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The run started Monday 25th September in the afternoon at Mercedes-Benz Truck’s Customer Center in Woerth am Rhein and finished on Tuesday morning 26th September in Germany’s capital city Berlin. The truck, powered by a cell-centric fuel cell system and equipped with a liquid hydrogen tank system, completed the run fully loaded and with a gross vehicle weight of 40 tons under real-world conditions. The record run with sealed tanks and controlled mileage was independently verified by TÜV Rheinland.
Ahead of the run, the Mercedes-Benz GenH2 Truck was fueled with liquid hydrogen at Daimler Truck’s filling station at the company’s development and testing centre in Woerth. The hydrogen supplied by Air Liquide is of renewable origin, as it has been produced from biomethane with guarantees of origin. During the refuelling process, cryogenic liquid hydrogen at minus 253 degrees Celsius was filled into two 40 kg tanks mounted on either side of the truck chassis. Thanks to the particularly good insulation of the vehicle tanks, the hydrogen can be kept at temperature for a sufficiently long time without active cooling. Both tanks were sealed by TÜV Rheinland before the start of the journey.
Daimler Truck prefers liquid hydrogen in the development of hydrogen-based drives. In this aggregate state the energy carrier has a significantly higher energy density in relation to volume compared to gaseous hydrogen. As a result, more hydrogen can be carried, which significantly increases the range and enables comparable performance of the vehicle with that of a conventional diesel truck.
After the successful record run, Andreas Gorbach, Member of the Board of Management of Daimler Truck AG, Head of Truck Technology, drove the truck across the finish line in the Ministergarten in Berlin: "By cracking the 1,000-kilometer mark with one fill, we have now impressively demonstrated: Hydrogen in trucks is anything but hot air, and we are making very good progress on the road to series production. At the same time, our record run today is a reminder that decarbonizing transportation requires two other factors in addition to the right drive technologies: a green energy infrastructure and competitive costs compared to conventional vehicles."
A prototype Mercedes-Benz GenH2 Truck covered a distance of 1,047 km between Woerth am Rhein and Berlin
Since 2021, first prototypes of the Mercedes-Benz GenH2 Truck are undergoing testing and have most recently demonstrated their capabilities at the Brenner Pass, one of Europe's busiest and most challenging transit routes. The successful #HydrogenRecordRun now marks a further milestone on the road to sustainable transportation. First fuel-cell trucks are expected to be tested in customer hands in the coming years, while the goal remains firmly set to introduce the series version of the Mercedes-Benz GenH2 Truck in the second half of the decade.
Source: Daimler Trucks
