How Hyundai plans to roll out 1,600 hydrogen commercial vehicles by 2025

Here's why Hyundai is so focused on hydrogen

Justin Pritchard

Apr 29, 2021 • May 20, 2021 • 2 minute read • Join the conversation

Hyundai Xcient Photo by Hyundai

With the launch of the XCIENT truck last fall, Hyundai premiered the world’s first mass-produced heavy truck powered by fuel cell. Equipped with a 32-kilogram hydrogen tank, the XCIENT can travel about 400 emissions-free kilometres in a 4×2 model with refrigerated upfit configuration and a 34-ton truck and trailer configuration. The XCIENT can carry a load similar to a comparable diesel truck, and refuelling the cell with hydrogen takes about 8 to 20 minutes.

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Vehicles like this will play a role as companies globally shift towards cleaner transportation options – and the technology behind them will one day be more widely available in passenger cars and trucks, too. The XCIENT previews what’s possible, and what’s coming, for hydrogen power, as Hyundai plans to stick with the technology and roll out some 1,600 fuel cell electric commercial vehicles by 2025.

A fuel cell vehicle works similarly to an electric vehicle with clean motor-drive putting electric power to the ground. Where an electric vehicle uses a battery to store electrical energy, a fuel cell vehicle instead generates electricity on demand, using stored hydrogen gas.

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In an electric vehicle, there are no emissions. In a hydrogen vehicle, the only by-product of fuel cell is a small amount of pure water vapour.

Hyundai’s already delivered the first examples of the XCIENT hydrogen heavy truck to customers in Switzerland, and is increasing production capacity to support expansion into Europe, the US, and China.

The automaker is pursuing partnerships within the North American market as well, around logistics and mass production. Hyundai says North American market will even get a hydrogen-powered 6×4 tractor model en route to projected sales of more than 12,000 hydrogen trucks on US roads by 2030.

Is there a hydrogen-powered car in your future? If so, it might look like the Hyundai Nexo.

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With no CO2 emitted and water droplets as the only emission, this hydrogen-powered hatchback can run about 570 kilometres clean and green and with electric quiet and smoothness. Unlike an electric car, you can refill its empty tank, replenishing those 570 kilometres of electrically-propelled range in about 5 minutes. Speaking of innovative, Nexo drivers can even use their vehicle as a portable generating station, running the clean and quiet fuel cell to make electricity for the campsite.

Though you won’t see a lot of fuel-cell powered vehicles on the road right now, Hyundai says their fuel-cell powered NEXO and Tucson fuel cell SUV have done more 11 million cumulative miles to date. That’s 437 times around the circumference of our planet.

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Today’s shopper is increasingly after new and innovative ways to get around, and Hyundai says that demand for clean transport solutions continues to grow globally. Here in Canada, automakers are reporting big interest in SUV’s, trucks and utility models – and increasing interest in clean and electrified technology, where hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles exist.

Automakers like Toyota, Honda, BMW and others all have hydrogen-powered models on the road now in select markets, used partly to validate, test, and further develop the technology for the future.

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