Toyota Joins cellcentric: Analysis of the Daimler Truck and Volvo Group Fuel Cell Deal

Summary

On 31 March 2026, Toyota Motor Corporation signed a non-binding Memorandum of Understanding to become an equal shareholder in cellcentric, the hydrogen fuel cell joint venture formed by Daimler Truck and Volvo Group in 2021. The full announcement is on the Toyota Global Newsroom (press release 44152536).

This is not a technology partnership dressed up as a business deal. It is Toyota redirecting 30 years of fuel cell manufacturing experience from a consumer market that never scaled into the commercial vehicle sector where hydrogen’s physics advantages are strongest. The deal also forces an honest reckoning with a question the battery-electric trucking narrative has been avoiding: megawatt charging infrastructure does not exist at freight-network scale, and grid constraints mean it will not for years.

Key Takeaways

• Toyota’s Mirai sold just 1,200 units last year. The pivot to heavy commercial vehicles is not a retreat — it is a redeployment of genuinely differentiated capability into a better-fit market.
• cellcentric gets Toyota’s third-generation fuel cell system, unit cell manufacturing expertise, and capital — the three things it needs to reach the €6/kg hydrogen TCO target that makes it competitive with diesel by 2030. See the fleet TCO calculator for worked examples.
• The MCS (megawatt charging) infrastructure case for battery-electric long-haul trucks rests on grid connections that take 4 to 10 years to secure in most European markets. The first publicly accessible MCS charger in Europe only went live in September 2025.
• EU CO2 standards mandating −45% by 2030, −65% by 2035, and −90% by 2040 for heavy-duty vehicles make compliance optionality — having a credible hydrogen programme alongside battery-electric — a rational hedge for Daimler Truck and Volvo, not a philosophical commitment.
• Three equal partners in a shared fuel cell entity send a qualitatively different demand signal to hydrogen infrastructure investors than any single company’s roadmap.

Main Analysis

cellcentric: The Industrial Logic

cellcentric was formed in March 2021 when Volvo Group acquired 50% of Daimler Truck’s existing fuel cell entity for approximately €600 million. The joint venture was designed from the outset as an independent, neutral Tier 1 supplier of fuel cell systems, capable of selling to any truck OEM — not just its parent companies. Neither Daimler Truck nor Volvo Group could individually justify the capital intensity of building proprietary fuel cell systems at scale while also competing across every other aspect of commercial vehicle manufacturing.

By mid-2024, cellcentric had inaugurated a pilot production facility at Esslingen-Pliensauvorstadt — a 10,300 m² site designed as the process blueprint for the planned large-scale KLIMA|WERK facility in Weilheim. In December 2024, cellcentric notarised an option agreement with the city of Weilheim/Teck to secure 16 hectares of land for that future mass-production site. Series production of its NextGen fuel cell system is targeted for the end of the decade, aligned with the EU CO2 regulation timeline. In the same announcement, cellcentric was candid that “the delayed development of the necessary hydrogen infrastructure, and the availability and pricing of green hydrogen means that also cellcentric can only act according to the volatile market environment at present.” That sentence, from a company trying to attract investors, tells you the real state of play.

Toyota’s Fuel Cell Journey: 30 Years and the Right Application

Toyota has been developing fuel cell technology for over 30 years. It commercially launched the Mirai passenger vehicle in 2014 and has since sold approximately 28,000 units in more than 30 countries. From 2019, it began supplying fuel cell systems for buses, trains, port equipment, and stationary power generators, reaching more than 2,700 units to over 100 customers globally. This breadth of deployment means Toyota has accumulated real-world data on fuel cell degradation, cold-start behaviour, stack durability, and balance-of-plant management across an unusually wide range of duty cycles. That is not knowledge easily replicated in a laboratory.

Toyota’s commercial vehicle work accelerated after 2017, when it partnered with Kenworth (PACCAR) on Class 8 heavy-duty trucks for port drayage operations in California. The “Shore to Store” ZANZEFF programme, completed in 2022, demonstrated that hydrogen fuel cell trucks could match diesel performance, reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 74.66 metric tons of CO2 per truck annually versus the baseline diesel engine. In Europe, Toyota has run programmes with Hyliko, VDL Group, and — in 2024 — a test programme with Coca-Cola and Air Liquide on international logistics routes. These are operational deployments generating maintenance data, refuelling logistics insights, and fleet integration experience that feeds directly into the third-generation system design.

The strategic logic of the pivot from consumer to commercial vehicles is straightforward once you understand where hydrogen’s physics advantages concentrate. Fuel cells lose efficiency proportionally less at high load than at low load — the opposite of what happens with batteries. A heavy truck cruising at 80 km/h at 80% load is a near-ideal operating environment for a fuel cell. A passenger car making short urban trips, frequently cold-starting, and running at 10–20% load is a poor one. The Mirai was always a technically impressive product deployed in the wrong application. For a full breakdown of how these physics translate into operating cost, see the analysis at Zero-Emission HGV TCO: Hidden Costs Battery vs Hydrogen Trucks.

