Renault looks to commercial vehicles to lead hydrogen charge

Commercial vehicles are the most likely champions of future hydrogen fueled powertrains where the BEV’s range and charging issues are too challenging.

That’s the view of Guido Haak, Renault’s executive vice-president of its Advanced Product and Planning Group. TU-Automotive caught up with Haak at the Paris Motor Show 2022 to hear that Renault is not placing all its zero-emission eggs in the BEV basket. He told us: “Well, we’ve started to look at hydrogen. First of all, for the LVCs and heavy commercial vehicles because there the use case is very clear. Right away, you have a business case that when you’re driving with a lorry more than 200 kilometers (124 miles) per day, you have to recharge and that’s really much quicker with a with a hydrogen. The same is true whenever you are driving longer distances.”

Haak admitted that hydrogen fuel has its own challenges with infrastructure and storage where extra cooling facilities have to be in place to keep the gas in its compact liquified form. He added: “Of course, right now, there is the issue of adequate infrastructure, this depends very much on what proprietary infrastructure you have as a customer. So, I mean with LCVs, that’s less of a problem because usually they have some place where they are parking the vehicles or, in between on a longer route, they have a station in between. However, in terms of passenger cars this will place a much heavier load on infrastructure. The actual the storage of hydrogen is a nightmare. Also, the topic of the way that the fueling works is more capital intensive than what you have currently with electricity charging. That is the biggest issue right now when we want to roll out hydrogen for passenger car.”

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