The US commercial fuel cell vehicle developer Hyzon Motors has founded a European subsidiary and announced the opening of its European headquarters in the Dutch city of Groningen.

Initiated by the Port of Rotterdam Authority and AirLiquide, several European companies have joined forces to provide a hydrogen corridor for fuel cell trucks in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. They target 1,000 trucks by 2025.

Switzerland’s second public H2 station has now gone into operation with the opening of Avia’s first hydrogen filling station in St. Gallen. By the end of 2020, five more filling station sites are to be built on the Lake Constance – Lake Geneva axis.

Today the European Commission has adopted the EU Strategy for Energy System Integration and Hydrogen. The former tackles charging infrastructure and grids, while the H2 Strategy focusses on long-haul and heavy-duty vehicles and hydrogen infrastructure.

In Germany, the Innovation Premium that spells out the doubling of the federal share of the Environmental Bonus for electric vehicles has come into force. The amended funding guidelines for the Environmental Bonus were published in the Federal Gazette, thus making it official.

The EDAG Group has started a joint research project with Hexagon Purus to develop a hybrid system of hydrogen and battery storage for integration into car floors. The customer should then be able to configure the number of storage units individually.

The Polish Ministry of Climate Change announced a few weeks ago that it intends to promote the purchase of electric buses with two programmes with a total volume of 90 million euros. Both support programmes are to make it easier for municipalities and districts to purchase electric buses for passenger transport.

Hyundai has now delivered the first ten units of its fuel cell truck XCIENT to Switzerland. A further 40 are to follow this year, and a total of 1,600 of the H2 trucks are planned for the Swiss market by 2025. Hyundai is also working on an H2 tractor with a 1000-km range.

In Norway, 5,041 new electric cars were registered in June. Electric cars accounted for 44 per cent of new passenger car registrations. With 707 units, the VW e-Golf was the most popular model across all drive types.

JCB has just presented its prototype of a hydrogen-powered excavator. According to the manufacturer, the 20-tonne 220X excavator equipped with a fuel cell system is the first of its kind in the industry. The excavator has been tested on JCB’s test site for more than a year.

The Austrian government is increasing purchase premiums and subsidies for charging infrastructure for zero-emission and plug-in hybrid vehicles from 1 July. This includes zero-emission and plug-in hybrid cars, zero-emission heavy and light commercial vehicles, zero-emission buses, and electric two-wheelers – including e-motorbikes, mopeds, e-bikes and e-cargo bikes. 

The six largest municipalities in Denmark will now procure only electric city buses from 2021. To this end, the cities of Copenhagen, Aarhus, Odense, Aalborg, Vejle and Frederiksberg have now signed the Climate Cooperation Agreement with the Danish Ministry of Transport.

California now requires manufacturers to sell a gradually increasing proportion of electric trucks, vans and pickup trucks from 2024 onwards until 2035. By the year 2045, every new commercial vehicle sold in the US state should have zero-emission propulsion.

Commercial electric vehicle supplier Lightning Systems continues to grow and expand its operations. With more than $32 million in pending orders from commercial and government fleets, the company is more than tripling the size of its manufacturing, research and development facility in Loveland, Colorado.

The UK government has awarded £73.5 million in funding through the Advanced Propulsion Centre. This includes ten projects in the automotive sector to develop technologies to reduce CO2 emissions. A significant proportion of the money is being spent on furthering electric vehicle production and technology.

ZeroAvia, which specialises in electric aircraft propulsion systems, has now completed the maiden flight of a six-seater battery-electric aircraft at Cranfield Airport as part of the HyFlyer project supported by the British government.

The Chinese government has now made the final decision to extend its quotas for New Energy Vehicles (NEV) beyond 2020. This includes electric cars and plug-in hybrids.

The commercial vehicle retrofitter Quantron has announced the Energon, a 44-tonne fuel cell truck with a range of around 700 kilometres. The vehicle can be ordered immediately, and deliveries are to start next year.

Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB) is also relying on hydrogen as part of the conversion of its bus fleet. After TMB had ordered a total of 23 articulated battery-electric buses from Solaris and Irizar in February, a tender for the purchase of the first fuel cell buses has now been launched.

The Australian start-up H2X is planning a series of locally produced fuel cell vehicles. The first vehicle from the newly founded company from New South Wales is a hydrogen fuel cell-powered SUV called Snowy to be launched in 2022.

According to Nikola CEO Trevor Milton, the US manufacturer known mainly for its fuel cell and battery trucks is in talks with three car manufacturers for a joint venture to produce its electrically powered pickup truck ‘Badger’.

The Israeli air taxi developer Urban Aeronautics has entered into a cooperation with the Californian startup HyPoint to use its fuel cell technology in its vertical take-off aircraft CityHawk. Urban Aeronautics is currently still using a hybrid drive in the CityHawk VTOL.

Daimler has taken an organisational step towards a commercial vehicle fuel cell joint venture with Volvo Trucks: In the newly founded Daimler Truck Fuel Cell GmbH & Co. KG, all of the Group’s fuel cell activities will now be bundled together.

Toyota is founding a joint venture in China with FAW, Dongfeng, GAC, BAIC and SinoHytec for the joint development of fuel cell systems for commercial vehicles under the name of United Fuel Cell System R&D (FCRD).

Continental’s drive division Vitesco Technologies has selected Rohm Semiconductor as its preferred partner for silicon carbide power semiconductors. Vitesco Technologies will use Rohm’s SiC technologies to increase the efficiency of its power electronics for electric vehicles.

The US manufacturer Nikola, best known for its plans for fuel cell and battery trucks, has placed an order worth over 30 million dollars with the Norwegian hydrogen specialist Nel for the supply of electrolysers.

In an economic stimulus package following the Corona crisis, the German government has included several measures to promote electric mobility. The most powerful one is that the state is doubling its share of the environmental bonus in the form of a new “innovation premium”.

In Norway, 3,444 all-electric cars were registered in May, accounting for 43.1 per cent of all new passenger car registrations. With 610 units, the VW e-Golf was the most popular model across all drive types.

An update was published on the progress of the German ‘AutoStack Industrie’ project launched in 2017. The project will run until the end of 2021, involving five OEMs and various suppliers working together to bring key technologies for the production of stacks for fuel cell vehicles to industrial maturity.

Rome’s transport company ATAC has failed to procure hydrogen buses. Somehow, not a single bid was submitted for a tender for five H2 buses published in February 2020. And this is not the first time: At the beginning of 2019 another hydrogen bus tender for Rome was equally unsuccessful.