Daimler Truck sends hydrogen truck to the Alps for testing
The German manufacturer announced nine months ago that it was sending the first five pre-series GenH2 trucks to customers for testing after long internal test drives. The quintet will be tested for a year for suitability for everyday use. The vehicle’s range should exceed 1,000 kilometres, as Daimler Truck itself demonstrated last September: a road-legal prototype travelled 1,047 kilometres on a single tank of fuel. Now, with the winter test, the company has taken another important step in the development process – especially since this was a set of the next generation of prototypes that had to prove itself here.
Daimler Truck sent two vehicles from the next development stage to the Simplon Pass in the Swiss canton of Valais to test the limits of the hydrogen truck in adverse conditions of cold and snow and the midst of mountainous terrain. “For the further development of our Mercedes-Benz GenH2 Truck, we are seamlessly building on the experiences of the first prototype generation and are therefore able to test the improved technology under extreme conditions right from the outset,” explains Rainer Müller-Finkeldei, Head of Mercedes-Benz Trucks Product Engineering. With a height of over 2,000 metres above sea level and an ascent from 600 to 2,000 metres, the route over the Simplon Pass offered good conditions for testing the interaction of the fuel cell unit with further developed components.
During the test, the interaction of all essential components was checked, including the fuel cell, the high-voltage battery, the e-axle, the tank system and the thermal management. According to those responsible, a particular focus was on the use of the topography-dependent cruise control (‘Predictive Powertrain Controls’). The aim was to use the battery in combination with the fuel cell efficiently, both in terms of retrieving energy for propulsion and for recuperation when driving downhill.
The two hydrogen-powered trucks completed an extensive test programme over a period of 14 days, with a total vehicle weight of up to 40 tonnes. According to the manufacturer, they covered a total of 6,500 kilometres, crossing mountain passes with a total ascent of 83,000 metres. The developers involved describe the approximately 20-kilometre-long ascents and descents with a gradient of 10 to 12 per cent as particularly challenging, adding up to a total of 1,600 kilometres. During the winter trials, the fuel cell trucks were refuelled using a mobile hydrogen filling station from Air Products.
Daimler Truck did benefit from public funding for the development of the GenH2: in autumn 2024, the German Federal Transport Ministry and the federal states of Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate pledged a total of 226 million euros in funding to the manufacturer. The grants are earmarked for the development, small-scale production and customer deployment of 100 fuel cell trucks. The tractor units are being built at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Wörth and are to go into operation with various customers from the end of 2026.
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