IKEA Austria has become the company’s first market in the world to use green hydrogen fuel cell trucks.

IKEA’s new green hydrogen trucks

The Swedish furniture giant paired up with Germany’s Quantron AG to launch five QUANTRON QLI fuel cell electric vehicles – the first hydrogen vehicle in the up to 7.5t fuel cell commercial vehicle segment in Europe.

Quantron developed it with Canadian fuel cell tech developer Ballard Power Systems in just 18 months. The trucks are going to be fueled with green hydrogen from energy supplier Wien Energie.

IKEA Austria has been using electric trucks to make deliveries around the country for the last few years. So why adopt hydrogen trucks?

In 2018, IKEA set an ambitious target of transitioning to zero-emissions delivery for every one of its stores worldwide by 2025, so the clock’s ticking.

The QUANTRON QLI has a range of up to 400 km (248 miles). IKEA Austria’s CEO and chief sustainability officer, Alpaslan Deliloglu, said that it wanted “to show that a transformation to zero-emission delivery is already possible today.”

Melanie Eltzner, customer fulfillment manager at IKEA Austria, said that its electric trucks are great for urban multi-stop deliveries, and the reason it’s added hydrogen trucks to its fleet is so it can immediately start making emissions-free deliveries to more remote areas of Austria.

Electrek’s Take

Green hydrogen is costly to make, so it probably helped that IKEA’s hydrogen initiative was boosted by an award of almost €4.8 million by the Austrian Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation, and Technology (BMK).

Going the hydrogen route – which is essentially another battery technology for an electric motor – isn’t going to be a one-size-fits all solution, but it seems to be a good solution for IKEA Austria, which wants to expand its range of deliveries and achieve net zero before 2025. It’s a good solution for what the company needs right now.

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