming the cheapest forms of electricity and continue to drop in price.
We will soon reach a critical inflection point where we produce new solar panels and batteries using the very solar energy they generate. At this stage, subsequent generations of panels and batteries will become cheaper purely through the energy input cost reduction, even without new technological breakthroughs. Consequently, countries lacking significant investment in solar or wind resources are highly likely to become energy poor and economically uncompetitive.
the exact same thing was said for japan when their economy boomed. Whether china falls to the same fate, or actually sustain and overtake the west, is yet to be determined. However, trump's policies aren't really helping (but in fact, is actually enabling them). By removing the US as a large consumer, the CCP could be forced to switch to internal consumption model instead, which both increases the standard of living of the people there, as well as decrease the reliance on exporting (so lower economic leverage).
Not to mention the west's economic policies are disparate between supposed allied countries - with friends like that, who needs enemies?
I think the article underplays the transition. They're not just-now being sold, it's already the norm. I was in Chengdu last summer and all the huge trucks hauling sand and rocks at construction sites where electric already (and not brand new.. they'd clearly been used quite a bit). The days of trucks making huge plums of smoke at intersections are gone. As I understood it ICE trucks are extremely limited in the hours they're allowed to operate in cities.
So I'm actually a bit surprised by the BEV fraction in the plot. Maybe there are quite a few trucks between cities and in the countryside that I just wasn't seeing.
I'm curious if the batteries can be swapped. Vehicles (trucks and taxis) are generally used in shifts, so you don't want to have the car just sitting around charging half the time
My guess is that the long distance trucks (the old blue ones) are still mostly diesel and the trucks inside cities for local work are transitioning first? Every city could also be really different in terms of where they are in adoption, CD could be further along than lower tier cities. I didn’t notice any trucks at all when I was in Beijing last April, so I’m guessing that they still aren’t allowed inside the fifth ring in the day time electric or not.
To electrify long distance trucks Bosch developed a fuel-cell power module (FCPM) it is already using for internal logistics. For long disctances f-cell and hydrogen tank are lighter than batteries would be.
It supposedly can do 1000km without stops. https://www.bosch-mobility.com/en/mobility-topics/fuel-cell-...
Only high speed trucks have a crew of drivers to rotate through to drive without more than a toilet break.
Hydrogen is very expensive compared to just batteries. The weight savings only make up for the horrible efficiency of hydrogen once you are looking at an airplane.
Just use a battery, really.
And put transport over distances that exceed one driver shift on trains.
A couple of points in the article that are interesting:
- EV trucks in China have less safety/comfort features and are therefore cheaper. The same would presumably true for diesel trucks. And that "extra" cost for that stuff would be the same elsewhere. It's not a reason EV trucks would be more expensive specifically anywhere.
- China is starting to export these things around the world. I think this is very disruptive because it means the EU/US are increasingly isolated with higher cost of transport locally.
- The ASP of EV trucks is dropping below those of diesel trucks. This is being driven by battery cost, which in China is of course closely following production cost of those and in any EV truck is (or was) the biggest cost component. Going from 150$/kwh to 50$ or lower is a big deal. Prices could be trending towards 10$/kwh mid term for some chemistries. At 150$ it's 90K, at 50$, 600kwh is 30K. at 10$ it's 6000$. It stops being the largest cost factor on the truck somewhere along that curve. That's going to happen everywhere. It's just economics and physics. There's no logical reason for an EV truck to be more expensive than a diesel truck long term.
- Diesel usage is in decline in China. That's a real world effect that's hard to ignore. In China that means less imports are needed. It's a big economic shift in their favor to be needing less diesel/oil. Road miles tend to be dominated by newer vehicles: this effect might be faster than market shares suggest.
The EU has very expensive diesel. Those effects would be exaggerated here. It also has very strictly enforced rest breaks every 4.5 hours. Ideally spaced to allow for a 45 minute charging break. 600kwh is all you need for long distance trucking in the EU.
IMHO, the EU will catch up much quicker than the US: it has a bigger economical incentive. The US is producing its own fuel. China and the EU are not. Unless they switch to electric.
I wonder how the economics are shifted in China which is dependent on foreign oil but has plenty of (some very dirty, some clean) electricity? I'm sure subsidies are playing a great role(as they do in all things in China) and national security concerns are making EV trucks more viable.
At a macro level, more exports and less imports mean things should be good for their trade balance. Though you might rightfully worry about e.g. debt and other misaligned things in the Chinese economy. They have poor utilization of their production capacity for e.g. batteries.
The Chinese think in terms of expensive and cheap electricity rather than dirty and clean. The reason they have so much clean energy growth is because it's saving them money.
Subsidies are a very political/ideological talking point. But the traditional fossil fuel economy isn't exactly free from subsidies, incentives, tariffs, and other government instruments. The US having a dependence on oil and gas is hard to separate from its huge budgets for incentivizing and protecting that.
The Chinese have been very strategic about their R&D in the last few decades. It's paying off though. Demand for their clean tech exports is increasing and just when oil/gas markets are becoming increasingly volatile they are managing to be less dependent on those.
Thus in China a 600KWh truck is 85.000€ while in Germany an eActros with 600KWh is 290.000€ (w/o VAT) [1]. Consumption is 100-120KW/h per 100km. The range is then up to 500km / 310 miles.
