H2 Trucks are dead, just from the economics. Watch the latest video from Elektrotrucker on youtube where he does the math. His BEV long haul actros comes out to a price per km of 0.35 EUR whereas the h2 Truck ends up at 1.35 EUR. There is a reason why Charging networks for BEV trucks are expanding while h2 stations are being taken down.
Couldn't find where he or how you arrive at those numbers. Anyway it's not solely about energy costs per km but total cost. And here the lower weight of FCPM trucks comes into play. What they discuss at the ceremony:
A truck, including its load, must not weigh more than 40 tons. Let's take two comparable trucks: one with a battery, the other with a fuel cell. It turns out that the fuel cell truck's drive system is four tons lighter. This means its payload capacity is greater. Therefore, up to 20 percent fewer trucks are needed to transport the same goods. Instead of five trucks, there are only four on the road.
In the best case you can save acquisition costs, driver wages and insurance for one truck per every four others. It's going to take a while until you make that up with saved energy costs.
"take a while"?
A quarter to a third of a conventional European long haul truck is fuel.
And what unrealistic truck are you looking at? European long haul battery trucks currently have around 600 kWh of LFP; that's just around 3 tons; how is adding a fuel cell negative 1 ton of weight? No, the cable to the charging port is light enough to carry by one human, even if it's not negligible, that's still more than an order of magnitude below so won't change anything here.
Note that the trucks are already allowed 2 tons extra road weight, so it's actually not unusual to have basically the same load capacity (within +-500kg).
It does matter if you have a rotating crew driving express long haul, because then you don't have a mandatory 45 minutes of lunch break during which you can plug in to a 300~400 kW charger (and e.g. take a walk or visit a bathroom or actually have lunch) to get a shift limit of range out of such a "small" battery.
They probably took a battery truck with (in a worker-and-road-safety oriented market like Europe) excessively much no-recharge range to match their fuel cell setup. But you do that because it's fairly tame to add the marginal range of a full shift limit to a fuel cell truck; it's not economic to size a long haul battery to suffice without recharging for anywhere near the weight limit.
Green hydrogen is substantially more expensive than diesel per energy; and electric trucks can already beat diesel's in TCO depending on the kind of usage (e.g. notably express long haul is not competitive, but most highway single-driver operations are).
I'm no expert but a far stretch but if this most basic fact is already wrong then my trust in the remaining stuff diminishes. On top of that they is only relevant if all truck loads were limited by weight.
So, I believe that argument to be wrong in its entirety. And if we then factor in the CO2 costs, hydrogen is the clear loser in all regards.
It's much simpler. In the EU, truckers have to do mandatory 45 min breaks after 4 1/2 hours of driving. With the latest truck generation, this is enough time to recharge to get through the rest of the shift. 400 kW charging is sufficient in this scenario. No wasteful expensive H2 or fancy battery swapping technology required.
Those BEV trucks come in both swappable battery and fast-charging models. Most support dual chargers for simultaneous charging. A 600kWh battery can be fully charged in about an hour with two 350kW chargers. Two more common 180kW charger takes around two hours. Some trucks even support four chargers at once. But for the small and cheap trucks used in city, they may take 4 hours for charging to run 200km.
I've also know some trucks used in mines that don't even need charging. The electricity generated when descending with a full load is enough to power the empty truck back uphill.
> I've also know some trucks used in mines that don't even need charging. The electricity generated when descending with a full load is enough to power the empty truck back uphill.
Mines tend to be underground, or then a big hole in the ground, so the truck would be going uphill when fully loaded and down empty, no?
Unless we're talking about a mine up on a mountain?
We use fewer critical raw materials for our fuel cell, unlike the lithium and cobalt typically used in batteries. Our use of these materials is considerably reduced.
Sodium batteries won't help here as they are even more heavy.
For the infrastructure, for long-distance transport, we need approximately 140 filling stations across all of Europe. That's a completely different scale than for battery-electric cars. In other words, there isn't that much to do.
In Germany alone there are about 14000 gas stations, 350 at the Autobahn; housing some of the 160000 charging points.
Modern trucks don't use cobalt batteries. LFP are better for that workload as they can be cycled much deeper (making up almost all the weight difference when just looking at nominal capacity) and are substantially safer and actually somewhat cheaper than the NMC chemistry that uses the cobalt.
It's for long distance/quick refill operations. I wonder how the BEV trucks handle this. Can they swap batteries or are limited to shorter distances?
Here's the award ceremony in German https://minily.org/gfp25-award-bosch-long-distance-truck-fce...