Europe’s truck industry is increasingly looking beyond batteries for the long-haul transition, with eight major companies using IAA Transportation to call for a coordinated hydrogen ecosystem capable of putting trucks, fuel and refueling infrastructure on the road together.
Daimler Truck, Volvo Group, Toyota Motor Corp., Bosch, Air Liquide, TotalEnergies, TEAL Mobility and MB Energy announced a joint initiative aimed at making hydrogen-powered trucking commercially viable across Europe by 2030. Germany is being presented as the model, with the group urging the European Commission and other national governments to adopt a similar approach.
The announcement came as Daimler Truck unveiled its Mercedes-Benz NextGenH2 Truck on the IAA show floor.
Daimler plans to place a small series of 100 NextGenH2 trucks into customer operations from the end of 2026. The first 50 vehicles have already been sold, according to Karin Rådström, president and CEO of Daimler Truck. Meanwhile, customers have already accumulated almost 600,000 kilometers with the previous-generation GenH2 Truck.
“This isn’t some small side project for us,” Rådström said. “It’s a very important part of our strategy.”
Daimler Truck plans to invest a mid-three-digit million-euro amount in hydrogen trucks through the end of the decade. Its first hydrogen combustion-engine trucks are also being prepared for market launch next year.
The NextGenH2 is designed to travel more than 1,000 kilometers on a single fill of liquid hydrogen. It can also carry 1.3 metric tons more payload than Daimler’s battery-electric eActros 600, largely because the hydrogen truck does not have to carry the weight of a large battery pack.
Hydrogen and Europe’s electricity challenge
For Rådström, the infrastructure challenge extends beyond individual charging or refueling stations. Europe has roughly 6 million trucks that need to transition away from diesel, she said, consuming around 60 million metric tons of diesel every year.
The broader truck figure is supported by data from the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, which counted 6.2 million trucks in use across the European Union in its Vehicles on European Roads 2026 report, published in January and based on 2024 registrations.
Rådström argued that converting the entire truck fleet to battery-electric propulsion would create a massive electricity requirement.
“When you would translate that into electricity, if you would imagine running them all on electricity, that’s around 500 terawatt-hours of energy, which is actually the full annual electrical consumption of the country of Germany,” she said.
Germany’s gross electricity production reached 509.2 terawatt-hours in 2025, according to the Federal Statistical Office’s gross electricity production series, updated this month.
Volvo Group President and CEO Martin Lundstedt said the hydrogen alliance reflects a lesson that the industry should have learned earlier during the electrification process.
“If we should have anticipated this type of lineup on the electric side five, six years ago, we shouldn’t have been standing yesterday saying that the transformation is moving too slow,” Lundstedt said.
The €6-per-kilogram target
For hydrogen trucking to become commercially viable, the price of the fuel remains a central issue.
The panel did not discuss actual pump prices during the IAA session. Moderator Andy Johnson ruled out questions on pricing because competing station operators were represented on the same stage.
Both truck manufacturers nevertheless identified the same benchmark: €6 ($6.92) per kilogram.
“When we can get down and that is our analysis at Volvo at a price point of 6 euro per kilogram in Europe, then we have the business case going,” Lundstedt said.
Rådström said Daimler’s analysis points to a similar threshold.
“Also our analysis shows it’s somewhere around 6 euro where it starts to get very, very competitive,” she said.
She added that the supply chain indicates such a price level is realistic over time, although not necessarily immediately.
“And my understanding from the supply chain is that’s realistic, not today, but over time. That’s where we get to, maybe 2030 or a little bit after that.”
Europe’s existing hydrogen stations were not designed for trucking
The infrastructure challenge is also a matter of pressure levels.
Europe currently has 187 hydrogen stations, according to Rådström, but most were designed around 350-bar systems.
“Most of them are 350 bar, so that actually doesn’t give you the added range that you need for it to be really beneficial for trucking,” she said.
Air Liquide is working to expand hydrogen production capacity. Armelle Levieux, a member of the company’s executive committee responsible for innovation, technology and hydrogen energy, pointed to several projects already operating or under development.
