At a scruffy truck stop in a vital coal mining region in China, I realised the extent to which the country is leading the West in embracing new technologies.
I watched as a giant, red truck was manoeuvred towards a line of charging points. The driver climbed down from his cab, nonchalantly reached for a large plug to slot into a battery pack and then connected a second to run in parallel. Finally, he tapped twice on an electronic screen.
He told me it was much cheaper than diesel and took about an hour to charge. “The length of my lunch break,” he said. In other words, no big deal.
Until recently, the very idea of an electric truck was widely seen as implausible. The assumption was that the batteries would need to be so enormous and heavy that there would be little capacity left to carry much cargo. But through a combination of government edict, public subsidy and mind-blowing scale, China is doing for trucks what it’s done for solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and electric cars – making them affordable, mass produced and attractive worldwide.
The breathtaking pace of the energy transition in China is less about tackling global warming and more about going all in on technologies that are simply cheaper to run and easier to use.
The truck I saw in Inner Mongolia offered a glimpse of an industrial revolution that’s happening faster than many realise. Powered by a clean motor that produces no pollution, its job – ironically – was to haul coal, the dirtiest of the fossil fuels and a leading cause of climate change.
A coal truck in Inner Mongolia being electrically charged (Photo: David Shukman)The rise of electric trucks has been explosive in China. Last year, they made up about 30 per cent of all new truck sales there, and this year that rate has shot up to nearly half.
The prediction is that the vast majority of truck sales will become electric over the next decade – and it’s perfectly likely that goal will be achieved more quickly. China’s solar power surpassed the capacity of its coal-fired power stations last year, far sooner than expected.
This trend matters. While heavy trucks only make up 3 per cent of China’s vehicles, they’re responsible for half of its road transport carbon emissions.
And ditching diesel for battery power will help to solve something that’s long troubled the Chinese Communist Party leadership: the country’s dependence on imported oil. This vulnerability has been made more acute in recent months by Donald Trump’s war with Iran, which is heavily disrupting oil and gas flows out of the Middle East.
BYD all-electric trucks on an empty freeway. China’s trucks are increasingly turning electric (Photo: VCG/VCG via Getty)Already, the sheer number of electric cars across China has taken a big chunk out of the amount of oil it consumes. Electrifying the truck fleet would take that further.
Given China’s size, this is a process with global implications, because it’s shifting traditional flows of energy and influence. It exposes a potential fault line between China and the United States, just as Trump hosts President Xi Jinping for talks in Washington later this week.
China has long been open about its ambitions to become the world’s leading “electrostate”, dominating the most important clean technologies, while Trump has been doing all he can to promote fossil fuels – deriding electric vehicles and renewable power and peddling disinformation about them.
The American Trucking Associations, a lobbying group for truckers, has echoed Trump’s approach, making the case for sticking with diesel engines and arguing that they can be even more low-carbon than battery-powered ones. This isn’t borne out by the evidence.
But the message is having an effect: in the US last year, less than 1 per cent of truck sales were electric. In Europe, the figure was closer to 4 per cent, though climbing fast.
Presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump in Beijing in May 2026. The two will meet again in Washington later this week (Photo: Kenny Holston/Reuters)What Trump and his backers seem to have missed is the potential impact of the change that’s under way, and how it’s likely to accelerate, with or without them. It’s what’s known as a “positive tipping point”, when a new system suddenly becomes cheap, easily available and widely appealing to a mass market.
The concept is designed to show how solutions to climate change, which at first sight might seem unrealistic, can very rapidly succeed if there’s the right momentum behind them. This has been adopted as a guiding principle by the Earthshot Prize, the global environmental award founded by The Prince of Wales.
Its latest selection of finalists was based on whether they can be scaled up to make a real difference and become positive tipping points themselves. Examples range from low-cost air-quality monitors in Africa and electric three-wheelers in India, to a coalition of giant retailers urging the global shipping industry to use green fuels.
These projects are geographically a long way from a truck stop in northern China, but they’re part of the same story. History shows us that dramatic and positive shifts are possible.
I experienced that again while waiting for a taxi at a railway station in Inner Mongolia. I couldn’t work out why the place was so quiet and the air so fresh. And then I realised that literally every cab was electric. China had passed a tipping point and not only was it positive, it was also healthy and remarkably pleasant.
For the West, there is still a long distance to go.
David Shukman is former BBC News Science Editor and author of The Response: A Story of Fire and Flood in Britain’s New World of Extremes (Witness Books, 2026)
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