Heavy long-haul road freight is among the hardest parts of transport to decarbonise. Three of the world's largest commercial vehicle manufacturers are now pooling their efforts on one of the possible routes, at a single site in south-western Germany: Daimler Truck, the Volvo Group and Toyota have signed a binding agreement under which the Japanese group joins the fuel cell developer cellcentric as an equal owner. Each of the three will hold a third of the shares.
The agreement follows a letter of intent from late March 2026. Toyota is buying in through a capital increase; completion is subject to regulatory approval and is expected around the turn of the year 2026/2027. Cellcentric is to remain an independently managed company, and in all their other businesses the three groups stay competitors.
What Toyota brings above all is time: roughly three decades of fuel cell development, a series production car in the Mirai, and truck partnerships with Hino and Kenworth. According to Daimler Truck, the collaboration focuses first on the level of the individual fuel cell — the component that determines cost, efficiency and industrial scalability.
One site, 700 patents
Cellcentric was founded in 2021 as a joint venture of Daimler Truck and Volvo. More than 560 people work at Kirchheim/Teck, Esslingen and Stuttgart, as well as in Burnaby, Canada; the company holds around 700 individual patents. Its systems are not limited to tractor units: coaches, rail vehicles, stationary power generation and heavy working machinery are all target markets. The portfolio includes the BZA150 with 150 kilowatts, presented in 2022, and the BZA375 with 375 kilowatts, shown only at the 2026 IAA commercial vehicle show.
How close the technology is to the road is shown by the Mercedes-Benz NextGenH2 Truck, which still uses the smaller unit. From the end of 2026 it is to be built at the Wörth am Rhein plant in a small series of about 100 tractor units, with ranges well beyond 1,000 kilometres and refuelling times of ten to 15 minutes. The logistics firm Dachser is due to receive the first vehicle at the end of December 2026, with two more by mid-2027. Daimler Truck plans full series production for the early 2030s.
The hydrogen route is not uncontested: conversion losses are larger than with battery-electric drivetrains, and the refuelling network is largely absent. Daimler Truck therefore pursues a dual strategy, "battery first, hydrogen second", and sees hydrogen's strengths on distances above 1,000 kilometres, at high payloads and in energy-intensive duties such as refrigerated transport. Board member Andreas Gorbach calculates that charging ten long-haul trucks simultaneously in 45 minutes would need around ten megawatts — the demand of a small town. Building both infrastructures in parallel, he argues, is therefore the faster path. That is precisely where the three partners now intend to work together with industry associations.