The funding package, dubbed ‘Hy2Move’, is the fourth “Important Project of Common European Interest” (IPCEI) related to hydrogen which the European Commission has approved over the past two years.

The truck displayed at the show was a ‘Freightliner Cascadia’ 6x2 tractor unit powered by Symbio’s 400-kW ‘StackPack’ fuel cell system - developed for the “H2 Central Valley Express” project.

A USD1.98m grant awarded by the U.S. Department of Transportation will fund a six-month project, called ‘SMART Rider’, to pilot three buses with collision mitigation systems.

Called ‘FFB PreFab’, the 6,450-square-metre building is an initial step towards building an even larger facility, the ‘FFB Fab’, for research into large-scale industrial methods of battery cell production.

Mullen is now entirely exempt from export duties and taxes by U.S. customs for any Class 1 and 3 vehicles sold abroad which are produced at the Tunica site.

The ‘Automated Vehicles Act’ (passed on 20 May) will require self-driving vehicles to achieve a safety level “as high as careful and competent drivers” before being allowed onto public roads.

The amended legislation will further reduce CO2 emissions from road transport and introduce new targets for 2030, 2035 and 2040. 

According to the EU, the dates of application depend on vehicle type: “30 months for new types of cars and vans, and 42 months for new cars and vans. 48 months for new types of buses, trucks and trailers, and 60 months for new buses, lorries and trailers. 30 months for new systems, components or separate technical units to be fitted in cars and vans, and 48 months for those to be fitted in buses, lorries and trailers.”

The TransMilenio system in the city of Bogotá, Colombia, claims to have an electric bus fleet of over 1,600 vehicles, the second largest in South America behind Santiago in Chile.

Delegates of Hydrogen UK’s annual conference, held at the National Conference Centre in Birmingham on 12 March, left the event with no doubts about the future of the burgeoning hydrogen economy. Opening the conference, Clare Jackson, CEO of Hydrogen UK, declared that “net zero is not possible without hydrogen”. The burning question is, will the UK have any significant part in its development?

The German Ministry of Transport confirmed to local media, that this is the last time the federal government funds or subsidises e-buses or e-trucks. Funds allocated for projects up until 2027 will remain. A combination of high inflation, energy instability (gas supply from Russia) and a downturn in productivity has resulted in the German government revising its 2024 economic forecast down from 1.3% to just 0.2%.

While the city of Jakarta commits to being fully electric by 2030, the Indonesian and South Korean governments have signed a bilateral cooperation agreement to develop a public transportation network using battery-powered buses across cities in Indonesia.