Stellantis sees the future in hydrogen as a way to make the range of emission-free commercial vehicles more attractive. It is therefore developing a modified version of the base it now uses for its electric vans. Citroën, Peugeot and Opel are the first lucky ones.
Stellantis already has numerous fully electrically powered commercial vehicles in its range, such as the Citroën ë-Jumpy, Opel Vivaro-e and Peugeot e-Expert. In the long run, a new emission-free choice will be added: hydrogen. For this, Stellantis is preparing a platform that takes the basis of the aforementioned electric vans as a starting point, but adds a fuel cell. To do this, it yields part of the battery capacity to make room for the storage of hydrogen and adds the fuel cell itself to the engine compartment of the vans, as there is then room for that.
The result is an electrically powered bus that gets its electricity from a fairly large battery pack for a hydrogen car, instead of the electricity from a powerful fuel cell quickly passing through a small battery pack to the electric motor. Stellantis calls this ‘mid-power’, it seeks the middle way between a powerful fuel cell and a fuel cell that only functions as a range extender. In this basis, the battery pack has 10.5 kWh capacity and the electricity is generated from 4.4 kilos of hydrogen by a 45 kW fuel cell. All in all, according to Stellantis, it must be good for at least 400 km range (WLTP) with a full hydrogen tank and of course it can be refilled in just a few minutes.
The big advantage of this approach, according to the concern, is that the well-known electric vans with a fuel cell still offer the same amount of space in this way. Also, no major structural changes need to be made to the design of the vans. At the end of this year, the first vans with this basis should roll off the line and Stellantis indicates that it will at least go to Citroën, Opel and Peugeot. So count on a hydrogen Jumpy, -Vivaro and -Expert respectively, but according to Stellantis there is even more to come.