Iveco Group is preparing to launch a range of hydrogen-powered light commercial vehicles.

The company sees this as an opportunity to improve its competitiveness on alternative platforms and powertrains as fuel prices skyrocket following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

It is also for this purpose that the company is developing its partnership with Hyundai, as announced last week. CEO Gerrit Marx said so in an interview with Bloomberg.

“The worsening of the energy crisis two weeks after the war is a wake-up call for consumers, but in the long run it will boost the energy transition. People will be thinking more and more about their energy consumption decisions,” Marx said.

Hydrogen as a means of making light commercial vehicles low-emission has already been taken up by several players in the automotive industry, such as Hyvia, the joint venture launched by Renault last summer, and Plug Power, which recently presented a range of new vehicles with fuel cell propulsion. It will be interesting to see which models Iveco plans to provide with hydrogen propulsion. That can hardly be other than with the Daily or with distribution trucks, as for the heavy-duty segment Iveco is a partner of Nikola.

In the same interview, Marx also added that Iveco Group is considering withdrawing from the Iveco-Amt joint venture in Russia and has stopped vehicle deliveries to Moscow and Belarus.

Iveco-Amt, of which Iveco owns 33 percent of the capital, is responsible for the assembly of Iveco trucks in the city of Miass. Formerly called Iveco-Uralaz, it was established in 1994 by Iveco with Gazprom and Uralaz and plans to build 600 to 700 trucks this year.