The next time some Tesla bro corners you in the locker room at the gym, dripping and wearing only a towel while he explains to you, finger jabbing into your sternum, that he’s saving the world and defeating the massive oil industry’s stranglehold on America, and you, you’re the problem, just stop him right there and let him know this: The, but Chinese buses.

Yes, electric buses, the vast majority of which are in use in China, are responsible for more than three times the displacement of oil demand compared to all of the world’s private electric passenger vehicles.

That’s 270,000 barrels of oil per day not being used thanks to electric buses. To put it another way, for every 1,000 electric buses in use, 500 barrels of oil aren’t used each day, and for every 1,000 private electric cars in use, only 15 barrels of oil go un-slurped.

That’s a pretty huge difference. So why are these mostly clustered in China? Why don’t we see more electric buses in America? The nature of bus trips, with their regular and largely unvarying routes should make them ideal candidates for electrification, right?

Well, yes. So far, though, where China uses .There’s a number of reasons why buses should make a ton of sense—less direct pollution, significantly fewer moving parts and a much reduced need for fluid replacements, making maintenance cheaper and easier, for example, but despite a lot of compelling reasons, they’ve been slow to be adopted in America.

The reasons aren’t pegged to any one thing—while some places like , mechanical issues aren’t—or at least shouldn’t—be a deal breaker, since there’s 300,000 that manage to do their job in China.

A couple months back, a group of mayors from across the world made a splash by pledging to only buy

What seems to be the is simple “ according to Hanjiro Ambrose, a Ph.D candidate from U.C. Davis who studies sustainable transportation and was interviewed in Streetsblog late last year.

Most experts agree the technology is there to make these work, but without a strong central policy push like exists in China, there’s just not that much incentive for bus systems to do such a comprehensive change-over.

Chances are that’ll change in the future, though, and then you’ll just have to deal with bus drivers at the gym telling you how they’re saving the world.