The company is set to deliver a BrightDrop Zevo 400 and BrightDrop Zevo 600 electric van by Q4 this year. The vehicles will be produced at GM’s CAMI Assembly plant in Ontario, Canada.

About the retrofit of the H2 ICE engine, Lord Bamford, JCB Chairman, said: “We have retrofitted this vehicle with a JCB hydrogen engine to demonstrate how simple it will be to convert existing vans and to show that it is not only construction and agricultural machines that can be powered by hydrogen. While converting vans will not be for JCB to do, it does prove there is something else other than batteries that can work very effectively.”

With USD10m in additional shareholder funds the company will focus on deployment of electric tarmac buses at Bengaluru international airport and development of a mid-mile heavy-duty EV truck platform.

The Ghent factory is assembling battery electric versions of the heavy-duty FH, FM, and FMX ranges on the same production line as the diesel and natural gas ones.

Lumax Auto already supplies engine oil under the the 'Ultra' brand name.

New trails of electric parcel delivery vans will take place shortly ahead of an announcement by First Hydrogen of when and where it will to start series production. First Hydrogen says the aim of the trials is to gather more data on fuel consumption, usage and efficiency, to calculate the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) more accurately.

The Ferndale facility has the capacity to produce up to 850 ‘Vicinity Classic’ and ‘Vicinity Lightning’ (i.e., ICE and EV) buses and 6,250 ‘VMC 1200’ battery electric trucks per year.

The assets include production lines for battery pack assembly, battery testing and validation equipment, computer numerical control equipment, and module enclosure production.

The planned factory will be built in the Rijnmond region of the Netherlands before 2026 and will allow the Dutch startup to scale up production of its fuel cell systems to 1,000 units annually.

As manufacturers increasingly move towards producing electric, “software-defined” vehicles, Volkswagen CEO, Oliver Blume said that aesthetics will replace “traditional unique selling propositions” (i.e., technical design) as the key differentiator between brands.

The vehicle shown was a 26-tonne ‘E-Tech D Wide’ 6x2 chassis with inward folding "bus-style" doors and low step height.

The battery assembly launch will allow Scania to commence serial production of heavy-duty electric vehicles at Södertälje.