Cheaper batteries alone are not enough to determine the future of electric freight. The path freight electrification will take depends heavily on the infrastructure already in place: the degree of reliance on roads, the capacity of railways, and the role of inland waterway transport, alongside the level of electrification of each mode.
The comparison prepared by Michael Barnard presents a different picture across four major environments. In China, domestic freight movement in 2025 was distributed, according to the data collected by the author, approximately between roads at 44%, railways at 20%, and inland waterways at 36%. The European Union shows a higher share for roads, at approximately 54%, compared with 12% for railways and 34% for inland waterway transport. Meanwhile, the modeling baseline of India’s NITI Aayog indicates greater reliance on roads, at about 69%, compared with 23% for railways and 8% for waterways. In the United States, a comparative breakdown is estimated at 53% for roads, 36% for railways, and 10% for waterways, with lower confidence in these figures than in the other datasets.
These percentages should be treated with caution; European Union data were reconstructed from separate datasets by transport mode and were not originally published as a unified, coordinated distribution. The U.S. comparison is also less certain according to the source. Nevertheless, the figures reveal an important trend: the battery may be a global technology, but the point at which electricity enters the freight system differs from one economy to another.
China Is Betting on Electrifying Its Large Fleet
China is moving particularly quickly with electric or new-energy heavy-duty trucks. Approximately 140,000 new-energy heavy-duty trucks were sold during the first half of 2026, an annual increase of 78.6%. However, the term “new energy” is broader than battery-electric vehicles, so the entire figure should not be treated as sales of BEVs.
China aims for new-energy heavy-duty trucks to account for approximately 40% of annual heavy-duty truck sales by 2030, alongside the construction of charging and battery-swapping infrastructure on major freight corridors. At the same time, this does not mean abandoning railways or waterways, as China can electrify a huge truck fleet while continuing to transport large quantities of freight through the other two modes.
India Needs to Improve the Rail Product, Not Just Electrify the Lines
India has a different lever. Approximately 2,800 kilometers of dedicated freight corridors have been completed, and these corridors were handling nearly 480 freight trains per day at the beginning of 2026. The broad-gauge railway network has also become almost fully electrified, but electricity alone does not automatically move freight from roads to trains.
What could practically change the competition is combining dedicated capacity, higher axle loads, greater speeds, and more regular schedules. These factors make rail a freight service more capable of competing with road transport, rather than merely changing the energy source of trains.
Europe Faces Two Parallel Paths
Europe demonstrates that having electrified rail infrastructure does not guarantee a higher railway share. The network exceeds 200,000 kilometers and has a large electrified share, but roads increased their share of inland freight by approximately 3.3 percentage points between 2014 and 2024. In 2025, rechargeable trucks weighing more than 3.5 tonnes reached 4.2% of vehicle registrations in the European Union.
Europe therefore appears to need a dual approach: improving and making better use of electric railways while electrifying road freight, which will continue to exist. Infrastructure alone does not address the factors of speed, flexibility, and operational capacity that drive some freight toward roads.
The United States Is Testing a Long-Term Comparison
U.S. railways retain important advantages in train length, labor productivity, and the transport of dense freight over long distances, but they rely largely on diesel. By contrast, battery-electric trucks could change the energy and operating-cost comparison.
Modeling by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) indicates that zero-emission trucks could reach cost parity with or surpass conventional vehicles in total cost of operation across different market segments by 2035, assuming continued technological improvement. But a serious comparison should not allow trucks to advance while keeping locomotives technologically static; railways also have battery-powered options.
Why Does This Analysis Matter?
The practical conclusion is not that one mode will win globally, but that fossil fuels will gradually recede from roads, railways, and inland waterway transport, while electricity replaces them through wires, chargers, and batteries. What differs is the amount of freight that will remain in each mode and the scale of infrastructure required to electrify the existing system.
For policymakers and fleet operators, this means that a falling battery price is not enough to make an investment decision. They must first understand the distribution of local freight and the capacity of railways and waterways, then determine whether the priority is electrifying trucks, improving rail service, or developing the infrastructure needed for both. Accurate comparisons remain constrained by differences in data quality, particularly when transport-mode distributions are not published in a standardized format.