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"take a while"? A quarter to a third of a conventional European long haul truck is fuel. And what unrealistic truck are you looking at? European long haul battery trucks currently have around 600 kWh of LFP; that's just around 3 tons; how is adding a fuel cell negative 1 ton of weight? No, the cable to the charging port is light enough to carry by one human, even if it's not negligible, that's still more than an order of magnitude below so won't change anything here.

Note that the trucks are already allowed 2 tons extra road weight, so it's actually not unusual to have basically the same load capacity (within +-500kg). It does matter if you have a rotating crew driving express long haul, because then you don't have a mandatory 45 minutes of lunch break during which you can plug in to a 300~400 kW charger (and e.g. take a walk or visit a bathroom or actually have lunch) to get a shift limit of range out of such a "small" battery.

They probably took a battery truck with (in a worker-and-road-safety oriented market like Europe) excessively much no-recharge range to match their fuel cell setup. But you do that because it's fairly tame to add the marginal range of a full shift limit to a fuel cell truck; it's not economic to size a long haul battery to suffice without recharging for anywhere near the weight limit.

Green hydrogen is substantially more expensive than diesel per energy; and electric trucks can already beat diesel's in TCO depending on the kind of usage (e.g. notably express long haul is not competitive, but most highway single-driver operations are).


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