Electricity price for industry is 0.112 USD in China, 0.455 USD in the UK, 0.29 USD in Germany, 0.149 USD in the US. [2]
This definitely looks like starting to be competitive for various use cases and regions. Obviously it needs a charging infrastructure that can keep up with it.
Charging speed is currently 350KW, 1MW chargers are in development.
H2 Trucks are dead, just from the economics. Watch the latest video from Elektrotrucker on youtube where he does the math. His BEV long haul actros comes out to a price per km of 0.35 EUR whereas the h2 Truck ends up at 1.35 EUR. There is a reason why Charging networks for BEV trucks are expanding while h2 stations are being taken down.
Let’s all remember Bill Gates’ prediction from 2020:
> Even with big breakthroughs in battery technology, electric vehicles will probably never be a practical solution for things like 18-wheelers, cargo ships, and passenger jets. Electricity works when you need to cover short distances, but we need a different solution for heavy, long-haul vehicles.
Seems like there is a lot of dislike of this comment but not a lot of discussion about. Is it not true that china is dominating here? Or that this is becoming the norm? Isn't the instant negative reaction to this comment the exact problem? Maybe if we decided to get better instead of get mad we would see articles about the west dominating more often.
Comments often follow a u-curve, where immediate downvotes are countered after a few minutes. I suspect the cause is at least in part people directly downvoting from the https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments page
It’s apparent that the USA is falling deeply behind on all of these things. I look at the rest of my life now as the final days in Babylon and try to still enjoy going down in the sinking ship. I vote to stop it, but my votes haven’t mattered in a long time. It’s important to still do them anyway.
There isn't a major political party in the USA willing to undergo the reforms needed to compete.
I don't know what voting does, other than produce a false air of approval around the administration. I think that if voter turnout was low enough, it would speak for itself and encourage more radical political strategy.
you vote mattered. It's just that there are more people who didn't vote the way you wanted them. But that's OK, because this is how it is supposed to work.
mattering doesn't mean you get what you wanted/voted for. Mattering means your vote was counted among the hundreds of millions, and the ultimate consensus reached, and the minority voters have accept the result of the majority voters.
I think people have (recently at least) mistakenly believed that democracy means your vote is a demand to be fulfilled, and if it isn't, then democracy is failing.
The USSR was considered by many prominent intellectuals a valid counterpoint to the Western capitalist structure, up until the moment it collapsed, and then it wasn't true socialism. Some humbleness should be in order when considering imperfect knowledge
Perhaps competition in the cold war reinvigorated the USA or expedited the fall of Soviet Union by forcing them into expensive competition?
Imagine a boat has a hole in it, and is sinking. Some of the crew-members make a big deal about it, and run a campaign to plug the hole and bail the water out. In the end, it does not sink and the remaining crewmembers conclude that it was not a big deal and that the campaign was unnecessary. It is a survivor's bias.
Even a small hole, if left unplugged, will eventually sink a ship. Likewise, some types of systematic problems in a country (that are not self-solving or naturally limited) will eventually ruin it if not addressed directly.
> Even a small hole, if left unplugged, will eventually sink a ship. Likewise, some types of systematic problems in a country (that are not self-solving or naturally limited) will eventually ruin it if not addressed directly.
Not necessarily. Whether it sinks depends on three things: hole location, rate of flooding, and watertight compartment design.
What’s an example of a systematic (systemic?) problem that will ruin a country if left unsolved?
I think mostly in a budgetary sense: Corruption, tax evasion. You can't just have a flow of wealth into some bureaucracy that goes unchecked, because the power the bureaucracy has to extract even more wealth increases over time. In the USA, the military industrial complex is the biggest example of this, the general self-licking ice cream cone.
I don't think it depends on hole location or rate of flooding. If the rate is greater than zero, and if the second derivative is non-negative (i.e. it isn't self regulating, the rate of loss itself does not decrease over time like a self-healing wound) then eventually it will flood. If the second derivative is zero, and the hole is very small relative to the size of the ship, it will take a while.
Our government is not well compartmentalized. The evolution of the US government has trended towards increasing federal over state power (for some good reasons). Maybe programs like social security are compartmentalized in the sense that if they collapse, they don't bring down other sectors of government.
> expedited the fall of Soviet Union by forcing them into expensive competition?
Nobody forced the Soviet Union into anything.
I think the soviet leaders knew that the system in the West AT THAT TIME was simply better in all ways imaginable and the comunism utterly failed at its mission -- the workers in the West were enjoying a much much better life that those in communism, and having lost that ideological space, they thought they could override common sense on the battle field -- surely, if you win the space race, more olympic gold medals or on the battlefield, then communism actually won?
Cold War involved a lot of imperfect knowledge - until Gorbachev, soviet leaders were utterly convinced that USA plans to attack first. On one hand, it was paranoia, on the other hand, US intelligence actions including gleeful setup of mass scale murder in Indonesia reinvigorated that belief.
China has been largely capitalist since the late 1980s. Economically, it's similar to many Western countries—in fact, its government and welfare spending is lower than the Western average. Where it differs dramatically is in its political structure (one-party state versus democracy).
I would say the primary difference is that the state supersedes capital, rather than the other way around. The Chinese state permits capitalism, but only when it's to the benefit of China's economy and wellbeing.
So, for instance they just banned sports betting outright, as it's not productive or contributing to the economy.
The state runs the "commanding heights" of the economy, the banks, and directs investment, coordinates with industry. Of course it invests in infrastructure development.
