A Kenworth Class 8 truck rolls out of a hydrogen fueling station near the Port of Los Angeles, its 80,000-pound load bound for a rail yard a few miles inland. The fill-up took roughly 15 minutes. The exhaust pipe drips water. That scene has been repeating since May 2021, when the first of 10 fuel-cell big rigs entered daily freight service under a state-backed demonstration called Shore to Store. Now, as of June 2026, a second California program has put 30 more hydrogen trucks on the road in the northern half of the state, and a $102 million federal grant is funding refueling stations along Interstate 5. Together, these projects mark the most serious test yet of whether hydrogen can power the long-haul trucking industry or whether battery-electric rivals will get there first.
Two fleets, two proving grounds
The strongest public evidence for hydrogen trucking comes from two California programs operating under government contracts with traceable records.
At the Port of Los Angeles, the Shore to Store project deployed 10 Kenworth Class 8 fuel-cell electric trucks built around Toyota’s hydrogen fuel-cell powertrain. The California Air Resources Board logged the first truck entering commercial service on May 13, 2021, making it one of the earliest documented cases of a hydrogen semi performing daily revenue freight work in the United States. The trucks refuel at 700-bar compressed hydrogen stations in Ontario and Wilmington, California, and their final technical report, archived by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, remains the most detailed public record of how fuel-cell big rigs perform under real drayage conditions.
Farther north, the NorCAL ZERO project funded 30 fuel-cell drayage trucks along with dedicated 700-bar hydrogen fueling infrastructure and a maintenance facility. The California Energy Commission published the program’s scope and technical specifications under publication number CEC-600-2025-032, providing an official contract-level accounting of what was built and how it operates.
Between them, the two fleets confirm a basic but important point: hydrogen fuel-cell Class 8 trucks can complete the stop-and-go duty cycles that port drayage demands, refueling in minutes rather than the hours required by current battery-electric chargers for heavy trucks.
Federal money targets the I-5 corridor
Keeping hydrogen trucks close to a single port works for short-haul freight. Scaling them to interstate routes requires stations every hundred miles or so, and that infrastructure barely exists. The most significant federal commitment to closing that gap is a $102 million multi-state award announced by Caltrans through the Charging and Fueling Infrastructure Discretionary Grant Program, authorized under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
The grant funds both battery-electric truck charging and hydrogen refueling stations along I-5 and other key freight corridors. But a critical detail remains undisclosed: how the money splits between the two technologies. If the bulk flows to battery charging, the hydrogen corridor could remain too thin to support trucks running several hundred miles a day. For fleet managers weighing equipment purchases that lock in for a decade or more, that ambiguity is a real obstacle.
The gaps that matter most
For all the progress these programs represent, the public record has significant holes, and they fall in exactly the places where freight carriers need answers.
Cost per mile is unknown. No operator running these hydrogen trucks has published a direct cost comparison against diesel or battery-electric alternatives. Without that number, it is impossible to judge whether hydrogen drayage can survive without ongoing subsidies or attract private investment on commercial terms.
Station reliability is unproven at scale. The Ontario and Wilmington hydrogen stations are confirmed to be operational, but no verified throughput data, such as kilograms dispensed per day or percentage of hours online, has appeared in public reporting. A truck that refuels in 15 minutes is only useful if the pump is working when the truck arrives. Early hydrogen passenger-car stations in California have struggled with downtime, and heavy-duty stations face even higher flow demands.
Operational data remains thin. The Shore to Store trucks have been in service for five years, yet no granular fleet telemetry covering uptime, fuel economy, or maintenance frequency has been released for independent analysis. Program-level summaries confirm the trucks ran; they do not tell us how well.
Long-haul performance is untested. Port drayage routes are short, flat, and predictable. Interstate freight involves mountain grades, temperature extremes, and payloads that vary by the load. None of the current hydrogen truck programs have documented sustained operations over multi-hundred-mile days, which is the use case where hydrogen’s fast refueling advantage over batteries would matter most.
Hydrogen sourcing is murky. The trucks emit only water vapor at the tailpipe, but the climate benefit depends entirely on how the hydrogen itself is produced. The program documents confirm that compressed hydrogen is dispensed at 700 bar. They do not specify what share comes from low-carbon sources like renewable-powered electrolysis versus natural gas reforming, which carries a substantial carbon footprint. Without that data, “zero-emission trucking” describes the truck, not necessarily the fuel supply chain behind it.
The battery-electric question looming over everything
Hydrogen trucks are not developing in a vacuum. Battery-electric Class 8 trucks from manufacturers including Tesla, Volvo, and Daimler are already hauling freight on some of the same California corridors. Battery-electric semis avoid the entire hydrogen supply chain problem: they plug into the existing electrical grid, and charging infrastructure, while still insufficient, is expanding faster than hydrogen refueling.
Where hydrogen holds a theoretical edge is in refueling speed and range for the heaviest, longest routes. A battery-electric semi hauling a full 80,000-pound load may need 30 to 60 minutes or more on a fast charger, and its range can drop significantly on grades or in cold weather. A hydrogen truck refueling in 15 to 20 minutes with a 300-plus-mile range could keep tighter delivery schedules on routes where time is money.
But that advantage only materializes if hydrogen stations are plentiful, reliable, and affordable. Right now, they are none of those things outside a handful of California locations. No independent, peer-reviewed study has yet compared the two technologies head-to-head in identical duty cycles with full cost accounting. Until one does, the choice between hydrogen and battery-electric freight remains as much a bet on future infrastructure as a technical decision.
What freight carriers should actually watch for
The practical takeaway from California’s hydrogen truck programs is narrow but real. Fuel-cell Class 8 trucks can do the job in short-haul port operations when a dedicated station is nearby. That has been demonstrated over five years of service at the Port of Los Angeles and is now being replicated across Northern California drayage routes.
The leap to long-haul viability hinges on a set of questions that the next 12 to 18 months should begin to answer. Will the I-5 corridor buildout deliver enough hydrogen stations, spaced closely enough, to support multi-hundred-mile runs? Will those stations stay online at the reliability rates freight schedules demand? And will the per-mile cost of hydrogen fuel drop close enough to diesel, or at least to battery-electric, to justify the capital investment in fuel-cell trucks and the fueling infrastructure they require?
Hydrogen trucking in the United States has moved past prototypes and press conferences into limited but genuine commercial use. It has not yet cleared the hurdles of infrastructure density, cost transparency, and proven long-haul performance that would make it a mature alternative to diesel. The data that comes out of these California corridors over the next year will determine whether hydrogen-powered freight becomes a lasting part of American trucking or a technology that arrived just late enough for batteries to claim the road first.
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*This article was researched with the help of AI, with human editors creating the final content.
