In 2025, 28 percent of new heavy-duty vehicles sold in China were electric. In the European Union, the figure was 1.9 percent, according to data from the International Council on Clean Transport (ICCT). That is a ratio of almost one to 15, despite the technology now being available on both sides.
This gap is no longer technological. It reveals a deeper problem: we have set trajectories without creating the economic and political conditions needed to achieve them. China has the planning and implementation capacity to bypass the patient process of building coalitions among stakeholders.
Europe, by contrast, is liberal and democratic: it can neither impose the transition by decree nor should it try to. It must make the transition possible by aligning interests, rules and risks. Who should bear the risk of scaling up: the manufacturer, carrier, energy provider or financier?
The direction is clear: sustainable, sovereign, desirable and viable mobility. But the coming months will involve a series of critical decisions, and Europe must turn its ambitions into conditions for action: it must move from a policy based on targets to one based on creating the conditions to achieve them. When the path is not credible, the destination itself eventually comes into question.
So do our failures to choose. Three examples illustrate this. First example: heavy-duty vehicles.
Seventy-eight percent of European land freight travels by road: almost everything on our shelves has traveled by truck. The technology needed to electrify these flows is available, as is the regulatory framework; the challenge is economic. Higher purchase prices, uncertain residual values, charging infrastructure that still needs to be deployed, slow electricity-grid connections and hesitation over a technology that is advancing rapidly: no single stakeholder can bear these risks alone.
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