China has reached a stage of vehicle electrification that is easy to miss if the only number monitored is the national market share of electric vehicles. New city buses are now essentially all-electric, and in many cities the question of supply is no longer whether to replace a diesel bus with a battery bus. It is a question of which new electric bus should replace the electric bus purchased during China’s first big wave of electrification.
This is a bigger milestone than another record year for electric vehicle sales because it shows a transportation segment finishing its first adoption cycle and entering routine replacement. The International Energy Agency estimates that almost 70% of China’s more than 680,000 electric buses have already been deployed before 2020. A significant part of the current market therefore consists of renewals of older electric fleets rather than conversions of diesel fleets for the first time.
China’s 2025 equipment renewal program explicitly supported the replacement of new energy city buses and even the complete replacement of traction batteries, with the program continuing until 2026. Politics is still involved, but its task has changed. It supports the revival of a market where electric propulsion has already become the normal technology.
This replacement cycle is the starting point for my TFIE Strategy Briefing analysis of Chinese electric transportation markets. Looking at buses, cars, trucks and coaches shows why “China’s electric vehicle adoption rate” is increasingly a poor denominator.
Passenger cars are at another stage. Electric cars accounted for just over half of China’s new car sales in 2025, and buyers had nearly 700 electric models available at the end of the year. The IEA estimates that almost 70% of battery electric cars sold in China were cheaper than comparable conventional cars even before incentives, meaning electric drive is no longer a specialist alternative for Chinese car buyers. This is one of the normal choices in much of the market.
Trucks are behind cars in terms of absolute market share, but they are growing much faster. Electric heavy-duty trucks reached about 29% of China’s sales in 2025, about double their share in 2024. Their strongest markets are no accident: ports, mines, steel mills and industrial logistics operations offer trucks relatively predictable routes, high utilization and places where charging or battery swapping can be organized around the job.
This is what makes utility vehicles particularly interesting. A passenger car may spend most of its life parked, so fuel savings accrue relatively slowly. A hard-working truck can cover enough miles that reducing energy and maintenance costs will impact the business case much more quickly, especially when infrastructure can be concentrated in depots or along fixed corridors.
Intercity coaches show why even this logic cannot simply be extended to all categories of transport. Battery-electric coaches accounted for only about 10% of China’s coach sales in 2025, despite strong sales growth from the previous year. At first glance, this looks like a category far behind city buses. The difference isn’t just that coaches need bigger batteries. They compete with another electricity technology that China developed decades earlier than most countries: rail.
China ended 2025 with more than 50,000 kilometers of high-speed rail lines, while its rail system carried more than 4.5 billion passenger trips during the year. High-speed rail serves almost all Chinese cities with more than half a million urban residents, and provides one- to two-hour journeys through many 500-kilometer urban hubs and approximately four-hour journeys through some 1,000 kilometers of corridors.
A battery-powered coach can replace a diesel coach on routes where road transport still makes sense, but it does not necessarily have to capture all long-distance passenger travel that might otherwise have been done by bus. Part of this mobility has already shifted to an electrified mode offering better performance on dense interurban corridors.
This is why national EV percentages may obscure more than they clarify. City buses, passenger cars, trucks and coaches all have wheels and batteries, but their economics are very different. They operate for different numbers of hours, return to different locations, carry different loads, use different infrastructure, and face different alternatives.
A useful forecast starts with the work done rather than a single adoption curve. Fixed-route city buses were electrified early because the batteries matched the duty cycle and public markets could coordinate charging. Passenger cars followed as battery costs fell, model choices expanded, and purchase prices became competitive. Heavy-duty trucks are now experiencing acceleration where high utilization turns operating savings into a strong business incentive.
Coaches will also be electrified, but their potential market is shaped by what rail has already conquered. This is not a weakness in the history of transport electrification in China. This proves that the goal is mobility with fewer fossil fuels, without forcing all existing vehicle categories to expand into an equally large electric market.
There is also a data caveat that is worth preserving. Chinese sources have historically used overlapping categories, such as “new energy buses”, and successive editions of the IEA have revised the classifications as better data became available. The precise shape of the first bus curve is less certain than the general pattern: city buses were the first to move and are now saturated, cars are common, heavy goods vehicles are rising quickly, and coaches remain much less electrified.
For policymakers outside China, the implications are practical. A country with a low national share of electric vehicles should not assume that all transportation segments will grow at the same rate. Some categories may scale very quickly once vehicles, operating economics, and infrastructure align, while other categories may remain smaller because another mode does part of the job better.
This changes the way public money should be spent. Rather than subsidizing each category of electric vehicles equally, governments can identify uses for which electrification is already suited, remove infrastructure bottlenecks, and allow those markets to move first. Buses, depot-based fleets, high-utilization trucks, and other predictable business applications often provide clearer starting points than trying to scale an entire transportation sector together.
China’s experience suggests that the mature endpoint will not be a smooth EV adoption curve. It will involve several different transitions that will take place depending on the work each vehicle does and the transportation systems around it.
TFIE’s comprehensive strategy briefing compares the sales trajectories of China’s city buses, passenger cars, heavy-duty trucks and coaches, including why high-speed rail is changing the coach denominator and why replacement rather than first adoption now determines much of the city bus market.
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