Bus buyers have overwhelmingly chosen battery electric ones

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The procurement of zero-emission buses has moved beyond the stage where battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell buses should be treated as two parallel technologies waiting for the market to decide between them. Transportation agencies have been doing both for years, rebuilding warehouses, installing charging and refueling infrastructure, training technicians and figuring out which assumptions survive daily service. Both technologies can move passengers without tailpipe emissions. The most useful evidence now comes from what agencies are willing to purchase repeatedly and at a fleet scale.

I assembled a global procurement registry with 388 records obtained in 81 countries, separating firm orders and awards from tenders, options, framework quantities and financing announcements. On that conservative basis, the registry contains 13,165 permanent battery electric buses and 65 hydrogen fuel cell buses. The difference in breadth is equally striking: orders for battery electric vehicles come from 55 purchasing entities, while 65 hydrogen buses come from two.

The full TFIE Strategic Report analysis trails those totals across the two hydrogen purchases, the country-level robustness checks, and the procurement record itself. The concentration of hydrogen purchases is at least as revealing as the number of vehicles.

Procurement data requires care because public advertisements routinely describe the same buses multiple times. A tender, award and delivery announcement may relate to a single purchase, while framework options may never be exercised and financing approvals may not necessarily be converted into contracts. That is why the total number of firm orders is important. It represents identifiable purchasing decisions rather than every optimistic number that has appeared in a press release.

The resulting split is a little more than 200 battery electric buses for every hydrogen bus, and battery electric buses represent around 99.5% of company acquisitions captured for the two technologies. The track record of future procurement points in the same direction, with thousands of battery electric buses more visible in open procedures and a much smaller hydrogen pipeline. Buses delivered today may reflect decisions made several years ago; Current tenders and awards show what agencies are choosing after absorbing more recent operational experience.

The registry is not a census of all buses ordered everywhere. Procurement transparency varies widely, and Chinese municipal awards, European tenders, and North American multi-year contracts do not clearly correspond to each other. Inevitably some purchases will be missed. But erasing a gap from 13,165 to 65 would require that a very large hydrogen purchasing market would have escaped the public record, while electric battery purchasing would remain visible in dozens of countries. I found no evidence of such a market.

The two hydrogen buyers deserve fair treatment because they demonstrate that the technology can still make sense under particular conditions. Qingyang in China is deliberately building a municipal hydrogen ecosystem, coordinating buses, fuel supply and refueling infrastructure as part of a broader development program. Krefeld in Germany is the strongest commercial counterexample because the operator already has hydrogen buses in service and decided to purchase more after gaining operational experience.

What those cases don’t show is replication. After years of hydrogen bus demonstrations, subsidy programs, refueling infrastructure and manufacturer development, the company’s acquisition history still boils down to a Chinese municipal hydrogen program and a German municipal operator making a repeat purchase. Meanwhile, electric battery procurement is spread across dozens of buyers operating in different climates, networks, route structures and political regimes.

That doesn’t make it easy to convert large fleets from electric fleets to batteries. Power from reservoirs can require new multi-megawatt substations and connections, interconnecting utilities can take years, and charging systems, software and schedules have to work reliably enough to put buses on the streets every morning. Those are material limitations. However, there are increasingly implementation problems associated with the overwhelming selection of technology agencies, rather than evidence that the propulsion decision remains balanced.

For the normal procurement of city and suburban buses, battery-electric technology should now be the default reference technology. Agencies should start with the architecture that has by far the deepest procurement base, broadest supplier ecosystem, and largest set of operational expertise, and then ask whether a specific local constraint justifies departing from it. Technology neutrality means applying the same service, reliability, emissions and cost requirements; it does not require claiming that technologies with radically different commercial reference classes present the same risk.

Hydrogen should now be treated as the exception that must justify its case. A proposal must identify a material duty cycle, depot energy, or operational limitation that battery electric buses and practical charging cannot economically resolve; demonstrate that hydrogen solves it at an acceptable cost for the entire system; establish a credible long-term fuel supply; and demonstrate that the operational advantage is large enough to justify dedicated on-site production, transportation or generation, compression, storage and dispensing infrastructure.

If a hydrogen proposal passes those tests, an agency has a reason to buy hydrogen buses. What the evidence no longer supports is resetting all procurements to zero and acting as if battery electric and hydrogen are two comparatively mature options awaiting another publicly funded trial.

Political priority should advance with market evidence. For battery electric fleets, important issues now include grid planning, depot connections, charging reliability, workforce capacity, operating software and financing. Resolving those limitations is more likely to accelerate zero-emission transit than continuing to fund comparative demonstrations whose basic technological question has already been answered repeatedly in procurement.

TFIE’s full strategic report examines the two hydrogen purchases individually, tests whether the size of the existing fleet explains the outcome and provides the underlying procurement workbook of 388 records.