Europe's e-Truck Market Diverges: A Deep Dive into BEV Registrations and the Netherlands' Boom Behind It

Market Monday - Week 47 - Where electric heavy truck usage grows

In our post from last week, we discussed the latest registration figures for commercial vehicles in Europe, which ACEA published at the end of October.

Today, we will focus on the electric heavy truck segment. This segment has remained immune to the broader decline in registrations and has shown significant growth in its still low overall share. Europe’s Q1-Q3 Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) share in registrations increased from 1,5% to 1,8% compared to the previous year. Isolated Q3 figures showed an accelerating trend, with a 2.2% share of BEV registrations; however, a further detailed look into countries reveals large differences in electric truck adoption.

The following map illustrates the share of BEVs in all heavy truck registrations from the first three quarters of 2025. The tooltip(mouse-over) further provides the year-on-year change in registrations for transparency on their growth trajectory.

Early adopters with a relatively high share of heavy electric trucks amongst all new truck registrations are Switzerland and Norway, followed by the Netherlands and Sweden. A pattern or tendency is visible: the further south or east in Europe from the northwest, the lower the share of electric trucks is in new registrations. For example, Austria and Belgium are also growing fast, with YoY increases in BEV registrations above 60%. While the industrial and, consequently, fleet heavyweights, France and Germany, follow this trend, with more moderate electric fleet additions.

As already shared in last week’s post, we noted a fascinating observation in the Netherlands, with a share of 11.2% for BEVs in Q3. Given the local AanZET purchase subsidy, activated in October for the purchase of new BEV trucks, we expect the Netherlands to improve this share in the coming quarters.

This recent development prompted us to open a previous article we published in the paid tier, which also explains why we expect the BEV share to increase significantly in the Netherlands:

This article discusses that, based on a detailed Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) analysis, BEV trucks are already approaching cost parity with diesel on domestic routes in the Netherlands. Driven by lower energy costs and a new CO2-based toll starting in 2026, BEVs will become the more economical choice, particularly on longer routes. This financial shift, supported by future EU policies like carbon pricing (ETS2) and expanding charging infrastructure (AFIR), provides a clear business case for shippers to begin electrifying their logistics operations.

Dutch developments would not be unique, as similar accelerating progress is expected to happen in Nordics, DACH and in France, eventually paving way for the rest of Europe and making looking for all-electric capacity a practical exercise instead of theoretical.

Christian Dolderer
Lead Research Analyst
Trimble Transportation (Transporeon)