Everyone treats the electric van the same way: a slow, grinding transition.

10% today, maybe 12 next year, inching up for a decade.

I think that is exactly wrong. The van will not switch slowly. It will switch all at once. See the success of Hyundai Motor Company.

Here is why commercial vehicles behave differently from private cars.

A private buyer chooses emotionally - brand, design, how it feels. That spreads adoption out over years, because taste varies. A fleet manager chooses on a spreadsheet. Total cost of ownership, and almost nothing else. And the thing about a spreadsheet is that everyone's arithmetic tips at the same moment.

Once an electric van is clearly cheaper to own than a diesel one - not marginally, clearly - there is no emotional lag, no brand loyalty to slow it down. Every rational operator reaches the same conclusion in the same quarter. Adoption stops being a ramp and becomes a step.

And we are close to that line. Electric vans already show up to 14% lower total cost of ownership on high-utilisation urban routes. There are now more electric van models on sale in Europe than diesel ones. The serious modelling - from Carbon Tracker, from recent work in Nature - all points the same way: past cost parity, commercial adoption follows a steep S-curve, not a gentle slope.

The 10% figure everyone quotes is not the pace of a slow transition. It is the quiet part before a fast one.

This matters, because the people planning for a gradual shift - the manufacturers, the charging providers, the grid planners - are planning for the wrong shape. A wave does not give you time to catch up once it arrives.

The car will electrify gradually, held back by 250 million private owners and their feelings. The van has no feelings. It has a calculator. And the calculator is about to flip.