This honestly isn't a discussion about governmental systems. The US and 'western nations' have built big things and pushed for big things many times in the past and can do it again. We pump trillions in subsidies and direct funding into 'strategic' resources that are flat out bad policy and the people pushing that know it. This is a question of actual people making obviously bad decisions and not being held responsible for the obviously bad outcomes. I hope that the rise of china gives us the correct motivation. The motivation to do more, to be honest and to start competing instead of just using our weight to put up barriers so we don't have to compete. The first step is making decisions backed by evidence and understanding and not emotion and appeals to fear. Basically, we need to grow up and start putting in the work again.
First, China is nothing like the USSR economically and the West is NOTING like the old capitalist West in any regard.
Second, the ideological capitalism of the West during the Cold War is not what actually brought prosperity to the masses, I think it was just the fear of comunism that kept the elites at bay and willing to give some scraps to the unwashed masses.
You're apparently the only one saying this. Maybe it's time to opt out of the outrage pornography cycle and contribute to the discussion in a more thoughtful way.
This totally won't work. The infrastructure isn't built. Truck stops are built to store fuel. They're not built to deliver electricity. Cheap electric trucks solve the wrong problem currently.
Are you just talking about the USA or are you also including the rest of the 7.8 billion people that don’t live in the USA? If the former why should the rest of the world care about whatever hangouts the USA thinks it has?
Totes bro. Nice backwards hat with a flag on it, brodda. We patriots gotta stick together. There's a war against the American way. These commie Chinese EV semis have no place in the great red white and blue. Here in the land of stars n stripes we only have Erl at our truck stops. It'll never work with electricity!
I would not call highly disposable and cheap heavy duty vehicles an "intelligent investment." It's headline chasing and there's always very little tying their touted efforts to any actual improvements in the environment our economic outcomes.
China imports most of its oil. With EVs China needs to import less oil, this works really well for their national security. Even if the environmental benefit was zero (and it isn’t), this would still be the best choice for them and much of the world that doesn’t produce much oil. It isn’t really complicated.
I agree that mining is probably the worst of it, but trucks usually last a decade and a couple million kilometers, after which they’re shipped off to Africa or the Middle East where they’re kept on the road for much longer.
I would not know, here were I live I see most of the heavy duty trucks (owned by small companies at least) with 10-15+ years of service, looking at the license plates.
There are some electric trucks driving around Australian cities already as well.
Though I love the sound of a straight cut gear, I suspect they'll want to work on quieting that drivetrain a bit. Thankfully there is a lot of prior art.
It's from the truck, it's the transmission of the truck which is evident by changing pitch as the truck downshifts while slowing down.
It likely uses a transmission as a tradeoff between torque and RPM of the electric motor or because it's a simpler task to retrofit an existing truck driveline with an electric motor bolted onto it.
These are so noisy because of the use of straight cut gears, which you choose when preferring strength over noise and comfort. Most regular cars use helical gears which reduces the noise due to continuously meshing between gear teeth, whereas straight cut gears are like a paddle wheel, so the teeth are smacking into eachother head on each time they engage. That is also why they clunk when getting on and off throttle.
We have some similar trucks running around Australia at the moment and the sound is the same, I'm also familiar with the sound from motorsport!
Some cars have 2 gears as well. One for the acceleration and one for cruising efficiency and top speed. So my guess is to get it going easier and then have 2nd as the eco gear for the speed they cruise at.
The picture of two rows of electric trucks is marked "ChatGPT generated". Note that some of the trucks shown have three front grille slots, while some have two. Also, those trucks appear to have fuel tanks.
The author is mostly talking about what someone else saw at the China Commercial Vehicles Show.
Low-credibility source.
There's plenty of info about that show, with real pictures.[1] BYD has a full range of electric trucks, but what they're pushing seems to be the T3 and T4 trucks. The new T4 is a straight truck, available as a box truck, flatbed, or open top truck. Or they'll sell the chassis for custom jobs. Claimed range is "up to 250km". It's intended for city use with once daily charging. The T3, which has been out for a few years, is an ordinary electric van, comparable to a Ford Transit or a Mercedes Sprinter. These are high-volume commercial products. Light and medium electric trucks are taking over fleet operations.
BYD has a new line of heavy electric trucks, launched in April.[2] This isn't BYD's first try at heavy electric trucks. They delivered some (at least hundreds, but not tens of thousands) in 2022. The 2025 model is at least their third try. They don't claim to have cracked long-haul trucking. "BYD Tractor Q3: Focusing on Short – Haul Transportation and Breaking Through Medium – and Long – Haul Transportation" is their marketing pitch.
There are multiple battery options, and for charging, the Q3 can be plugged into up to four chargers at once. Long-haul operation is possible, but it's not yet the target market.
So the BYD heavy trucks aren't mainstream in China yet, but they're a lot closer than Tesla's Semi (yet another re-announcement: [3]) or the Nikola (only works going downhill and required a Trump pardon for the CEO).
Volvo has a range of electric trucks, mostly sold in Europe.
There is also Mercedes eActros line and MAN eTGX. There are already thousands of them in Europe. Funny how that just happened, without fanfares and trillion dollar evaluations.
Speaking of which, I don’t know why would anyone still wait for Tesla Semi or any other up-and-comers. Promised better efficiency sounds good on paper, but means nothing if the product doesn’t exist or is an unreliable prototype with no service support.
