Abstract:

Heavy-duty vehicles (HDVs) significantly contribute to China's greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution, emitting half of all on-road vehicles and 3% of all industry emissions in 2019. Despite advancements in diesel engine emissions, China needs to transition to zero-emission heavy-duty vehicles (ZE-HDVs) to meet its decarbonization targets. This paper builds upon data from the 
most recent market analysis, which focused on ZE-HDVs in China in 2021 (Mao et al., 2023), and here the authors analyze China’s ZEHDV market in 2022. The authors provide insights into developments in several key areas, including the application of ZE technologies across different vehicle segments and the geographic variation in ZE-HDV adoption. This study also presents a detailed analysis of ZE-HDV specifications, including battery suppliers, battery capacity, range, and specific energy density at the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) level. Furthermore, the authors track advancements in battery-swapping and fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV) technologies. HDV registration and vehicle specification information for 2022 was drawn from ZEDATA (2022). Throughout the paper, the authors define HDVs as all trucks and buses with a gross vehicle weight exceeding 3.5 tonnes, battery electric vehicles (BEVs) as those that rely on plug-in chargers for recharging, and battery-swap-capable battery electric trucks (BETs) as those that use battery-swapping technology. For years, China has been a global leader in the production and adoption of ZE-HDVs. In 2022, it was the dominant market, with roughly 110,000 ZE-HDVs sold; that was about 81% of the total global market (Chu & Cui, 2023). The 2022 ZE-HDV market in China was still dominated by BEVs, which captured 96% of the market. Among BEVs, 89% were powered by charging, while the remaining 11% were battery swap capable. FCEVs remained less common but doubled their market share from 2% of total ZE truck sales in 2021 to 4% in 2022, with absolute sales surging by 144%.