In February 2025, Toyota announced its third-generation fuel cell system, explicitly designed for the commercial sector: twice the durability of the previous generation (comparable to current diesel engines), 20% better fuel efficiency, a maintenance-free design, and significantly lower unit costs. Commercial production is planned from 2026, targeting Europe, North America, Japan, and China. Toyota also invested $139 million in a joint venture with China’s Shudao Group to build a fuel cell plant in Chengdu — a simultaneous push into the world’s largest commercial vehicle market.

Recycling 30 years of fuel cell manufacturing knowledge — captured in the third-generation system’s unit cell architecture — from a niche consumer market into the heavy commercial vehicle sector is not a retreat. It is a redeployment of genuinely differentiated capability into the market where it has the strongest commercial case.

What the Deal Actually Does

Under the MOU, Toyota would participate in a capital increase to acquire a stake equal to those of Daimler Truck and Volvo Group. cellcentric will continue to operate as an independent, autonomous entity — it is not being absorbed into any parent. All three companies will continue to compete in vehicle manufacturing and fuel cell integration. This structure is deliberate: cellcentric’s commercial proposition depends on being a credible Tier 1 supplier to any truck OEM. Toyota’s entry reinforces rather than undermines that independence.

The most technically significant element is joint development and production of fuel cell unit cells — the core repeating component of a fuel cell stack, and the primary determinant of system cost, durability, and power density. Toyota’s manufacturing precision at the unit cell level, developed over three decades of Mirai production and refined in its third-generation commercial system, is precisely what cellcentric needs to achieve automotive-grade quality at automotive-grade volumes. Daimler Truck and Volvo contribute deep knowledge of what trucks actually demand from a powertrain: the vibration profiles, temperature extremes, duty cycle variability, and maintenance constraints that come from building and servicing commercial vehicles at scale. Combining these two knowledge bases around a shared unit cell architecture creates a product neither party could build alone.

Why Does This Matter for Freight?

Heavy-duty long-haul trucking is where hydrogen fuel cells have always made the strongest technical case. A fuel cell truck can be refuelled in under 20 minutes — comparable to diesel — and avoids the roughly 2-tonne payload penalty that a large battery imposes on a standard 40-tonne articulated lorry. EU forecasts suggest as many as 850,000 hydrogen fuel cell trucks could be operating in Europe by 2035, requiring up to 4,800 hydrogen refuelling stations. For the payload penalty analysis in UK operating conditions, see Zero-Emission HGV TCO: Hidden Costs Battery vs Hydrogen Trucks, and run the numbers for your own fleet at the Fleet TCO calculator.

EU regulation is the structural forcing function. The revised CO2 standards (Regulation 2024/1610), which entered into force in June 2024, require −45% CO2 reduction for trucks by 2030, −65% by 2035, and −90% by 2040, relative to the 2019 baseline. Hydrogen-powered vehicles are classified as zero-emission under this regulation. For Daimler Truck and Volvo, meeting these targets with battery-electric alone is commercially and operationally risky; a credible hydrogen programme in production by 2030 provides essential compliance optionality. For a full overview of the European OEM landscape, see Top European Hydrogen Truck Manufacturers 2025.

What Is the Real Constraint?

Hydrogen freight has one binding constraint: green hydrogen pricing and infrastructure deployment must arrive in the same window as commercial fuel cell trucks. cellcentric has publicly targeted €6/kg hydrogen TCO by 2030 as the threshold at which hydrogen becomes competitive with diesel for long-haul. That requires both high-volume fuel cell production and a functioning refuelling network on the corridors where operators actually run loads. For a worked-through UK and European TCO model, visit the Fleet TCO calculator.

The Megawatt Charging System (MCS) constraint on the battery-electric side is symmetrical and underappreciated. MCS chargers require medium-voltage grid connections, protection coordination, and transformer procurement that currently runs 18 to 24 months across Europe. Grid connection applications at transmission level in several EU markets take 4 to 10 years. The first publicly accessible MCS charger in Europe opened in September 2025. A major EU-funded programme targeting 330 MCS chargers across 55 sites in nine countries completes in autumn 2028 at the earliest. These are pilot deployments, not a freight network. Operators comparing hydrogen and battery-electric long-haul should be comparing two infrastructure-contingent technologies, not one proven and one uncertain.

The ICCT estimates roughly 85% of goods are transported under 300 km — a distance well within current battery-electric capability without MCS. That is the genuinely strong argument for BEV in freight, and it largely holds for urban and regional routes. But the remaining 15% of freight — which includes the highest-value, time-sensitive, long-distance loads — is where hydrogen’s 20-minute refuelling time and absence of payload penalty matter most. For deeper analysis of how UK hydrogen infrastructure has developed in practice, see UK Hydrogen Infrastructure: Why Deployment Failed and What Works.

