The Hidden Cost of Europe’s Hydrogen Bus Experiment

Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe.


Or support our Kickstarter campaign!

Arthur Bus’s collapse in Poland marks the end of a story that had been quietly unraveling for some time. A hydrogen bus startup backed by public funding, municipal orders, and a planned manufacturing footprint failed before delivering a single customer vehicle. Twenty buses ordered by the city of Lublin were left undelivered, subsidies were put at risk, and local authorities were forced back to the drawing board. This was not a surprise caused by mismanagement alone. It was the visible failure of a broader European experiment that tried to industrialize hydrogen buses in parallel with battery electric buses, splitting capital, attention, and learning curves in a market that never had the scale to support both.

Poland matters in this story because it is not a marginal market. It is Europe’s largest bus manufacturing hub, home to Solaris, the continent’s dominant supplier of zero-emission buses, and a country that adopted generous subsidy schemes to accelerate fleet decarbonization. Poland did not test hydrogen buses as a pilot project or a symbolic gesture. It deployed them at scale, in real cities, under real operating conditions, with professional operators responsible for keeping buses on the road every day. If hydrogen buses struggle to make economic and operational sense in Poland, a country with manufacturing depth, political support, and experienced transit agencies, it is difficult to argue that they will succeed elsewhere in Europe.

Poznań provides a grounded example of what happens when a city commits seriously to both hydrogen and battery electric buses. The municipal operator runs one of the largest hydrogen bus fleets in Europe alongside a substantial battery electric fleet. This is not a comparison between different cities or different operating philosophies. It is a side-by-side test within the same organization, subject to the same labor agreements, route structures, and service expectations. Over time, the contrast became clear. Hydrogen buses carried higher fuel costs, exposure to hydrogen supply quality issues, and operational interruptions that required temporary withdrawal of vehicles from service. Battery electric buses, while not without challenges, delivered lower cost per km and higher availability. The comparison did not require ideology or advocacy. It emerged from internal performance data and day-to-day operational experience.

The economic picture sharpened when Polish researchers examined total cost of ownership using real-world inputs from the Upper Silesian Zagłębie Metropolis, one of the largest public transport organizers in the country. Their cost-benefit analysis compared diesel buses, battery electric buses, and hydrogen fuel cell buses over a 10-year horizon, assuming 60,000km per bus per year. The purchase price assumptions were €235,000 for diesel, €610,000 for battery electric, and €750,000 for hydrogen, converted from zloty at current exchange rates. Energy costs were set at about €1.15 per liter of diesel, €0.21 per kWh of electricity, and €9.20 per kg of hydrogen. Under those assumptions, energy cost per km was roughly €0.40 for diesel, €0.21 for battery electric, and €0.74 for hydrogen. When capital costs, operating costs, and monetized environmental impacts were combined, battery electric buses produced an economic net present value of about €14m for a 30-bus fleet, while hydrogen buses produced about €5.6m. Diesel buses remained negative. The conclusion was not subtle. Battery electric buses delivered more than double the net social benefit of hydrogen buses, while hydrogen remained the most expensive option to operate and the most sensitive to cost shocks.

This evidence raised an obvious question. Battery prices have fallen sharply over the past five years, with global average battery pack prices declining from about €130 per kWh in 2020 to around €100 per kWh by 2025 when converted at current exchange rates. For a typical 12m city bus carrying a 350kWh to 400kWh battery pack, that puts the total battery pack cost today in the range of roughly €35,000 to €40,000, compared with €45,000 to €52,000 five years ago. The decline therefore removes only about €7,000 to €12,000 per bus from manufacturing cost that can be attributed directly to battery price reductions, a modest change on vehicles that typically sell for €600,000 to €800,000. The battery was never the dominant cost component in a city bus, and falling battery prices alone were never going to make battery electric buses approach diesel purchase prices.

Battery electric buses remain expensive in Europe because buses are not mass-produced consumer goods. They are low-volume, highly customized industrial vehicles assembled largely by hand. Body structures, doors, ramps, interiors, HVAC systems, wiring looms, safety systems, and homologation processes account for most of the cost, and none of these follow the steep learning curves seen in battery manufacturing. Electric buses also require reinforced structures to support roof-mounted batteries, thermal management systems, fire protection, high-voltage power electronics, onboard chargers, and redundant safety controls. These systems replace the diesel engine and transmission, but they do not eliminate cost. They shift it from mechanical components to low-volume, safety-critical electronics and control systems that are expensive to design, certify, and warranty.

Warranty risk further inflates prices. Diesel buses benefit from decades of operational history and predictable failure modes. Battery electric buses still carry uncertainty around battery degradation, thermal events, software stability, and residual value after 10 or 12 years of service. Manufacturers price that risk into contracts that often include uptime guarantees and fixed payments per km. In addition, many European bus procurements bundle charging hardware, energy management software, and grid connection costs into the vehicle contract, making battery electric buses appear more expensive than diesel by internalizing system costs that diesel buses externalize to fuel suppliers.

