One of the few positives to come out of the Western Asia war. We needed this petrol shock to do what we should have been doing much earlier. It’s great that the costs have gone down but lack of appropriate charges is still a problem.
Electric trucks had their strongest ever month of sales in March 2026, although they still account for a small proportion of total sales.
For the first time, electric models are available for the same up-front cost as their diesel equivalents, including for road trains.
There are anecdotal reports of a surge of interest in electric trucks as companies seek to reduce their exposure to the risk of future diesel price spikes.
44 trucks in a month is not a particularly big wave, though I’ll grant it’s a sizeable step from previous sales.
Electric trucks do make sense for a lot of the last mile delivery sort of stuff (lowish and predictable max km per day, lots of stop/start, return to same base each day) so I expect this use case at least will become popular in the near future. As the article says though charging is a bit of a killer and will likely be more of a problem than the actual purchase price of the trucks. It’ll be interesting to see if it leads to a shift towards the big companies buying rather than leasing more of their depots due to the capital input required for charging infrastructure (small companies are probably just out of luck).