What Is the Industry Getting Wrong?

The framing of “hydrogen vs. batteries” is producing worse decisions than the underlying physics warrants. Battery-electric trucks are genuinely competitive for urban and regional freight — that debate is largely settled. The mistake is assuming that performance demonstrated in those duty cycles transfers automatically to long-haul, high-utilisation routes where the constraints are fundamentally different.

The deeper error is treating sentiment as evidence. A recent German freight operator survey showed the sector shifting toward battery-electric compared to 2022. Sentiment shifting in a market that lacks the infrastructure to validate either technology is not the same as the technology case being settled. What has changed is the narrative, not the physics.

There is also an underappreciated risk in the hydrogen camp: if weakening sentiment becomes self-fulfilling, infrastructure investment slows, operators do not commit to trucks, and OEMs redirect capital to BEV because that is where the policy signals point. Toyota’s entry is partly an attempt to prevent that cascade. Whether it succeeds depends less on the technology — which is demonstrably mature — and more on coordination between industrial production, infrastructure deployment, and green hydrogen pricing arriving in the same window. For the broader hydrogen investment context, see Hydrogen Investment Opportunity 2026: Why Deal Collapse Signals Real Value.

What Does the Unit Cell Joint Development Actually Mean?

The announcement specifies joint development and production of fuel cell unit cells and directly linked architecture. This is the most technically significant clause and the one most likely to be glossed over. Unit cells are where the electrochemistry happens. They are the primary driver of system cost, power density, and durability. Toyota’s competitive advantage in fuel cells is not its system integration — it is its manufacturing precision and materials knowledge at the unit cell level, accumulated across hundreds of thousands of Mirai stacks and an expanding portfolio of commercial deployments.

This creates an industrial standard around which the component supply chain — membrane electrode assemblies, bipolar plates, hydrogen storage — can build with confidence about volume commitments. Companies working in those areas now have a clearer technology target to design towards. For context on how deep-tech ventures navigate exactly this kind of technology-to-commercialisation transition, see Deep Tech Commercialisation.

Implications

For entrepreneurs and component suppliers

The unit cell joint development creates a clearer technology standard than the industry has had before. Companies developing membrane electrode assemblies, bipolar plates, and hydrogen storage systems now have a more credible volume pathway to design towards.

For infrastructure investors

Three of the world’s most significant commercial vehicle manufacturers are now aligned behind a common fuel cell platform. The demand signal for hydrogen refuelling infrastructure along European and Japanese highway corridors is materially stronger after this deal than before it. EU AFIR targets requiring hydrogen stations every 200 km on major highways by 2031 now have a more credible truck utilisation case behind them. For the UK-specific picture, see The State of UK Hydrogen: A Global Opportunity at Risk.

For fleet operators

The relevant decision window is 2028 to 2032. That is when cellcentric’s production scale is expected to reach the cost levels that make hydrogen operationally competitive with diesel. For operators planning fleet replacement cycles now, the question is whether refuelling will be available on their specific routes by the time hydrogen trucks are commercially available at volume. Use the Fleet TCO calculator to model your own numbers against the €6/kg threshold.

For policymakers

The deal is partly contingent on regulatory certainty. The EU CO2 standards are the structural anchor; any revision or relaxation weakens the investment case for both the fuel cell production facility and the hydrogen refuelling network. Regulatory consistency matters more than subsidy levels at this stage in the cycle. For how the UK is currently positioned relative to European peers, see Road Transport Decarbonisation 2025 Review: UK and Europe.

Closing Insight

The Mirai was not a failure of fuel cell technology. It was fuel cell technology deployed in the wrong application. Heavy commercial vehicles — high load, long distances, weight-sensitive, operationally predictable — are where hydrogen’s advantages are structural, not incidental. Toyota has spent 30 years learning how to manufacture fuel cells at quality and scale. cellcentric has spent four years learning what trucks actually demand. This deal connects those two bodies of knowledge in the market where they will have the most effect.

The battle for heavy freight decarbonisation is not won by this announcement. But hydrogen becomes materially harder to write off.

Sources and Further Reading

• Toyota Motor Corporation press release 44152536 — Toyota aims to join Daimler Truck and Volvo Group as equal shareholder in cellcentric (31 March 2026)
• cellcentric — official site
• Top European Hydrogen Truck Manufacturers 2025
• Zero-Emission HGV TCO: Hidden Costs Battery vs Hydrogen Trucks
• Fleet TCO Calculator
• UK Hydrogen Infrastructure: Why Deployment Failed and What Works
• Hydrogen Investment Opportunity 2026
• Road Transport Decarbonisation 2025 Review
• Hydrogen Internal Combustion Engine (H2ICE): Ultimate 2025 Guide
• Real World Hydrogen Truck Data: Why Shanxi Is the Blueprint for Freight
• Deep Tech Commercialisation