While Washington debates the funding the Biden administration is seeking to electrify U.S. transportation, battery electric buses and trucks are already running commercially in cities around the globe, particularly in China.

And those foreign fleets are growing as governments fund commercialization in order to cut air pollution.

In Shenzhen, a city of 12.6 million on the southeast coast of China, there were more than 70,000 electric step vans and box trucks operating at the end of 2019 — up from 300 in 2015, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI).

“That’s growing at almost 300% a year,” said Dave Mullaney, a principal on RMI’s Carbon-Free Mobility team, during a webinar Tuesday held by the North American Council for Freight Efficiency (NACFE), which has partnered with RMI since 2010 to bring efficiency to U.S. trucking.

NACFE is keeping track of 13 companies that have been running preproduction prototype trucks in their businesses for months and have agreed to participate in a three-week efficiency monitoring project in September.

The organization has since April hosted a series of webinars examining funding and other electric truck issues. The most recent webinar took a global perspective, including a look at China, where the government launched initiatives years ago to stimulate commercialization of electric trucks.

“There were four big ideas that enabled that,” Mullaney said of the growth in Shenzhen. They are similar to the kind of stimulus programs the Biden administration is attempting to launch. (See DOE Offers $100M for Electrification of Heavy Trucks and EDF: Electrifying Heavy Trucking Could Save Money Strengthen the Grid.)

“One was the financial incentives provided by the government. Another was the rental and leasing models that grew around this market; also the deployment of charging infrastructure, and the quality and capabilities of the vehicles themselves — all were really important to catalyze this growth,” Mullaney said.

“No matter where you are in the world, the ability to generate a return is critical,” he continued. “And so the government stepped in and began to incentivize the purchase and use of these vehicles.”

Those incentives were designed to allow an electric truck user to earn a somewhat higher profit than would have been earned using a conventional truck of the same size, he said. But even with that, ownership of an electric truck was considered risky, as the manufacturers were small startups with sketchy futures.

At that point leasing companies moved into the equation, Mullaney said, minimizing the risk to the delivery companies and making the switch to electrics less daunting. Better batteries and extended driving distances also fueled growing acceptance.

Initially electric trucks were leased by companies large enough to have a charging depot, he said, but the appearance of public charging stations enabled “owner-operators” to convert to electric.

Shenzhen has about 80,000 public charging stations, he said, of which 30,000 are higher voltage and able to charge batteries faster.

About 90% of all deployed electric trucks and buses are in China, said Cristiano Facanha, global director at CALSTART, a Pasadena-based clean transportation advocacy group with offices across the U.S. and worldwide.

CALSTART’s Drive to Zero program includes 270 member companies. Its mission is for electric vehicles, particularly electric trucks and buses, to dominate the market by 2040. Facanha said light-duty electric vehicles will reach cost parity with conventional vehicles by 2025 and heavier vehicles by 2030.

India, nearly as populous as China, with a burgeoning economy and a GDP measured at $2.8 trillion in 2020, is also heading for EVs, though in many cases much smaller than what is typically seen as a truck.

“Urban demand is typically met by two-wheelers or three-wheelers,” said Samhita Shiledar, RMI’s manager of India programs.

“Those two-wheelers have the carrying capacity of 200 kg [about 452 lbs]. The three-wheelers and four-wheelers have payloads of about 502 to 1,000 kg [~1,107 to 2,205 lbs]. These small vehicles typically are powered by a 2.5-kWh battery and can travel 125 km [~78 miles] on a charge.”

Bigger trucks with capacities between 5 and 40 tons ply between cities and states, she said, and large manufacturers have begun to move into the EV and infrastructure markets, joining the small startups.

Another advocacy group, the D.C.-based International Council on Clean Transportation, has been working to persuade bus companies in Latin America to replace diesel and gasoline-powered buses with electric fleets.

Oscar Delgado, manager of the zero emission fleets center at the council, said buses share some of the components found in trucks. He noted that bus companies are risk averse but have been willing to listen.

“Electric buses provide lower total cost of ownership than their diesel or natural gas counterparts,” he said. “But they are more expensive up front. So there is a need to establish … financial mechanisms. Our goal is to secure more than $1 billion in public commitments from investors.

“In terms of business models, our best practice example is Santiago, Chile, which happens to have the largest fleet of electric buses outside of China. They have achieved this without the need of government mandates or special subsidies for electric buses. It was driven mainly by private entities and … a suitable business model. This model works because it allocates risk to the entities that can absorb them. About 4,000 buses will be procured with this model in the coming couple of years,” Delgado said.