Daimler, Volvo lead hydrogen truck pact targeting €6/kg fuel

Two of Europe's largest truck makers say the battery-electric rollout moved faster than the charger network needed to support it. At the IAA Transportation show in Hanover, eight companies announced a joint pact to ensure hydrogen trucking does not repeat that mistake, with trucks, fuel, and stations arriving together.

Daimler Truck, Volvo Group, Toyota, Bosch, Air Liquide, TotalEnergies, TEAL Mobility, and MB Energy plan to make hydrogen trucking commercially viable in Europe by 2030. They intend to use Germany as a template and have called on the European Commission and other national governments to replicate their approach.

Daimler Truck showed its Mercedes-Benz NextGenH2 Truck at the event. Karin Rådström, president and CEO of Daimler Truck, said the company plans to put a small series of 100 trucks into customer operations from the end of 2026. The first batch of 50 is already sold. Customers have run the previous-generation GenH2 Truck almost 600,000 kilometers.

"This isn't some small side project for us," Rådström said. "It's a very important part of our strategy." The company is investing a mid-three-digit million euro amount in hydrogen trucks through the end of the decade. Its first hydrogen combustion engine trucks are being prepared for a market launch next year.

The NextGenH2 runs more than 1,000 kilometers on a single fill of liquid hydrogen. It carries 1.3 metric tons more payload than Daimler's battery-electric eActros 600 because it does not need to haul heavy batteries.

The grid capacity challenge

Rådström argued that hydrogen also addresses a grid capacity problem. Europe has roughly 6 million trucks to convert, burning about 60 million metric tons of diesel annually. She said converting this fleet entirely to electricity would require around 500 terawatt-hours of energy, which equals Germany's full annual electricity consumption. Germany's gross electricity production was 509.2 terawatt-hours in 2025.

Volvo Group President and CEO Martin Lundstedt framed the new alliance as a lesson from electrification. 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, he said.

The €6 per kilogram target

Hydrogen pricing is the central pillar for the business case. Although panelists were barred from discussing specific pump prices during the Q&A session, both truck makers independently named the same target: €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 agreed, stating, Also our analysis shows it's somewhere around 6 euro where it starts to get very, very competitive.

Building the station network

Europe currently has 187 hydrogen stations, but most are not suitable for long-haul trucking. 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, Rådström explained.

Air Liquide is building the supply side. Armelle Levieux, a member of the company's executive committee, detailed the upstream projects: a 20-megawatt electrolyzer has been running in Oberhausen, Germany, for over two years; a 200-megawatt unit will start in Normandy, France, before the end of this year; and another 200-megawatt unit will follow in Rotterdam, Netherlands, next year.

Levieux said heavy-duty trucking must solve three problems simultaneously: a viable station network, affordable fuel, and synchronization between truck makers and 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, she said. And obviously this is what is going to drive us to diesel parity.

TEAL Mobility, a joint venture between Air Liquide and TotalEnergies, runs 16 hydrogen stations across five countries. An executive from the venture said station operators sit at the crossroads of the hydrogen supply chain and truck adoption, making them the first to suffer if either side falters. The venture is targeting larger, faster stations that can dispense both gaseous and liquid hydrogen.

Government funding and policy asks

Germany opened a funding call earlier this year, deliberately bundling hydrogen refueling stations and hydrogen-powered commercial vehicles together. The government allocated €220 million. Applications sought more than €450 million, more than double the available funds, according to Steffen Bilger, Germany's federal minister of transport. The bids were for more than 70 high-capacity stations and 800 heavy-duty trucks.

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 immediately called for a second funding round from the stage.

Markus Heyn, a board member at Bosch, outlined a list of policy requests for the European Union. These include full implementation of the Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation with targets beyond 2030, targeted funding for electrolysis and infrastructure, an energy tax exemption for fuel cells and hydrogen combustion engines, and removal of the additionality principle he said is slowing production of renewable fuels.

Toyota is joining the pact as a technology partner, bringing over 30 years of fuel cell development. Executive Vice President Hiroki Nakajima said the company is also separately working with Scania and Iveco on hydrogen-powered heavy-duty transport.

Lundstedt closed the press conference by emphasizing the urgency. 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.