On July 27, Volvo Group, Daimler Truck AG, cellcentric and Toyota signed a binding agreement making Toyota an equal one-third owner of cellcentric alongside the two European truck groups that founded it. Closing is expected around the end of 2026 or the start of 2027, pending regulatory approvals. cellcentric stays an independent Tier 1; the three owners keep competing everywhere else.
The wire copy will tell you this is about “strengthening capabilities.” Fine. The interesting part is one clause buried in the March memorandum that set this up, and almost nobody is talking about it.
The unit cell is the whole ballgame
That March document says Toyota and cellcentric intend to jointly manage the development and production of fuel cell unit cells — the core component of a fuel cell system — plus the architecture and control elements directly tied to them.
If you’re not steeped in this, “unit cell” sounds like a footnote. It isn’t. A fuel cell stack is a few hundred of these things clamped in series, and each one is a membrane electrode assembly — a proton exchange membrane with catalyst-coated electrodes on both faces, sandwiched between gas diffusion layers and a pair of bipolar plates that route hydrogen, air and coolant. Essentially all of the cost, all of the platinum, all of the durability behavior and most of the meaningful patents live in that sandwich. Everything else — compressors, humidifiers, plumbing, controls — is expensive engineering, but it’s engineering other people can also do.
Making unit cells at automotive rate and automotive consistency is a genuinely rare industrial capability. Toyota has been doing it since the Mirai went on sale in 2014, which is why Toyota is in this deal and why the cell is specifically what’s being co-managed. Daimler and Volvo aren’t buying knowledge here. They’re buying manufacturing.
But truck cells aren’t car cells
The convenient assumption is that Toyota’s passenger-car fuel cell experience drops straight into a 40-tonne tractor. It doesn’t, and the specs tell you why.
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cellcentric rates its new system at a 25,000-hour service life, which it calls roughly a decade of heavy-duty truck operation. A passenger fuel cell car spends its life at low average load with constant start-stops and enormous voltage cycling — and voltage cycling is what kills catalyst layers, through platinum dissolution and carbon support corrosion. A long-haul truck does the opposite: high, steady load for ten hours, then idle. Those two duty cycles demand different membrane thicknesses, different platinum loadings, different operating points on the polarization curve, and different water management strategies.
Which is exactly why Toyota announced a third-generation system in February 2025 explicitly re-engineered for the commercial sector: roughly double the durability of the prior generation, 1.2 times the fuel efficiency, and a meaningful cost reduction, with market introduction in Japan, Europe, North America and China from 2026 at the earliest. Toyota didn’t stumble into heavy duty. It spent years pivoting toward it, then went looking for a truck partner. The timing of this deal isn’t a coincidence.
The spec that should have been the headline
cellcentric launched the BZA375 at Hannover Messe in April. The number everyone quotes is 375 kW of continuous net power from a single system, replacing the twin-stack arrangement its BZA150 predecessor needed. More than 500 hp, if you prefer that unit.
The number that actually matters is different: under 500 kg, in a package dimensioned to fit an engine bay originally designed for a 13-litre diesel.
Think about what that means on a factory floor. Same frame rails. Same cab. Same crossmembers. Same assembly line, largely. An OEM doesn’t need a bespoke hydrogen chassis — it needs a different module going into the hole where the diesel used to go. That’s a capital-expenditure argument dressed as an engineering spec, and it’s worth more to Daimler and Volvo than any efficiency figure. The sub-500 kg mass matters for the same commercial reason: payload is revenue, and a zero-emission truck that gives up a tonne of freight capacity doesn’t get bought twice.
cellcentric also claims 40 percent less waste heat at 300 kW net versus the old system. Underrated. Fuel cells reject heat at much lower temperatures than a diesel does, so the radiator area required per kilowatt of waste heat is brutal — heat rejection, not stack power, has historically been the packaging constraint on heavy fuel cell trucks. Cutting waste heat by 40 percent is what lets the whole thing fit behind a normal-looking grille.
The arithmetic the press release skips
cellcentric projects under 6 kg of hydrogen per 100 km for a fully loaded 40-tonne truck in real-world conditions, enabling ranges past 1,000 km. Let’s do something with that.
Hydrogen carries about 33.3 kWh per kilogram at lower heating value. Six kilograms is roughly 200 kWh of chemical energy per 100 km, or 2.0 kWh per kilometer. A diesel 40-tonner burning around 30 litres per 100 km is consuming closer to 300 kWh over the same distance. So the fuel cell truck is genuinely about a third more efficient than diesel at the vehicle. That’s a real win and it deserves saying plainly.
