Fleet operators will not commit to hydrogen trucks until there are enough refueling stations to make operations reliable. Station developers will not build until there are enough customers to justify the investment. Both sides wait for the other, and the market stalls.
This is not a theoretical concern for EU hydrogen transport. It is the current situation, and it is why H2Accelerate published a direct policy call to the European Commission on 13 October: combine funding for hydrogen trucks and refueling stations into a single coordinated mechanism, rather than running separate programmes that cannot solve the dependency between them.
The consortium has evidence to back the ask. The Netherlands introduced a joint support scheme called SWiM in 2024, committing around €72 million to fund approximately 600 vehicles and 15 stations together. Germany followed in January 2026 with a €220 million combined programme targeting up to 40 stations and around 400 trucks. Applications came in at more than twice the available budget.
The cost argument is equally clear. H2Accelerate estimates that coordinated funding brings the cost of a 1-tonne-per-day station serving 30 vehicles to around €4.21 million. Running trucks and stations through separate EU programmes produces an estimate closer to €8.84 million for a comparable setup. The figures are not directly comparable given differences in scale and design, but the direction of travel is not in doubt.
H2Accelerate is asking for three changes to how future EU programmes are structured: joint applications from vehicle operators and station developers, clear deployment deadlines that both sides must meet, and flexibility on which vehicle and refueling technologies are eligible. None of these asks are radical. All three are already working in practice at national level.
The broader context matters here. The EU has committed between €400 million and €450 million to hydrogen refueling infrastructure through the CEF Alternative Fuels Infrastructure Facility since 2021, and the AFIR regulation is currently under review. The question is whether the Commission uses that review to align funding mechanisms with the market dynamics that national programmes have already demonstrated.
There is also a question worth raising for adjacent sectors. Hydrogen for heavy road transport and hydrogen for short-sea shipping face versions of the same problem: vessels will not convert to hydrogen propulsion without bunkering infrastructure, and bunkering operators will not invest without confirmed vessel demand. If the combined funding logic works for trucks, the same design principle should at least be tested for ports and the shipping corridors connecting them.
The industry has done the harder work of proving the model in the field. The policy ask is now relatively straightforward.