The Ministry of Transport in Japan is considering introducing dedicated lanes for self-driving trucks on highways connecting major cities to help reduce congestion and address driver shortages.

At a Venture Logistics facility in the Midwest, the project partners will test a 500-kW charging system with two Class 8 battery electric trucks to see what benefits wireless charging could bring to goods transportation.

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.

Four minibuses – Ford ‘E-Transit’ vans retrofitted with Perrone’s ‘TONY’ self-driving hardware – will transport passengers on a 10.8-mile route through the city of Detroit, connecting Michigan Central Station (set to reopen this June) and the Pensole Lewis College of Business and Design.

“The 5,000 Hydrogen Vehicle Challenge”, a government programme which supported the development of the fuel station, says the opening of the station on Highway 2 marked a “significant milestone” in its project to put 5,000 hydrogen or dual fuel vehicles on the road in Alberta province.

Hexagon has supplied Ford Trucks with a complete hydrogen fuel storage system for the development of a fuel-cell electric-powered truck (F-Max FCEV) prototype. As a partner in the project, Ford Trucks will develop and deliver the F-Max FCEV, which will operate as part of a larger fleet of zero-emission trucks collecting data from around Europe.

The project’s explicit goal is to “reduce the overall time and cost of battery production by at least 20%, in addition to lowering the number of physical experiments required and reducing material costs.” This will ultimately increase the competitiveness of the European battery industry.  

The demonstrator, located at Michelin’s plant in the commune of Bassens, is tooled to produce butadiene, an organic compound of hydrogen and carbon, from ethanol derived from biomass.

The multiple electric truck trials throughout 2023, aim to show that electric trucks are ready to replace diesel HGVs and can deliver the same service when the right infrastructure, systems, processes, and business models are deployed.