KUALA LUMPUR (Oct 31): Electric vehicles (EVs) have gone from less than 1% of light commercial vehicle sales to 10% in just the last two years in China.

In a statement on Oct 28, research company BloombergNEF (BNEF) said sales in China reached a record high of almost 18,000 in August and looked likely to keep rising in the final few months of the year.

The firm said China is the largest commercial vehicle market in the world, so what happens there moves the needle globally.

It said at 10% electric share, China is well ahead of almost all other countries in this segment.

The firm said only South Korea has a higher adoption rate, with more than 20% of its light commercial vehicle sales already electric so far in 2022.

It said the adoption curve for light electric vans and trucks in China has started to look a bit like what happened with passenger vehicles a few years earlier, when the combination of policy support, more model availability and a surge in charging-infrastructure investment led the market to take off.

BNEF said momentum has continued on the passenger vehicle side, with plug-in vehicles hitting 29% of all sales in September. Full electrics were 22% of the market.

It said the market for electric medium and heavy-duty trucks in China is also picking up.

Sales of electric big rigs in that segment rose 224% in July and hit 3.4% of the total market. Deliveries dipped slightly in August, falling to 2% share, but the trend for the year is still strongly up and to the right.

BNEF said that so far, most of these heavy trucks are operating in shorter-range urban duty cycles, rather than long-haul routes, but the picture is changing quickly nonetheless.

The firm said it’s easy to be dismissive of a few percentage points of market share, but technology adoption stories have a habit of going slowly, right up until they don’t.