Volvo and Daimler bet on hydrogen truck boom this decade
There&#x27;s obviously a lot of complexities here and clear reasons why many in the transport industry think this is the solution. If they didn&#x27;t Volvo and Daimler would be announcing their bet on BEV, right? Unlike oil majors, they have no sunk-cost reason to prefer one over the other and a lot of the technical change is shared between the platforms. A FCEV is just a BEV with a small battery, a small fuel cell, and a big hydrogen tank.<p>That being the case, it feels a bit easy to just say, &quot;obviously this doesn&#x27;t make sense&quot;.<p>However there are a few important differences between trucks and passenger cars that actually reduce some of the issues with EV trucking. A long-haul truck probably needs about 700kWh to 1MWh of battery storage. How long does that take to charge?<p>Some constraints on passenger car charging become less relevant when you&#x27;re serving a professional audience and can have staff on-site to help. Cable thickness &#x2F; weight is an ergonomic constraint that can be relaxed if you are serving truckers and not the 99th percentile of the public. You can even mount them on articulated arms on a gantry so that you&#x27;re not dragging them around.<p>Multiple cables charging in parallel? Inconvenient on a passenger car, perfectly sensible on a truck.<p>Liquid cooling loop to external chiller? Again, that just doesn&#x27;t work if you&#x27;re building tens of thousands of chargers for the public, may well be worthwhile on network of truck refilling stations.<p>In the EU, there is already a mandatory 45 minute break every 4 hrs 30 mins. So there is no need for trucks that can drive for 12 hours on a tank. (US rules are in theory laxer but in practice insurance companies also insist on break rules).<p>So the real question is whether you can make the charging process fast enough to get approx. 4:30 extra capacity in 45 minutes. That&#x27;s probably about 800kWh in 40 minutes of actual charging (assume time to connect and disconnect) or 1.2MW.<p>350kW chargers are installed and operating now (though I&#x27;m not sure how many cars can actually use them at that power) so naively you would think that running 4 of those in parallel would give you the charging tech required to run trucks today.<p>Hydrogen may still be cheaper for truck transport once you work out all the costs and logistics but I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s wildly impossible either.<p>The big advantage that hydrogen has is that the cost of hydrogen tanks scales much more slowly than batteries. If pack price is $100&#x2F;kWh then you need $70k-$100k worth of batteries. Doesn&#x27;t seem crazy for a truck but a tank that can hold equivalent H2 at pressure is much cheaper. Takes up a lot of space but trucking is mass limited rather than volume limited.