Daimler Truck  relies on hydrogen drive for buses

The truck and bus manufacturer Daimler Truck is known to rely not only on the pure battery-electric drive for its trucks but also on hydrogen for emission-free and quiet vehicles. Group CEO Martin Daum now said that Daimler Truck plans to equip buses with a hydrogen drive in the future in addition to fuel cell trucks. "The bus will come after the fuel cell truck," said CEO Martin Daum in an interview with Welt am Sonntag. The hydrogen drive will "definitely be used in long-distance coach transport".

Especially away from the main traffic arteries, hydrogen tanks make more sense as energy storage than batteries, Daum thinks, whereas the purely battery-based drive is "the better option in city traffic". Daum also let it be known that Daimler Truck will "definitely meet the EU's CO2 fleet targets in 2025 and also in 2030" and reiterated that the manufacturer's goal is to "no longer deliver vehicles with combustion engines in the most important markets from 2039 onwards."

Daimler Trucks also wants to put self-driving trucks on the road from around 2025: "We are working flat out on the autonomous truck," Daum said in the interview. This is expected for "sometime between 2025 and 2030". However, he did not want to commit to a more concrete timeframe. Initially, he said, the plan is for autonomous trucks in the US to drive in so-called hub-to-hub traffic, i.e. from one location near a highway to another that is also on a highway. "This can be an answer to the driver shortage: the unpleasant part of the journey, the long distances, will be taken over by the computer," Daum said. For more complex driving situations, however, human drivers will still be needed behind the wheel of a bus or truck, he said.