Musk & Gates were wrong on the future of trucks

TO HEAR BILL Gates tell it, the electric drivetrains that have transformed the passenger vehicle industry over the past decade have no chance of repeating the trick in heavy trucks.

- DAVID FICKLING Bloomberg

According to Elon Musk, such a transition is inevitable—and Tesla will be leading it. Both of them are wrong.

EV trucks really are on the brink of taking over—but Tesla is barely in the game. Only around 50,000 units ofits monstrous cubist pickup, the Cybertruck, have been sold so far. The Semi tractor trailer is still essentially a demonstration model, eight years after it was first announced. Instead, it’s China which isagain at the cutting edge, with Europe’s Volvo, Daimler Truck Holding, and Iveco Group running quite a way behind.America’s hopes of playing a role are looking increasingly threadbare.

The magnitude of the sales boom in China over the past 12 months has been breathtaking. In September 2020, when Musk was beefing with Gates on Twitter about his truck-scepticism, just a few dozen battery-powered semitrailers had ever been sold there. In 2024, 79,142 medium and heavy trucks were sold, according to BloombergNEF.A further 81,508 changed hands in the first half of this year alone.