How to determine the fuel consumption for a hydrogen light commercial vehicle project to be competitive?

Abstract: The automotive industry and the whole transport sector are currently facing the need to act against climate change. In fact, over the globe the passenger road vehicles emitted 3.6 Gt of CO2 in 2018 and the road freight vehicles emitted 2.4 Gt of CO2 [1]. These road and freight emissions represents 11% and 7% of the total CO2 emissions that year respectively [2]. One solution that has been chosen to limit and reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from road transportation is to shift from internal combustion engine (ICE)-based vehicles to electric vehicles which will emit no GHG during operation. There are mainly two types of electric vehicles suitable for this purpose. The first one is the battery electric vehicles (BEVs) which is already commercially and industrially mature and already on the road (11.3 million in 2020 [3]). It uses large Li-ion batteries to store the energy on-board to then power the electric motors. The second one is the fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) which is still being researched and whose number on the road is quite limited (34.8 thousand in 2020 [4]). Yet, this technology is suitable for many applications and especially the light commercial vehicles (LCVs). The stakes of this technology have been studied regarding the current market of LCVs in France and by comparing it to BEVs in terms of cost and mass. To better frame the development of new hydrogen LCVs, a tool has also been developed to calculate the range of such vehicles throughout the life of the project and the evolution of its specifications. The analysis of the market and the comparison between FCEVs and BEVs is not exhaustive and only some specific points have been dealt with, enough to give an overview of the main stakes of hydrogen LCVs. The tool developed is limited to simple input data as it aims to be used with little information at an early stage of the project.