What a European truck registration figure counts

ACEA’s headline that EU truck registrations fell 6.2 per cent in 2025 describes one specific series: new registrations in the European Union, published quarterly by the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association in categories that ACEA defines for itself. ACEA’s 2026 releases call these EU figures “the European commercial vehicle market”. The series is narrower than that sounds, because each of the four words in it — truck, European, registration, 2025 — carries a definition that is not the obvious one.

The categories, in ACEA’s own words

ACEA publishes its category definitions on a statistics FAQ page, and they are short enough to reproduce exactly.

Read those two truck lines together and the structure follows: everything over 16 tonnes is also over 3.5 tonnes, so HCV is contained inside MHCV rather than sitting beside it. The “trucks” headline is the wider bucket. The FAQ defines no separate medium category, but the full-year 2025 release does in the footnotes to its tables: medium trucks are “Medium commercial vehicles between 3.5 and 16 tonnes” and heavy trucks “Heavy commercial vehicles of 16 tonnes and over”. The two ACEA pages therefore do not draw the heavy line in quite the same place: “over 16t” in the FAQ, “16 tonnes and over” in the release.

The bus line has no weight split

BC is a single item: buses and coaches over 3.5 tonnes. Below that threshold, light buses and coaches are counted as vans. The FAQ’s list has no heavy-bus or city-bus category, and the 2025 release has a single bus table, footnoted “Medium and heavy buses and coaches over 3.5 tonnes”, broken down by country and power source only. A bus number lifted from an ACEA release is every bus and coach over 3.5 tonnes that ACEA counts.

That boundary is also not the one buses are classified by for construction purposes. UN Regulation No. 107 — read here in the text published in the Official Journal on 29 January 2026 (OJ L, 2026/139), which incorporates all valid text up to the 11 series of amendments — applies to every single-deck, double-deck, rigid or articulated vehicle of category M2 or M3 (paragraph 1.1); its requirements do not apply to vehicles designed for the secure transport of persons, ambulances, off-road vehicles or vehicles specially designed for the carriage of school children (paragraph 1.2). Inside that scope it sorts on capacity first: vehicles with a capacity “exceeding 22 passengers in addition to the driver” fall into Classes I, II and III (paragraph 2.1.1), those with a capacity “not exceeding 22 passengers” into Classes A and B (paragraph 2.1.2). Only within those brackets does provision for standing passengers divide them — Class II, for one, is “constructed principally for the carriage of seated passengers, and designed to allow the carriage of standing passengers in the gangway and/or in an area which does not exceed the space provided for two double seats” (paragraph 2.1.1.2). ACEA sorts by mass and R107 by passenger capacity, and neither document maps its categories onto the other’s.

They are not the type-approval categories either

The legal categories a vehicle is actually approved in are set by Article 4 of Regulation (EU) 2018/858, in force and consolidated to 2 August 2026. Category M covers vehicles built primarily to carry passengers and their luggage: M1 has not more than eight seating positions besides the driver’s and no space for standing passengers; M2 has more than eight and a maximum mass not exceeding 5 tonnes; M3 has more than eight and a maximum mass exceeding 5 tonnes. Category N covers vehicles built primarily to carry goods, by maximum mass: N1 not exceeding 3.5 tonnes, N2 exceeding 3.5 but not exceeding 12 tonnes, N3 exceeding 12 tonnes.

Only one of ACEA’s thresholds is a figure Article 4 also uses: the 3.5-tonne van boundary is the same number as the N1/N2 boundary, although ACEA’s LCV category also takes in light buses and coaches. The 16-tonne heavy-truck boundary matches nothing in Article 4 — N3 opens at 12 tonnes — and the 3.5-tonne bus boundary is not the M2/M3 boundary of 5 tonnes. Neither ACEA page says which mass its thresholds measure. On the figures alone, an ACEA heavy truck and an N3 vehicle are different populations, since a goods vehicle above 12 tonnes and below 16 is N3 but not heavy in ACEA’s terms; that reading is ours, not ACEA’s.

A registration is not a sale

Article 3(53) of the same Regulation defines registration as an administrative authorisation for the entry into service in road traffic of an approved vehicle, involving identification of the vehicle and the issuing of a serial number known as the registration number, on a permanent or temporary basis. Article 3(50) defines placing on the market separately, as making a vehicle available for the first time in the Union.

What these releases count is registrations; they report neither orders nor deliveries. ACEA’s own wording is looser in places — the Q1 2026 release reports its bus registrations as “New EU bus sales increased by 24.5%” — but on the definition above a vehicle sold in one period and registered in the next belongs to the later figure; that step is our reading, as ACEA does not describe how it dates a registration. Nor is this a production series: asked when production data is updated, ACEA’s FAQ answers that production figures “are available through OICA”. Nor does it reach model level. Asked where passenger car registrations broken down by brand and by model can be found, ACEA answers that it publishes monthly provisional registration figures by country and by brand, but not by model; the commercial vehicle releases are published by country, fuel type and vehicle category. The shape of the industry behind the badges is a separate subject, covered in who builds trucks in Europe.