Now Chinese want to enter the market with cheaper trucks, but - as the article clearly mentions - these are not yet ready to be used in Europe or the States, and making them ready will increase the price.
I live in China, and even I am surprised to see completely electric heavy trucks that are eerily quiet compared to diesel ones and carrying building materials, just cruising by on public roads. No idea how well or expensive they run, though.
We might just replace aeroplanes altogether with ultra-high-speed maglev.
Although the cost calculation for this would be totally different—hundreds of billions up-front for world-crossing tunnels and infrastructure and rolling stock, but then nearly no running cost.
The Chuō Shinkansen will be an interesting small-scale experiment in proper high-speed maglev in regular, long-distance passenger service.
Anything but airplanes. Current airliners have a fuel fraction between 24 and 47%, so any decrease in energy density massively compromises performance. The energy density of jet fuel is two orders of magnitude higher than modern batteries, and jet engines have efficiencies of a few ten percent.
Nonetheless, folks are working the problem. Albeit most of the current designs look more like short-haul passenger craft or automated cargo drones to connect remote communities.
The text in teeny font under the headline picture is "ChatGPT generated. Chinese electric truck production lines expanding rapidly in 2024 and 2025."
So, in other words, the leading image is a lie. When people say false things that purport to be true in text we call it lying or fraud. I don't understand why when they do it with an image it's not the same thing. Putting teeny, easily missed font that says "ChatGPT generated" doesn't make it OK. I might feel less strongly if the author put a disclaimer, in larger font, that said (more accurately IMO), "The above image is fake."
From the article, "China’s low price electric trucks do not arrive as finished products for Europe or North America. They need work." and the article goes on to describe what the author considered and an estimate of the cost.
“The gap between a domestic Chinese tractor and a European or North American long haul tractor is roughly €80,000 to €120,000 once all mechanical, safety and comfort systems are brought to the required levels per my estimate.”
In heavy trucks? Probably all of them, and I'd say all of them are worth it if we considered the damage each truck can do and the total number of trucks on the road.
One point of view is that, at least in Europe, over regulation results in: compliance maze due to overlapping regulations, urban policies driven by cyclists and politics rather than logistics, fragmented harmonization across member states.
> urban policies driven by cyclists and politics rather than logistics
Yes, urban policies should be also driven by the people whose very existence is threatened by unsafe trucks. You should try biking on the same road as trucks and see if your opinion changes.
And the result of the 'overregulation' is that in some European cities, there are zero pedestrian/cyclist traffic deaths yearly. How many deaths are you willing to sacrifice on the altar of capitalism?
The peak for combustion engines was nearly a decade ago now:
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/global-sales-of-com...
The propaganda machine in the US has tricked a huge number of Americans into sabotaging their own industrial future, merely to give fossil fuel infrastructure stocks a few more years of slightly higher profits.
When large corporations fail to adapt to changing technology, it gives smaller companies a chance to break in and take over markets.
We are seeing exactly the same thing happening right now with China catching up to the US economy. And by refusing to adapt to better technology that saves us money, we are seriously handicapping our future.
In my opinion, the dramatic change coming isn't just about combustion. The economics of electricity and energy are about to change profoundly over the next 20 years.
We are simultaneously witnessing the potential demise of the Western economic empire and the rise of the Eastern economic bloc (specifically China, Southeast Asia, and India), alongside the global shift to a new electricity age.
I frequently hear people argue that solar power isn't feasible for their specific location, but this perspective may soon render them economically uncompetitive. Trends clearly show that the production of almost everything is transitioning to electricity. Crucially, solar and battery storage are rapidly becoming the cheapest forms of electricity and continue to drop in price.
We will soon reach a critical inflection point where we produce new solar panels and batteries using the very solar energy they generate. At this stage, subsequent generations of panels and batteries will become cheaper purely through the energy input cost reduction, even without new technological breakthroughs. Consequently, countries lacking significant investment in solar or wind resources are highly likely to become energy poor and economically uncompetitive.
> rise of the Eastern economic bloc
the exact same thing was said for japan when their economy boomed. Whether china falls to the same fate, or actually sustain and overtake the west, is yet to be determined. However, trump's policies aren't really helping (but in fact, is actually enabling them). By removing the US as a large consumer, the CCP could be forced to switch to internal consumption model instead, which both increases the standard of living of the people there, as well as decrease the reliance on exporting (so lower economic leverage).
Not to mention the west's economic policies are disparate between supposed allied countries - with friends like that, who needs enemies?
Welcome to Germany
I think the article underplays the transition. They're not just-now being sold, it's already the norm. I was in Chengdu last summer and all the huge trucks hauling sand and rocks at construction sites where electric already (and not brand new.. they'd clearly been used quite a bit). The days of trucks making huge plums of smoke at intersections are gone. As I understood it ICE trucks are extremely limited in the hours they're allowed to operate in cities.
So I'm actually a bit surprised by the BEV fraction in the plot. Maybe there are quite a few trucks between cities and in the countryside that I just wasn't seeing.
I'm curious if the batteries can be swapped. Vehicles (trucks and taxis) are generally used in shifts, so you don't want to have the car just sitting around charging half the time
My guess is that the long distance trucks (the old blue ones) are still mostly diesel and the trucks inside cities for local work are transitioning first? Every city could also be really different in terms of where they are in adoption, CD could be further along than lower tier cities. I didn’t notice any trucks at all when I was in Beijing last April, so I’m guessing that they still aren’t allowed inside the fifth ring in the day time electric or not.
