IAA 2024 reveals transport industry no closer to clear decarbonization path

IAA 2024, the biennial transportation show that effectively marks the start of the new cycle within the global trucking industry, has now been and gone. As with IAA 2022, decarbonization of road transport was the overriding theme, although unlike IAA 2022, this year’s fair involved a fair amount of finger pointing.

While equipment manufacturers featured product developments, the infrastructure providers — a strange phrase to use when the provision of infrastructure has been patchy at best — adopted a hand-wringing approach to meeting what is the biggest change to the transport industry since the internal combustion engine replaced the horse.

Hydrogen ICE

Hydrogen, an increasingly divisive topic among the “decarbonati,” remains just that. Against the run of play, it’s now arguably more of a conundrum than it was in 2022. This time, however, rather than a fuel cell, hydrogen was put forward as fuel for an IC engine. DAF, amongst others, unveiled its take on hydrogen ICE power.

Hydrogen as a fuel for an ICE is an interesting case, as it does not really provide a solution to the decarbonization issue. Granted, it offers a significant reduction in emissions, but NOx must still be mitigated via an SCR system and — forgive the pedantry here — an ICE engine still requires lubrication, itself a source of CO2 emissions.

So hydrogen ICE provides not a ZEV but a reduced emissions vehicle — let’s call that a REV for purposes of phonetic elegance — and, at least currently, REVs don’t move the needle very far in terms of incentivization. In one case, MAUT, the German road toll system, offers ZEVs a free ride, but anything else has to stump up some euros for every kilometer travelled. Similarly in the United States, the EPA’s (current) view is that REVs do not make the cut in terms of GHG Phase 3.

With none of the considerable breaks available to ZEV adopters, it seems hydrogen ICE is something of a false economy. And with GHG Phase 3 and Euro 7 not on the horizon but knocking on the door, mistakes in procurement will inevitably prove expensive.

Battery Future

Oliver Dixon is an industry analyst based both in the U.S. and the EU for Global Highways, which covers the commercial vehicle industry worldwide. Email: [email protected]

Which brings us back to batteries and BEVs. Improvements in battery tech over the past two years have brought us to where we are now in sight of equipment that can operate at the edge of the theoretical legal maximum (in Europe, 4.5 hours) without needing to recharge. Here, megawatt charging becomes absolutely essential; the capacity to recharge a vehicle over a statutory break period (assuming that this is defined by regulation as Rest and not Other Work) makes the notion of a nine-hour driving day more plausible.

IAA 2026 will be the third outing in a row where decarbonization will be front and center. We can but hope that by that time there is some degree of coherence surrounding vehicle decarbonization. While some elements within the industry may regard this shift with some reasonable trepidation, the technology clearly exists. Here’s to hoping that the third IAA of the post-diesel era actually presents a holistic, rather than a partial solution, with infrastructure fully onboard and up to speed.

Street Smarts: Trucking’s future in play at IAA Diesel-focused technologies were on display at a packed IAA Transportation Show in Germany.