What 2025 actually was

The release of 29 January 2026 gives the year. New EU truck registrations fell 6.2 per cent to 307,460 units, driven by a 5.4 per cent decline in heavy trucks and a 9.9 per cent fall in medium trucks; Germany was down 12.2 per cent, France 9 per cent and Spain 3.6 per cent. New EU bus registrations rose 7.5 per cent to 38,238 units, led among the larger markets by Germany at plus 28 per cent and Poland at plus 16.6 per cent, with Italy down 15.9 per cent and Spain down 4 per cent. New EU van registrations fell 8.8 per cent.

Set the two published totals for the vehicles above 3.5 tonnes against each other and buses are 11.1 per cent of them — that division is our arithmetic, not a figure ACEA publishes, and it holds only because both totals come from the same release and the same geography.

Which fuel, in which bucket

The power-source figures come with the same category boundaries attached, and with ACEA’s own fuel buckets, which its tables define in footnotes: “electrically chargeable” “Includes battery electric and plug-in hybrids”, “hybrid electric” “Includes full and mild hybrids”, and “others” “Includes fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs)” as well as natural gas, LPG, E85/ethanol and other fuels. Diesel accounted for 93.2 per cent of new registrations in the EU heavy- and medium-duty truck market in 2025, on volumes down 8 per cent. Electrically-chargeable trucks above 3.5 tonnes took 4.2 per cent, up from 2.3 per cent a year earlier, with the Netherlands up 205.4 per cent — against a 40.8 per cent fall in its total truck registrations — Germany up 39.6 per cent and France up 30.5 per cent, the three together accounting for two-thirds of the EU’s electrically chargeable truck market. What those diesel registrations have to be approved against is a separate matter, set out in Euro VI and Euro 7.

On the bus side the electrically-chargeable share reached 23.8 per cent by the end of 2025, diesel held 62.1 per cent against 63.2 per cent the year before, and hybrid-electric fell 24.9 per cent to 7 per cent of the market. Germany, the largest market by volume, grew 106.4 per cent, with Sweden up 262.1 per cent and Belgium 233.5 per cent in what the release calls “the electric market segment” — ACEA’s electrically-chargeable line. Because BC is one undifferentiated line, none of that separates urban buses from coaches, a limitation that also constrains what can be said about city bus propulsion.

In the van bucket, diesel registrations fell 12.8 per cent to 1,168,561 units for an 80.7 per cent share, down from 84.4 per cent; electrically-chargeable vans took 11.2 per cent against 6.1 per cent; petrol fell 31.9 per cent to a 4.4 per cent share; hybrids rose 21.4 per cent on 2.7 per cent of the market. Light buses and coaches are inside those numbers.

Provisional, and revised

ACEA’s statistics FAQ states that the data it publishes for the current year is provisional and provided by national sources. The full-year 2025 commercial vehicle release gives its own data source as “aggregated data provided by national automobile associations, ACEA members and S&P Global Mobility”. The FAQ also says consolidated data compiled by the Association Auxilliaire de l’Automobile are published at the beginning of each year; the consolidated overviews it links to are passenger-car series for 1990-2021, dated May 2022, and it shows no consolidated truck or bus series. The FAQ further states that its registration data changes regularly for both the current and the previous year, because the official licensing authorities keep changing their registration files.

On ACEA’s own account, then, two correct citations of the same year’s figure can disagree because they were taken at different times. The FAQ’s statement that monthly press releases cover only ACEA members is made for passenger cars; the commercial vehicle release names its sources as above.

The period decides the answer

The window quoted changes the answer. ACEA’s half-year release for 2025 was headlined at minus 15.4 per cent on 155,367 trucks, with heavy down 14.5 per cent and medium down 20 per cent; the full year closed at minus 6.2 per cent. Both are ACEA’s figures for their own window; only the second is the year’s.

The 2026 releases show the same effect in the other direction. Q1 2026 came in at 81,766 trucks, up 10.7 per cent, and 10,964 buses, up 24.5 per cent; H1 2026 at 171,933 trucks, up 9.8 per cent, and 22,590 buses, up 22.7 per cent. The electrically-chargeable bus share reads 21.8 per cent at the first quarter and 27.7 per cent at the half-year, against 23.8 per cent for the whole of 2025 — three different true answers to the question of what share of the EU bus market is electrically chargeable.

Four questions settle what any of these numbers mean: which category, which geography, which period, and which vintage of the data. ACEA reports commercial vehicles by country, fuel type and vehicle category on a quarterly cycle and cars monthly, and the headline is the EU, not Europe; the 2025 release’s tables give EFTA, the United Kingdom and an EU + EFTA + UK total separately. Quote the four with the figure.