To electrify long distance trucks Bosch developed a fuel-cell power module (FCPM) it is already using for internal logistics. For long disctances f-cell and hydrogen tank are lighter than batteries would be. It supposedly can do 1000km without stops. https://www.bosch-mobility.com/en/mobility-topics/fuel-cell-...
See also my other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46075305#46076161
Only high speed trucks have a crew of drivers to rotate through to drive without more than a toilet break. Hydrogen is very expensive compared to just batteries. The weight savings only make up for the horrible efficiency of hydrogen once you are looking at an airplane. Just use a battery, really. And put transport over distances that exceed one driver shift on trains.
Toyota has also been working on "hydrogen cartridges" that can be quick swapped including just delivering them like fuel cans
by betting on the wrong horse Toyota positions itself for irrelevancy
> So I'm actually a bit surprised by the BEV fraction in the plot.
Chengdu is more on the "developed" scale of China (China is big). My guess is that 3rd tier cities and below are still behind on electrification.
A couple of points in the article that are interesting:
- EV trucks in China have less safety/comfort features and are therefore cheaper. The same would presumably true for diesel trucks. And that "extra" cost for that stuff would be the same elsewhere. It's not a reason EV trucks would be more expensive specifically anywhere.
- China is starting to export these things around the world. I think this is very disruptive because it means the EU/US are increasingly isolated with higher cost of transport locally.
- The ASP of EV trucks is dropping below those of diesel trucks. This is being driven by battery cost, which in China is of course closely following production cost of those and in any EV truck is (or was) the biggest cost component. Going from 150$/kwh to 50$ or lower is a big deal. Prices could be trending towards 10$/kwh mid term for some chemistries. At 150$ it's 90K, at 50$, 600kwh is 30K. at 10$ it's 6000$. It stops being the largest cost factor on the truck somewhere along that curve. That's going to happen everywhere. It's just economics and physics. There's no logical reason for an EV truck to be more expensive than a diesel truck long term.
- Diesel usage is in decline in China. That's a real world effect that's hard to ignore. In China that means less imports are needed. It's a big economic shift in their favor to be needing less diesel/oil. Road miles tend to be dominated by newer vehicles: this effect might be faster than market shares suggest.
The EU has very expensive diesel. Those effects would be exaggerated here. It also has very strictly enforced rest breaks every 4.5 hours. Ideally spaced to allow for a 45 minute charging break. 600kwh is all you need for long distance trucking in the EU.
IMHO, the EU will catch up much quicker than the US: it has a bigger economical incentive. The US is producing its own fuel. China and the EU are not. Unless they switch to electric.
> EV trucks in China have less safety/comfort features and are therefore cheaper.
the article does claim that even if chinese trucks are brought up to the same standards they will still be far cheaper
I wonder how the economics are shifted in China which is dependent on foreign oil but has plenty of (some very dirty, some clean) electricity? I'm sure subsidies are playing a great role(as they do in all things in China) and national security concerns are making EV trucks more viable.
At a macro level, more exports and less imports mean things should be good for their trade balance. Though you might rightfully worry about e.g. debt and other misaligned things in the Chinese economy. They have poor utilization of their production capacity for e.g. batteries.
The Chinese think in terms of expensive and cheap electricity rather than dirty and clean. The reason they have so much clean energy growth is because it's saving them money.
Subsidies are a very political/ideological talking point. But the traditional fossil fuel economy isn't exactly free from subsidies, incentives, tariffs, and other government instruments. The US having a dependence on oil and gas is hard to separate from its huge budgets for incentivizing and protecting that.
The Chinese have been very strategic about their R&D in the last few decades. It's paying off though. Demand for their clean tech exports is increasing and just when oil/gas markets are becoming increasingly volatile they are managing to be less dependent on those.
Thus in China a 600KWh truck is 85.000€ while in Germany an eActros with 600KWh is 290.000€ (w/o VAT) [1]. Consumption is 100-120KW/h per 100km. The range is then up to 500km / 310 miles.
Electricity price for industry is 0.112 USD in China, 0.455 USD in the UK, 0.29 USD in Germany, 0.149 USD in the US. [2]
This definitely looks like starting to be competitive for various use cases and regions. Obviously it needs a charging infrastructure that can keep up with it.
Charging speed is currently 350KW, 1MW chargers are in development.
[1] https://www.auto-anders.de/eactros-600 [2] https://www.globalpetrolprices.com/map/electricity_industria...
There's a fabulous YouTube channel on electric trucks in Germany if the topic interests you.
German version: https://youtube.com/@elektrotrucker
English: https://youtube.com/@electrictrucker this has fewer and shorter videos unfortunately.
There's a fabulous drive technology for electric trucks in Germany if powering it with hydrogen via fuel cell interests you. Got awarded the German Future Prize 2025 recently. https://www.bosch-presse.de/pressportal/de/en/bosch-team-win...
It's for long distance/quick refill operations. I wonder how the BEV trucks handle this. Can they swap batteries or are limited to shorter distances?
Here's the award ceremony in German https://minily.org/gfp25-award-bosch-long-distance-truck-fce...
H2 Trucks are dead, just from the economics. Watch the latest video from Elektrotrucker on youtube where he does the math. His BEV long haul actros comes out to a price per km of 0.35 EUR whereas the h2 Truck ends up at 1.35 EUR. There is a reason why Charging networks for BEV trucks are expanding while h2 stations are being taken down.
