New Zealand’s first commercial fleet of hydrogen-powered heavy trucks is finally moving from prototype to highway. After a five-year build, Taranaki-based Hiringa Energy and Auckland-based TR Group are in final negotiations to put twelve hydrogen fuel cell trucks into customer hands, with the remaining eight units in a wider twenty-truck programme due to follow from July.
The push comes at a moment when New Zealand’s freight operators are scrambling for alternatives to diesel. Statistics New Zealand reported last week that pump diesel rose nearly 37 percent in April alone, the steepest one-month jump on record, as the conflict in Iran continues to choke off supply through the Strait of Hormuz.
Hiringa chief executive Andrew Clennett told RNZ his phone has not stopped ringing since the fuel shock hit. “The market is definitely showing a lot more interest now,” he said. “With the Ukraine war bringing a fuel crisis and now another one which is bigger and worse and longer, it would be a brave director of a company that would bank on not having this again.”
The trucks themselves are no light-duty utility experiment. They are 50-tonne prime movers built on the DAF CF 530 platform by Christchurch-based Global Bus Ventures, with two Toyota 85-kilowatt fuel cells and a 124-kilowatt-hour battery feeding a single 350-kilowatt electric motor through a six-speed gearbox. Onboard hydrogen storage of 52 kilograms gives 450 to 500 kilometres of range, with refuelling taking about fifteen minutes.
That combination means the trucks can do the same five-and-a-half-hour driving block as a diesel rig, then refill and head back out, without the multi-hour wait that battery-electric heavies still require. TR Group project manager Grant Doull said nine of the twenty trucks had already come off the Global Bus Ventures conversion line in Rolleston, with the remaining eleven scheduled to land at TR’s Penrose depot from July onwards.
Real-world numbers are starting to back the technology. A hydrogen prime mover running for New Zealand Post has now logged more than 250,000 kilometres, and test driver Paul Fair has personally clocked up 10,000 kilometres on the first units. On a cents-per-kilometre basis, hydrogen is currently running cheaper than diesel for the operators in the trial, Doull said, mostly because diesel has lifted so violently in the past two months.
Hiringa already operates three hydrogen refuelling stations, at Wiri in south Auckland, Te Rapa in Hamilton, and Palmerston North, with a fourth at Tauranga deep into construction. Together the four sites are designed to cover ninety-five percent of North Island freight routes between WhangΔrei and the Wellington ferry. Each station produces hydrogen on-site by electrolysis, taking advantage of off-peak renewable electricity, which keeps the carbon profile genuinely green rather than relying on imported grey hydrogen made from natural gas.
The fleet has not arrived without taxpayer help. Government records show six million dollars in direct truck funding came out of the Covid Response and Recovery Fund, with a further sixteen million dollar loan extended to Hiringa to build the stations. The Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority still has around twenty-four million dollars sitting in its low-emissions heavy vehicle co-funding programme, willing to cover up to a quarter of the price difference for any operator switching out of diesel.
It has not been a smooth ride. Hiringa’s original US truck supplier, Hyzon Motors, collapsed into bankruptcy partway through the programme, which is why Global Bus Ventures ended up doing the local conversion work on DAF chassis and why four Hyundai Xcient rigid units were brought in to plug the gap. The original launch event at Hampton Downs in March 2025 promoted twenty trucks. Fourteen months later the road-ready count is still under half that, and Doull conceded uptake has been slow because of post-Covid recession pressures and the cost-of-living squeeze on freight customers.
Not everyone is convinced hydrogen is the right answer for heavy transport. EECA sector lead Richard Briggs notes that battery-electric drivetrains are three to five times more efficient than hydrogen once you account for the energy lost making, compressing, transporting and converting the hydrogen back to electricity at the wheels. University of Canterbury researcher Rebecca Peer argues hydrogen really only earns its keep when there are very long distances or highly variable routes with unpredictable fuelling times, which describes a slice of the freight task rather than the whole of it.
The counter-argument from the trucking side is that there is no heavy-vehicle fast-charging infrastructure anywhere in New Zealand today, so battery-electric forty-four-tonners are not a realistic choice for an Auckland-to-Wellington overnight haul, while hydrogen already is. With transport responsible for eighteen percent of New Zealand’s total greenhouse gas emissions, and global diesel prices unlikely to settle anytime soon, the next twelve months will be the first real-world test of whether hydrogen heavy freight can find a commercial foothold in this country or whether it remains a deep-pockets-only experiment.
What do you think? Are hydrogen trucks the right call for New Zealand long-haul freight, or should the subsidy money be steered toward battery-electric and overhead catenary instead? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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