Now compare it to the other zero-emission option. A battery-electric 40-tonne tractor draws somewhere around 1.1 to 1.4 kWh per kilometer from the pack. Call it 1.2. The fuel cell truck uses roughly 1.7 times more onboard energy — and that’s before you account for the upstream. Producing and compressing a kilogram of green hydrogen takes on the order of 50 to 60 kWh of electricity. Six kilograms means 300 to 360 kWh at the grid per 100 km, against maybe 135 kWh for the battery truck including charging losses. Two and a half times the electricity, give or take.
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That gap is thermodynamics, not engineering laziness, and no amount of stack refinement closes it. It’s why hydrogen only makes sense where charging time, payload, or grid capacity at the depot is the binding constraint — long-haul, mining, rail, remote operations. Which, read cellcentric’s own target application list, is precisely where it’s aiming.
The fuel price threshold follows from the same math. At a plausible €9/kg at the pump, 6 kg per 100 km is about €0.54 per kilometer in fuel. Diesel at €1.60 a litre and 30 litres per 100 km is roughly €0.48. Depot electricity at €0.25/kWh and 1.2 kWh/km is about €0.30. Hydrogen has to land in the sevens per kilogram to draw level with diesel and somewhere near four to threaten depot charging. Every fleet TCO model for this truck lives or dies on that one input, and none of the companies involved controls it.
Which brings us to the pumps
cellcentric’s own material states that hitting the EU’s 2030 target of a 45 percent fleet-wide CO2 cut requires roughly 2,000 heavy-duty hydrogen filling stations across Europe at 700 bar or liquid.
Now look at what the law actually mandates. Under the EU’s AFIR targets, member states must deploy publicly accessible hydrogen refuelling stations at intervals of no more than 200 km along the TEN-T core network and in every urban node by 31 December 2030, each with at least one tonne per day of cumulative capacity and a 700 bar dispenser. Depending on how you count urban nodes, that gets Europe into the high hundreds. Not two thousand.
So cellcentric is publicly stating that the binding legal minimum is somewhere around a third of what its product needs. That’s not a complaint buried in a lobbying paper — it’s on the product launch page, which tells you how seriously the company takes the gap.
Meanwhile the emissions clock keeps running. Regulation 2024/1610 locks in fleet-average CO2 cuts of 45 percent from 2030, 65 percent from 2035 and 90 percent from 2040 against the 2019 baseline, with zero-emission freight vehicles defined on a tailpipe basis at 3 g CO2/tkm or below. A fuel cell truck clears that trivially. It just has to exist and have somewhere to refuel.
Why “regulatory approvals” is plural
Three of the largest commercial vehicle manufacturers on earth jointly owning a critical Tier 1 supplier is not a rubber stamp. Expect EU merger control plus filings in Japan and likely elsewhere.
There’s history here that makes European regulators read truck-maker cooperation carefully. In July 2016 the European Commission imposed what was then a record cartel fine of €2,926,499,000 on MAN, Volvo/Renault, Daimler, Iveco and DAF for 14 years of collusion that included coordinating the timing of new emissions technologies and passing compliance costs to customers. This deal is a legitimate joint venture and nothing like that conduct — but the file exists, and Brussels remembers.
cellcentric’s answer is structural, and its CTO put it directly at the BZA375 launch: “we are deliberately set up as an independent Tier 1 supplier.” Selling to any OEM that wants a stack is both a commercial strategy and an antitrust argument. Expect that framing to do a lot of work in the approval process.
The contrarian in the room
Six days before this agreement was signed, Mahle held its own media day in Stuttgart and previewed a diesel range extender for battery-electric trucks. In Mahle’s release, CEO Arnd Franz said hydrogen-powered commercial vehicles are only reachable with massive, risky state subsidies, and the company forecasts combustion engines falling only from about 83 percent of the global commercial vehicle market to around 73 percent by 2035.
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Two of Europe’s serious powertrain players published diametrically opposed readings of the same decade within a week of each other. One is a Tier 1 with no truck to sell hedging toward the incumbent technology; the other is two truck OEMs and Toyota putting equity behind hydrogen. Both are talking their book. Neither is obviously wrong.
What a fleet should do with this
Nothing, for now, and that’s the honest answer.
Series production of the BZA375 is being prepared for the turn of the decade. Toyota’s third-generation system arrives in markets from 2026 at the earliest. The ownership change itself doesn’t close until late 2026 or early 2027. Anyone buying zero-emission trucks between today and roughly 2030 is buying battery-electric, because that’s what’s on sale.
What this deal actually signals is a cost verdict. Two of Europe’s largest truck groups looked at what it takes to industrialize fuel cell unit cells at volume, decided a two-way split wasn’t enough, and went to Toyota. When companies this size dilute themselves to a third, it’s because the number in the business case was bigger than either could carry alone.
Watch the hydrogen price and the station count. Those two variables decide whether the BZA375 becomes a product or a very well-engineered exhibit.