The real award ceremony is reduction of green houses gases. I think BEV do this better than hydrogen for a long time now.
Hydrogen doesnt deem scalable.
Let’s all remember Bill Gates’ prediction from 2020:
> Even with big breakthroughs in battery technology, electric vehicles will probably never be a practical solution for things like 18-wheelers, cargo ships, and passenger jets. Electricity works when you need to cover short distances, but we need a different solution for heavy, long-haul vehicles.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/moving-around-in-a-zero-carbon-wo...
It wasn’t a prediction, but a defence of investment if fossil fuels.
That did not age well.
Oh, look, it's another article about china dominating in electrification and reaping the rewards of intelligent investment.
Seems like there is a lot of dislike of this comment but not a lot of discussion about. Is it not true that china is dominating here? Or that this is becoming the norm? Isn't the instant negative reaction to this comment the exact problem? Maybe if we decided to get better instead of get mad we would see articles about the west dominating more often.
Comments often follow a u-curve, where immediate downvotes are countered after a few minutes. I suspect the cause is at least in part people directly downvoting from the https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments page
[flagged]
what was the mistake? it seems like the cards are stacked against anyone trying to build in the USA vs China.
It’s apparent that the USA is falling deeply behind on all of these things. I look at the rest of my life now as the final days in Babylon and try to still enjoy going down in the sinking ship. I vote to stop it, but my votes haven’t mattered in a long time. It’s important to still do them anyway.
There isn't a major political party in the USA willing to undergo the reforms needed to compete.
I don't know what voting does, other than produce a false air of approval around the administration. I think that if voter turnout was low enough, it would speak for itself and encourage more radical political strategy.
One party is more open-minded about it, and ready to use their brains.
> my votes haven’t mattered in a long time
you vote mattered. It's just that there are more people who didn't vote the way you wanted them. But that's OK, because this is how it is supposed to work.
At least, in theory.
in theory the probability of your vote mattering is about as high as winning the lottery
mattering doesn't mean you get what you wanted/voted for. Mattering means your vote was counted among the hundreds of millions, and the ultimate consensus reached, and the minority voters have accept the result of the majority voters.
I think people have (recently at least) mistakenly believed that democracy means your vote is a demand to be fulfilled, and if it isn't, then democracy is failing.
The USSR was considered by many prominent intellectuals a valid counterpoint to the Western capitalist structure, up until the moment it collapsed, and then it wasn't true socialism. Some humbleness should be in order when considering imperfect knowledge
Perhaps competition in the cold war reinvigorated the USA or expedited the fall of Soviet Union by forcing them into expensive competition?
Imagine a boat has a hole in it, and is sinking. Some of the crew-members make a big deal about it, and run a campaign to plug the hole and bail the water out. In the end, it does not sink and the remaining crewmembers conclude that it was not a big deal and that the campaign was unnecessary. It is a survivor's bias.
Even a small hole, if left unplugged, will eventually sink a ship. Likewise, some types of systematic problems in a country (that are not self-solving or naturally limited) will eventually ruin it if not addressed directly.
> Even a small hole, if left unplugged, will eventually sink a ship. Likewise, some types of systematic problems in a country (that are not self-solving or naturally limited) will eventually ruin it if not addressed directly.
Not necessarily. Whether it sinks depends on three things: hole location, rate of flooding, and watertight compartment design.
What’s an example of a systematic (systemic?) problem that will ruin a country if left unsolved?
I think mostly in a budgetary sense: Corruption, tax evasion. You can't just have a flow of wealth into some bureaucracy that goes unchecked, because the power the bureaucracy has to extract even more wealth increases over time. In the USA, the military industrial complex is the biggest example of this, the general self-licking ice cream cone.
I don't think it depends on hole location or rate of flooding. If the rate is greater than zero, and if the second derivative is non-negative (i.e. it isn't self regulating, the rate of loss itself does not decrease over time like a self-healing wound) then eventually it will flood. If the second derivative is zero, and the hole is very small relative to the size of the ship, it will take a while.
Our government is not well compartmentalized. The evolution of the US government has trended towards increasing federal over state power (for some good reasons). Maybe programs like social security are compartmentalized in the sense that if they collapse, they don't bring down other sectors of government.
> expedited the fall of Soviet Union by forcing them into expensive competition?
Nobody forced the Soviet Union into anything. I think the soviet leaders knew that the system in the West AT THAT TIME was simply better in all ways imaginable and the comunism utterly failed at its mission -- the workers in the West were enjoying a much much better life that those in communism, and having lost that ideological space, they thought they could override common sense on the battle field -- surely, if you win the space race, more olympic gold medals or on the battlefield, then communism actually won?
> Nobody forced the Soviet Union into anything
What do you think the cold war was exactly?
Cold War involved a lot of imperfect knowledge - until Gorbachev, soviet leaders were utterly convinced that USA plans to attack first. On one hand, it was paranoia, on the other hand, US intelligence actions including gleeful setup of mass scale murder in Indonesia reinvigorated that belief.
China has been largely capitalist since the late 1980s. Economically, it's similar to many Western countries—in fact, its government and welfare spending is lower than the Western average. Where it differs dramatically is in its political structure (one-party state versus democracy).
I would say the primary difference is that the state supersedes capital, rather than the other way around. The Chinese state permits capitalism, but only when it's to the benefit of China's economy and wellbeing.
