•Impact mechanism of land transport infrastructure is empirically examined.•Global data envelopment analysis and panel Tobit model are used for analysis.•Overall efficiency level of China's manufacturing industry is low.•We study the influential variables of energy and environmental efficiency.•Strong heterogeneity features exist between different regions. The energy consumption and carbon dioxide emissions of China's manufacturing industry accounted for 12.8% and 15.5% of the world in 2016, respectively. On the other hand, the construction of land transport infrastructure has become the focal point of the Chinese government recently. However, there is very little literature investigating the influencing mechanism of land transport infrastructure on the energy and environmental efficiency of the sector. Therefore, it is crucial and meaningful to study how the latter is affected by the land transport infrastructure to alleviate global energy and environmental issues. Non-radial directional distance function was used to calculate two indicators measuring energy and carbon dioxide emissions performance in this paper. The panel Tobit model was then applied to focus on factors affecting the performance. The results indicate that land transport infrastructure, economic growth, technological progress, energy prices, industrial structure have significant impacts on the energy and environmental efficiency of China's manufacturing industry. Different from the results at the national level, from a regional perspective, the development of land transport infrastructure in the eastern region plays a negative role in the performance of the manufacturing industry. Finally, some targeted policy recommendations are proposed to improve the policy design of the government.