Big Oil has more to fear from truckers than EVs

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a chief executive of an oil company in 2026 is probably losing sleep about the 21 million plug-in cars that will be sold this year. A few hundred thousand electric trucks and buses? Ehhh — not so much.

That could be a costly mistake. E-trucks are a relative novelty. Especially when it comes to their heavier, articulated variants, many of us have never seen one in the wild. In terms of sheer numbers, they’re a ripple, next to the tidal wave of BYDs and Teslas swamping the world’s roads.

Look at them through the prism of oil consumption, however, and they’re a juggernaut. Indeed, annual sales may already be eliminating crude demand as rapidly as every electric car coming off production lines.

That’s a mathematical consequence of the far more intensive way they’re used. A typical passenger vehicle gets driven about 7,500 miles per year. A heavy articulated truck might go 10 times further, or more. Its engine is also far more thirsty: A single bus or heavy truck typically consumes about as much diesel per kilometer as five cars.

Multiply those two numbers together, and you’ll notice a striking fact: Nascent electric truck sales may already be doing as much damage to oil demand as an EV boom that is likely to account for three out of 10 cars sold worldwide this year. If a truck uses 50 times as much crude each year, then you only need to sell 300,000 of them to displace as much crude as the roughly 15 million battery-only cars that will be bought in 2026.(1) With China alone registering 226,400 such heavy rigs by the end of September, it’s possible we’re passing that tipping point right about now.

The real answer will be a lot more messy than that simplified model. Usage of cars and trucks, and the split between long-distance heavy vehicles and smaller urban delivery vans, differs vastly from one country to another. In America, cars drive about 50% further than their French equivalents, while US tractor trailers go twice as far as European ones.

About 90% of the electric trucks sold to date have been in China, where data on vehicle usage and fuel consumption can be particularly spotty. That makes it difficult to work out hard-and-fast figures. If electric trucks are being driven shorter distances, carrying lighter loads, or replacing unusually efficient diesel models, that 50-times multiple could fall to 20 or less.

Even so, reasonable assumptions suggest the impact to oil demand from electric commercial vehicles is already in the same ballpark as passenger cars. Heavy trucks in Guangdong drive about 10 times as far as cars, according to a 2024 study, so the 50-times multiple for fuel consumption tracks real-world usage.

That matches fuel-consumption data on the ground, too. China’s diesel production fell by 12.55 million metric tons in the nine months through September, compared to a 8.76 million-ton drop in the gasoline that’s generally used in cars. Each fuel came in about 8% below the same period in 2025. Electric trucks account for about half of China’s avoided emissions from transportation, according to Global Carbon Budget, a project tracking emissions that expects a 0.4% decline in greenhouse pollution this year.

The alarming thing for that sleepless oil executive is that, while Tesla’s original Roadster was unveiled to the public more than two decades ago, all this disruption is happening at a time when the e-truck revolution is only just getting started. Global sales of medium- and heavy-duty electric trucks didn’t cross a 1% market share until 2021, but have breached 10% in recent quarters and rose 75% from a year earlier in the first half of this year.

While they’re most advanced in China, battery big rigs are starting to show up on five continents, as aggressive Chinese manufacturers target export markets. Sany Heavy Industry Co. has been delivering e-trucks in the United Arab Emirates, South America and Europe, and road freight isn’t even the whole story. XCMG Construction Machinery Co. loaders are operating at a giant iron ore mine in Guinea, while Sany delivered 600 loaders and dump trucks to mining customers just in August. If that pace is matched across the year, Sany’s mining vehicles alone could displace about as much oil demand as the 450,000 battery-powered cars BMW AG sold in 2025.

Battery big rigs were once regarded as so wildly implausible that a 2017 International Energy Agency survey on the future of trucking assumed their impact would be negligible even in 2050. Nine years later, they’re making up 50% of the largest market, China, and closing in on 10% in Europe. The spike in diesel from the conflict in the Strait of Hormuz certainly makes for a great sales pitch, but even if oil prices return to normal the efficiency and simplicity of electric traction will offer costs drastically lower than the competition in most markets. 

That’s reason to care more about the electric buses or delivery vans humming down your street than the shiny new cars leaving dealers’ showrooms. For too long, we’ve been measuring the EV revolution in terms of cars sold. The future will instead be about trucks, and the millions of barrels of oil that never got burned.

This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy. Previously, he worked for Bloomberg News, The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.