So, for instance they just banned sports betting outright, as it's not productive or contributing to the economy.
The state runs the "commanding heights" of the economy, the banks, and directs investment, coordinates with industry. Of course it invests in infrastructure development.
This honestly isn't a discussion about governmental systems. The US and 'western nations' have built big things and pushed for big things many times in the past and can do it again. We pump trillions in subsidies and direct funding into 'strategic' resources that are flat out bad policy and the people pushing that know it. This is a question of actual people making obviously bad decisions and not being held responsible for the obviously bad outcomes. I hope that the rise of china gives us the correct motivation. The motivation to do more, to be honest and to start competing instead of just using our weight to put up barriers so we don't have to compete. The first step is making decisions backed by evidence and understanding and not emotion and appeals to fear. Basically, we need to grow up and start putting in the work again.
> The USSR
First, China is nothing like the USSR economically and the West is NOTING like the old capitalist West in any regard. Second, the ideological capitalism of the West during the Cold War is not what actually brought prosperity to the masses, I think it was just the fear of comunism that kept the elites at bay and willing to give some scraps to the unwashed masses.
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You're apparently the only one saying this. Maybe it's time to opt out of the outrage pornography cycle and contribute to the discussion in a more thoughtful way.
I'm contributing with comedy by making fun of Americans for not realizing the rest of the world caught up and is passing them.
A lot of Muricans are blinded by patriotism so it's helpful to make jokes.
One thing I realised after emigrating from the US is that ignorance and the desire to view your own way of doing things as superior is universal.
The Germans and British are certainly not immune to it!
A lot of pretty much any citizen population of a somewhat stable country is blinded by patriotism.
This totally won't work. The infrastructure isn't built. Truck stops are built to store fuel. They're not built to deliver electricity. Cheap electric trucks solve the wrong problem currently.
Are you just talking about the USA or are you also including the rest of the 7.8 billion people that don’t live in the USA? If the former why should the rest of the world care about whatever hangouts the USA thinks it has?
If they're cheap enough that you can swap the tractor unit or its batteries out at a truck stop, does that not solve most of the problem?
Totes bro. Nice backwards hat with a flag on it, brodda. We patriots gotta stick together. There's a war against the American way. These commie Chinese EV semis have no place in the great red white and blue. Here in the land of stars n stripes we only have Erl at our truck stops. It'll never work with electricity!
/s clearly?
> intelligent investment
I would not call highly disposable and cheap heavy duty vehicles an "intelligent investment." It's headline chasing and there's always very little tying their touted efforts to any actual improvements in the environment our economic outcomes.
China imports most of its oil. With EVs China needs to import less oil, this works really well for their national security. Even if the environmental benefit was zero (and it isn’t), this would still be the best choice for them and much of the world that doesn’t produce much oil. It isn’t really complicated.
Yup, if Taiwan is attacked and the straits at Indonesia are denied to Chinese merchant vessels, every EV is a net plus for the wartime economy.
Why? Heavy duty trucks are often disposable, they wear out quickly. Mining trucks are probably the worst example.
I agree that mining is probably the worst of it, but trucks usually last a decade and a couple million kilometers, after which they’re shipped off to Africa or the Middle East where they’re kept on the road for much longer.
I would not know, here were I live I see most of the heavy duty trucks (owned by small companies at least) with 10-15+ years of service, looking at the license plates.
It is absolutely magnificent to see a electric truck full of sand driving through the street, here is a (sorry, verry bad quality) video of a BYD one I caught: https://youtube.com/shorts/B0akomAQgkM?si=B1JEkKrTk6w7q5Bq
There are some electric trucks driving around Australian cities already as well.
Though I love the sound of a straight cut gear, I suspect they'll want to work on quieting that drivetrain a bit. Thankfully there is a lot of prior art.
It sounds like a 2CV in reverse. The classic non-synchro-mesh sound used for cheapo reverse gears in the 1980s and 90s.
Thanks for sharing, is that engine sound coming from the truck?
It's from the truck, it's the transmission of the truck which is evident by changing pitch as the truck downshifts while slowing down.
It likely uses a transmission as a tradeoff between torque and RPM of the electric motor or because it's a simpler task to retrofit an existing truck driveline with an electric motor bolted onto it.
These are so noisy because of the use of straight cut gears, which you choose when preferring strength over noise and comfort. Most regular cars use helical gears which reduces the noise due to continuously meshing between gear teeth, whereas straight cut gears are like a paddle wheel, so the teeth are smacking into eachother head on each time they engage. That is also why they clunk when getting on and off throttle.
We have some similar trucks running around Australia at the moment and the sound is the same, I'm also familiar with the sound from motorsport!
Are there weight/performance reasons why an electric truck would need a multi-speed transmission? Most electric cars only have a single-speed
Some cars have 2 gears as well. One for the acceleration and one for cruising efficiency and top speed. So my guess is to get it going easier and then have 2nd as the eco gear for the speed they cruise at.
Sounds like the person taking the video is on an electric bike.
I think its the truck, near the end the bike peels off to the left and you can hear the sound fading off to the right.
The picture of two rows of electric trucks is marked "ChatGPT generated". Note that some of the trucks shown have three front grille slots, while some have two. Also, those trucks appear to have fuel tanks. The author is mostly talking about what someone else saw at the China Commercial Vehicles Show. Low-credibility source.
