While the Truck Industry Council published its regular monthly total commercial vehicle sales numbers via its T-Mark service last week, here at Truck eNews we thought we might give some insights into how the alternative fuel sector is fairing against the overall truck and van market.
Chinese maker Foton EV and its Australian distributor Foton Mobility led the way in April with 20 new registrations and Foton Mobility is telling us that with more than 200 orders forecast for the rest of 2026, it claims it will lead the pure EV truck market this year.
Daimler brand Fuso has so far registered five of its BEV Canters in 2026 and reported just one registration on the charts in April.
Clearly as those numbers show the Alternative fuel sector remains a small but unevenly distributed part of the market, with the sector registering 173 alternative-fuel trucks YTD against the 12,003 total truck sales so far in 2026. That figure includes, hybrids, light medium and heavy duty EV trucks and EV vans.
That represents a meagre 1.44 per cent total penetration overall and highlights that adoption of alternatives is still in the early-stages. However penetration varies sharply by segment depending on whether it is in the light , medium or heavy truck segments or in the heavy van sector, which represents 3.38 per cent of the overall light duty truck sector.
Across the entire light duty alternative fuel segment Hino is ahead with 65 sales of its Hybrid diesel 300 series light trucks, capturing 37.6 per of the sector so far this year compared with Foton Mobility’s battery electric models with 46 registrations in the first four months and a 26.6 per cent share.
Manwhile in electric heavy vans Ford led the way registering 15 of its battery electric transits, just one ahead of Chinese maker LDV with 14, while Mercedes-Benz laggedby just four units registering 11 Sprinter BEVs so far this year.
In medium duty there were just four EVs registered, compared with the 1435 total registrations in the medium truck sector, while in heavy duty there were ten EV trucks registered, representing just 0.25 per cent of the overall heavy truck sector, which has registered a total of 4010 truck so far this year.
Including Hino’s hybrid diesel light duty trucks as well as Foton and Fuso’s light duty pure EV machines there were 119 light duty alternative fuel trucks sold in the first four months of 2026 making light duty the leading sector when it comes to alternative fuel in the commercial market.
In fact with that 119 light duty registrations in the alternative fuel sector it represents 69 per cent of the overall alternative fuel registration across all commercial sectors, which does suggest that fleet electrification is currently easiest and most economical in light-duty urban and regional use cases.
Going by the numbers, this indicates that the adoption of electric in heavy duty adoption has effectively stalled, in fact in April there were no heavy duty EV trucks registered and as mentioned earlier only ten EV heavy duty trucks hit the road against the 4010 total heavy duty regos.
This strongly suggests to us that limitations such as electric range and and infrastructure challenges, as well as payload and uptime concerns for battery electric HD trucks means that decarbonisation for electric heavy duty trucks clearly lags a long way from OEM announcements and pilot programs.
Despite strong public positioning on electrification, large global OEMs are seeing very limited real-world volume, particularly outside vans.
So far this year Volvo leads the heavy end of the alternative fuel market with nine of its battery electric models being registered so far this year and none in April, while the only other maker in the medium and heavy BEV race, Mercedes-Benz has registered just six of its BEV trucks across both the medium and heavy sectors.
This suggests to us that allocation, cost, and or customer readiness issues are strongly at play in the Australian market .
Hino’s hybrid models are selling in slightly higher numbers that the pure battery electric Fotons and this suggests advantages such as their lower infrastructure dependency, the minimal change to operations for transport company’s and proven reliability, especially for regional and mixed-use fleets are all contributing to sales
The take out at the end of April is that at this point there is no clear inflection point yet in 2026 alternative fuel truck sales data.
So far this year growth has been steady but incremental, and definitely not exponential. Pundits in the industry are saying that some sort of shift in policy or incentive changes would likely be required to shift this curve meaningfully.