These structural realities explain why battery electric buses did not become dramatically cheaper over the past five years, even as batteries did. They also explain why Europe was tempted by hydrogen. Hydrogen buses promised long range, fast refueling, and continuity with existing depot operations, allowing cities to defer difficult decisions about charging infrastructure, grid upgrades, and route redesign. Hydrogen appeared to offer decarbonization without forcing European bus manufacturing to confront its lack of scale and standardization in battery electric platforms.

That choice came with a cost. By supporting hydrogen buses alongside battery electric buses, Europe fragmented demand for zero-emission buses across two fundamentally different technologies. Public funding was split. Engineering teams were divided. Suppliers faced smaller and less predictable order volumes. Production runs were shorter. Standards evolved more slowly. Every hydrogen bus ordered was one fewer battery electric bus pushing manufacturers down the learning curve. The hydrogen detour did not just fail to deliver cheap zero-emission buses. It actively slowed the cost reductions that battery electric buses could have achieved if Europe had committed to them exclusively.

The contrast with China makes this clear. China electrified its urban bus fleets early and decisively, deploying tens of thousands of battery electric buses in cities like Shenzhen by the late 2010s. Chinese manufacturers standardized platforms, minimized customization, vertically integrated batteries, motors, and power electronics, and ran long production lines at scale. Battery electric buses became a manufactured product rather than bespoke infrastructure. Hydrogen buses were largely excluded from urban transit, reserved instead for niche or industrial applications. As a result, 12m battery electric buses in China sell domestically for about €230,000 to €320,000 at current exchange rates, roughly half or less of European prices. This was not achieved through cheaper batteries alone. It was achieved by eliminating technological pluralism and allowing one solution to dominate.

Europe cannot simply copy China’s model due to procurement law, fragmented markets, and political resistance to large-scale imports of Chinese rolling stock. But the lesson remains. Scale and focus matter. Cities are cities are cities and standardized battery electric buses can be delivered faster and cheaper, enabling faster fleet decarbonization and reduction of urban air pollution. Professor Bent Flyvbjerg, author of How Big Things Get Done with Dan Gardner, is very explicit and very consistent on this point: the belief that “this project is different” is one of the most damaging cognitive errors in large infrastructure and technology decisions. He treats uniqueness bias as a core failure mode, not a minor judgment error.

Maintaining parallel hydrogen and battery electric bus programs diluted Europe’s ability to industrialize battery electric buses quickly. Ending the hydrogen detour does not slow decarbonization. It accelerates it by concentrating demand, investment, and learning on the technology that already wins on lifetime cost and climate impact.

This shift is already visible. Across Europe, hydrogen bus tenders have been canceled or annulled when bids exceeded budgets. Hydrogen supply contracts have been withdrawn by fuel providers unwilling to absorb long-term losses. 26 Polish cities sent a letter to the national government asking for hydrogen subsidies due to the high prices they were finding were required, the higher hydrogen bus capex subsidies far from sufficient to overcome the opex variance. Some fleets have paused hydrogen operations due to fuel quality or reliability issues. In several cases outside Poland, cities have decided to convert hydrogen bus fleets to battery electric operation rather than continue subsidizing expensive fuel. These are not ideological reversals. They are procurement systems responding to experience.

For Solaris, the implications are significant but not fatal. Hydrogen buses account for a meaningful share of recent deliveries and backlog, but they are not the core of the company’s business, and it’s part of a larger company with a strong balance sheet. Solaris remains a leading supplier of battery electric buses, trolleybuses, and hybrid vehicles. A clearer policy signal away from hydrogen would reduce near-term revenue in one segment but accelerate learning, standardization, and cost reduction in another. For a manufacturer positioned to benefit from scale, clarity matters more than optionality. This matters because Solaris is losing battery electric orders to competitors because its battery electric buses are burdened with hydrogen organizational costs.

Poland’s role in this story deserves a more generous reading. By testing hydrogen buses at scale, Poland absorbed the learning costs early and produced data that the rest of Europe can now use. It demonstrated that hydrogen buses are not just more expensive in theory, but in practice, on Polish routes, with Polish energy prices, and Polish operators. That experience shortens Europe’s learning curve. It reduces the risk of repeating the same experiment elsewhere at greater expense.

The lesson emerging from Poland is not that Europe should abandon ambition, but that ambition works best when choices narrow. Battery electric buses are not cheap because batteries are cheap. They become cheap when everything else around them is allowed to scale, standardize, and improve. Ending the hydrogen detour frees capital, engineering effort, and political attention to make that happen faster. Europe’s bus transition will move more quickly, not more slowly, once it stops trying to keep every option alive.