By Kate Yuan

(JW Insights) Mar 15 -- CRRC (中国中车), a Chinese state-owned rolling stock manufacturer, has produced the country's first smart heavy-duty truck that can be battery-powered or tap into the electricity supply of railways, Yicai Global reported on March 14.

The No. 1 product in the demonstration project rolled off the production line in Datong, northern China’s Shanxi Province on March 14, and has successfully accomplished zero carbon emissions, CCTV News reported.

The main advantage of the innovation is that the vehicle can charge while moving to improve the efficiency and sustainability of truck transport. Moreover, the truck features regenerative braking to feed energy back into the system. 

Beijing-based CRRC is the world's largest supplier of rail transit equipment with complete product lines and leading technologies. It has 46 wholly-owned and majority-owned subsidiaries with over 170,000 employees, according to its official website.

The company was formed in 2015 through the merger of CNR (中国北车) and CSR (中国南车), and went listed both on the Shanghai Stock Exchange and Hong Kong Stock Exchange the same month.

Road transport is becoming electric as it is expected that 36 percent of heavy-duty trucks will be powered by electricity by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency. Based on experiments, electric trucks are two times as energy-efficient as diesel vehicles. Although trucks make up only 3 percent of all motor vehicles in the world, they are contributing a big share of emissions, including carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, hydrocarbons, and nitrogen oxides, per the IEA.

In China, road cargo tallied around 37.1 billion tons last year, making up 76 percent of the total, said the Yicai Global report.