Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles accounted for less than 1% of European zero-emission heavy-duty truck sales in 2025, in a market where battery-electric trucks moved from pilots to early-scale commercial deployment, and diesel remained dominant across long-haul duty cycles. Into that market, Toyota has signed a binding agreement to acquire a one-third stake in Cellcentric, the fuel cell company founded in 2021 by Daimler Truck and the Volvo Group. The three companies will hold equal shares once regulatory approvals are complete, with the transaction expected to close by the end of 2026 or early 2027. The deal combines Toyota’s 30-year commercial fuel cell development history and its proprietary stack manufacturing at Motomachi with Cellcentric’s roughly 700 patents, 560 employees, and the direct commercial relationships that come with Daimler Truck and Volvo owning a combined 60% of European heavy-duty truck sales.
The timing is calibrated to a policy window that is opening whether or not the market has caught up with it. The EU’s CO2 standards for heavy-duty vehicles require a 90% emissions reduction by 2040, and the Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Regulation mandates a hydrogen refuelling station every 200 kilometres along core TEN-T corridors by 2030, directly enabling long-haul fuel cell truck operations. Battery-electric is advancing faster in urban and regional distribution where back-to-base charging works logistically. Fuel cell technology’s case rests on the long-haul segment, where refuelling speed, range, and payload sensitivity create constraints that battery systems handle less efficiently at current cell densities. Daimler Truck’s Mercedes-Benz GenH2 Truck trials reached 225,000 kilometres in real-world customer operation through 2025, providing the operational data that commercial customers require before fleet commitments.
What Each Party Brings and Why the Structure Makes Sense
Toyota’s entry is not primarily a financial transaction. The company has invested more in hydrogen fuel cell research and manufacturing than any other automotive group, and its TFCS stack architecture, developed across more than a decade of Mirai production and two generations of commercial vehicle pilot programmes, represents manufacturing know-how that Cellcentric’s founders cannot replicate independently on the timeline the market requires. Cellcentric’s proprietary stack technology is designed specifically for heavy-duty applications where duty cycles, thermal management requirements, and durability targets differ materially from passenger vehicle fuel cells. What Toyota adds is not a superior stack but the ability to scale stack manufacturing, reduce per-kilowatt costs through volume, and access supply chain relationships across membrane electrode assemblies, bipolar plates, and balance-of-plant components that are in constrained global supply.
Europe remains structurally dependent on imported platinum-group metals for catalyst-coated membranes and on carbon fibre for Type IV hydrogen tanks, with domestic supply covering less than 15% of these critical input requirements. Toyota’s global supply chain relationships provide partial mitigation against this exposure, particularly on PGM sourcing through its established recycling and procurement infrastructure. This is not a solution to European critical materials dependence in fuel cell components, but it reduces the supply risk that a standalone European entity faces when scaling production.
For Daimler Truck and Volvo, the deal solves a capital allocation problem. Both companies are simultaneously investing in battery-electric truck platforms, hydrogen fuel cell development, software-defined vehicle architectures, and the service infrastructure required for zero-emission commercial vehicle operations. Bringing Toyota in as an equal partner at Cellcentric allows the two European truck OEMs to maintain ownership of the fuel cell technology layer without bearing the full cost of industrialisation against an uncertain demand ramp. Cellcentric remains independently managed and serves customers beyond its three shareholders, including applications in off-road vehicles, coaches, stationary power generation, rail vehicles, and heavy machinery, which means the company’s revenue base is not entirely contingent on the pace at which Daimler Truck and Volvo sell hydrogen trucks to logistics operators.
The Infrastructure Dependency That the Deal Cannot Resolve
Green hydrogen production in Europe remains costly at €5 to €8 per kilogram in 2026, compared to grey hydrogen at €2 to €3 per kilogram, undermining the total cost of ownership advantage of fuel cell electric vehicles relative to battery-electric vehicles in most duty cycles. No partnership structure, however credible its technology credentials, resolves the hydrogen cost problem from the supply side of the fuel cell system. The Cellcentric consortium’s ability to bring fuel cell system costs down through manufacturing scale is the demand-side lever. The hydrogen cost trajectory depends on green hydrogen production scale-up, electrolyser cost reduction, and the rate at which the TEN-T corridor refuelling network materialises under AFIR requirements.
The H2Accelerate consortium, in which Volvo Group is a core partner, aims to deploy 125 fuel cell trucks across Europe with first vehicles entering operation in 2026, involving more than 20 truck operators across diverse duty cycles. That scale of deployment does not move the economics of hydrogen supply, but it generates the operational data and customer confidence that are prerequisites for the fleet commitments required to justify infrastructure investment. The sequencing problem between infrastructure deployment and vehicle deployment, each waiting for the other to reach sufficient scale, remains the fundamental market development challenge for hydrogen heavy trucking in Europe, and the Cellcentric ownership restructure addresses technology supply rather than that chicken-and-egg dynamic.
The European FCEV market is projected to grow from approximately 4,500 to 5,500 unit sales across all vehicle types in 2026 to between 180,000 and 250,000 annual unit sales by 2035, with heavy-duty trucks accounting for over 55% of cumulative market value. Whether those projections materialise depends on the intersection of hydrogen supply cost trajectories, AFIR corridor infrastructure delivery, CO2 regulation enforcement, and the total cost of ownership comparison with battery-electric alternatives as both technologies continue to develop. The Toyota-Cellcentric agreement positions one technology supplier well to serve the demand that materialises. The pace at which that demand arrives will be determined by factors that three truck industry shareholders cannot control from within a fuel cell joint venture.