There's plenty of info about that show, with real pictures.[1] BYD has a full range of electric trucks, but what they're pushing seems to be the T3 and T4 trucks. The new T4 is a straight truck, available as a box truck, flatbed, or open top truck. Or they'll sell the chassis for custom jobs. Claimed range is "up to 250km". It's intended for city use with once daily charging. The T3, which has been out for a few years, is an ordinary electric van, comparable to a Ford Transit or a Mercedes Sprinter. These are high-volume commercial products. Light and medium electric trucks are taking over fleet operations.
BYD has a new line of heavy electric trucks, launched in April.[2] This isn't BYD's first try at heavy electric trucks. They delivered some (at least hundreds, but not tens of thousands) in 2022. The 2025 model is at least their third try. They don't claim to have cracked long-haul trucking. "BYD Tractor Q3: Focusing on Short – Haul Transportation and Breaking Through Medium – and Long – Haul Transportation" is their marketing pitch. There are multiple battery options, and for charging, the Q3 can be plugged into up to four chargers at once. Long-haul operation is possible, but it's not yet the target market.
So the BYD heavy trucks aren't mainstream in China yet, but they're a lot closer than Tesla's Semi (yet another re-announcement: [3]) or the Nikola (only works going downhill and required a Trump pardon for the CEO).
Volvo has a range of electric trucks, mostly sold in Europe.
[1] https://www.chinatrucks.org/news/2025/1110/article_11304.htm...
[2] https://www.ctinsa.com/ccnes/5550
[3] https://elonbuzz.com/the-tesla-semi-2026-update-is-here/
There is also Mercedes eActros line and MAN eTGX. There are already thousands of them in Europe. Funny how that just happened, without fanfares and trillion dollar evaluations.
Speaking of which, I don’t know why would anyone still wait for Tesla Semi or any other up-and-comers. Promised better efficiency sounds good on paper, but means nothing if the product doesn’t exist or is an unreliable prototype with no service support.
Now Chinese want to enter the market with cheaper trucks, but - as the article clearly mentions - these are not yet ready to be used in Europe or the States, and making them ready will increase the price.
I live in China, and even I am surprised to see completely electric heavy trucks that are eerily quiet compared to diesel ones and carrying building materials, just cruising by on public roads. No idea how well or expensive they run, though.
Seeing this issue, I’m actually wondering what else might be replaced by batteries in the future… airplanes?
We might just replace aeroplanes altogether with ultra-high-speed maglev.
Although the cost calculation for this would be totally different—hundreds of billions up-front for world-crossing tunnels and infrastructure and rolling stock, but then nearly no running cost.
The Chuō Shinkansen will be an interesting small-scale experiment in proper high-speed maglev in regular, long-distance passenger service.
Some are testing viability
https://www.luftfartstilsynet.no/en/about-us/news/news-2025/...
Considering the sheer number of commercial flight routes and travel demand worldwide, that actually sounds pretty promising.
Anything but airplanes. Current airliners have a fuel fraction between 24 and 47%, so any decrease in energy density massively compromises performance. The energy density of jet fuel is two orders of magnitude higher than modern batteries, and jet engines have efficiencies of a few ten percent.
Nonetheless, folks are working the problem. Albeit most of the current designs look more like short-haul passenger craft or automated cargo drones to connect remote communities.
Looks like a ChatGPT generated article to me. All paragraphs and sentences are the same size and format.
The text in teeny font under the headline picture is "ChatGPT generated. Chinese electric truck production lines expanding rapidly in 2024 and 2025."
So, in other words, the leading image is a lie. When people say false things that purport to be true in text we call it lying or fraud. I don't understand why when they do it with an image it's not the same thing. Putting teeny, easily missed font that says "ChatGPT generated" doesn't make it OK. I might feel less strongly if the author put a disclaimer, in larger font, that said (more accurately IMO), "The above image is fake."
If your entire take away from this article is "the image is fake" when it declares it's GPT GENERATED then your on a low bar mission.
Go hunt stories which don't declare it's a GPT masthead and excoriate them.
It wouldn’t be any different if it said “made from imagination with photoshop”.
Using fake images is lame whether they are AI or not.
How about drawing by hand with a bamboo tablet?
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From the article, "China’s low price electric trucks do not arrive as finished products for Europe or North America. They need work." and the article goes on to describe what the author considered and an estimate of the cost.
What makes you think/say they’ve skipped safety standards?
“The gap between a domestic Chinese tractor and a European or North American long haul tractor is roughly €80,000 to €120,000 once all mechanical, safety and comfort systems are brought to the required levels per my estimate.”
Some regulations are great, but far too many are just wasteful rubbish (perhaps captured).
Safety standards are altogether too often designed for non-safety reasons.
If we iterated through each and every safety regulation, I wonder how many of them are actually helping safety???
In heavy trucks? Probably all of them, and I'd say all of them are worth it if we considered the damage each truck can do and the total number of trucks on the road.
One point of view is that, at least in Europe, over regulation results in: compliance maze due to overlapping regulations, urban policies driven by cyclists and politics rather than logistics, fragmented harmonization across member states.
> urban policies driven by cyclists and politics rather than logistics
Yes, urban policies should be also driven by the people whose very existence is threatened by unsafe trucks. You should try biking on the same road as trucks and see if your opinion changes.
And the result of the 'overregulation' is that in some European cities, there are zero pedestrian/cyclist traffic deaths yearly. How many deaths are you willing to sacrifice on the altar of capitalism?