A 20-megawatt electrolyzer has been operating in Oberhausen, Germany, for more than two years. A 200-megawatt unit is scheduled to start in Normandy, France, before the end of this year, followed by another 200-megawatt project in Rotterdam, Netherlands, the following year.
For heavy-duty trucking, Levieux said three challenges have to be addressed simultaneously: establishing a viable station network, bringing fuel prices down and coordinating truck manufacturers with infrastructure operators.
“The end game is liquid hydrogen, because this is the only way to really have the volumes and the scale-up we need,” Levieux said. “And obviously this is what is going to drive us to diesel parity.”
TEAL Mobility, the 50/50 joint venture established by Air Liquide and TotalEnergies in 2024, currently operates 16 hydrogen stations in five countries under the TotalEnergies brand.
A TEAL executive said station operators occupy a critical position between hydrogen suppliers and truck operators. That also means they are among the first to feel the impact when either side of the market develops more slowly than expected.
The company is therefore targeting larger and faster stations capable of dispensing both gaseous and liquid hydrogen while the industry moves toward a common standard.
Volker Ebeling, senior vice president of new energy, supply and infrastructure at MB Energy, said the Hamburg-based company already operates hydrogen stations in northern Germany and Sweden.
Germany will not be expected to provide all the hydrogen required by the European market, he said. The Nordic countries are one potential source, while hydrogen itself is increasingly being treated as a global market.
Germany’s hydrogen funding program received more than twice the available demand
Germany has already attempted to address the chicken-and-egg problem between hydrogen trucks and refueling infrastructure.
Earlier this year, the German government launched a funding call covering hydrogen refueling stations and hydrogen-powered commercial vehicles together. The objective was to encourage both sides of the market to develop simultaneously.
The government allocated €220 million to the program. Applications, however, totaled more than €450 million, more than twice the amount available, according to Steffen Bilger, Germany’s federal minister of transport, who opened the IAA press conference in German.
The companies involved said the applications included requests for more than 70 high-capacity hydrogen stations and 800 heavy-duty trucks.
The funding was exhausted before the demand was.
“Without stations, no hydrogen trucks run. Without vehicles, nobody builds a nationwide station network,” Bilger said. “That shows the companies want to invest, and we want those investments to happen.”
Rådström used the opportunity to call for another funding round shortly after Bilger left the stage.
“It would be great to have another program so all these projects can have the first batch,” she said.
She argued that coordinating vehicle and infrastructure investment could allow the hydrogen ecosystem to develop more effectively than the industry’s current experience with electric trucking.
“The coordinated way of working can make us much more successful in building the hydrogen ecosystem than what we see on the electric side right now.”
Bosch calls for policy changes to create demand
For Bosch, the remaining obstacle is primarily economic.
Markus Heyn, a member of Bosch’s board of management and chairman of its mobility division, said vehicles equipped with Bosch fuel cell systems have already covered more than 30 million kilometers.
“The best technology isn’t viable if it’s not economically efficient,” Heyn said.
The solution, he argued, depends on scale.
“So we really need to bring the cost down, and we can only bring the cost down if we can scale it up. We need critical mass, and that’s why we need to create demand.”
Heyn outlined several policy measures the industry wants to see.
Among them are full implementation of the Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation, including targets extending beyond 2030; targeted funding for electrolysis and infrastructure; an energy-tax exemption applying both to fuel cells and hydrogen combustion engines; and the removal of the additionality principle, which he said is slowing production of renewable fuels of non-biological origin.
Toyota joins as a technology partner
Toyota is participating in the initiative as a technology partner, bringing more than three decades of fuel-cell development and supply-chain experience.
Executive Vice President Hiroki Nakajima said Toyota is also working separately with Scania and Iveco on hydrogen-powered heavy-duty transportation.
The involvement of manufacturers, energy companies, infrastructure operators and technology suppliers is intended to address the central challenge identified throughout the IAA discussion: hydrogen trucking requires the different parts of the ecosystem to develop at the same time.
Lundstedt ended the discussion by stressing the importance of starting the coordinated effort now rather than allowing another multi-year delay.
“I remain very positive about the discussion that we are starting here today, and not five years from now that we have seen in other experiences, because maybe it’s a little bit one or two years overdue already now,” he said.
“But let’s go for it now.”
