Zero-emission bus procurement 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. Transit agencies have now spent years operating both, rebuilding depots, installing charging and refuelling infrastructure, training technicians and discovering which assumptions survive daily service. Both technologies can move passengers without tailpipe emissions. The more useful evidence now comes from what agencies are prepared to buy repeatedly and at fleet scale.

I assembled a global procurement register with 388 sourced records across 81 countries, separating firm orders and awards from tenders, options, framework quantities and funding announcements. On that conservative basis, the register contains 13,165 firm battery-electric buses and 65 hydrogen fuel-cell buses. The difference in breadth is just as striking: battery-electric orders come from 55 purchasing bodies, while all 65 hydrogen buses come from two.

The full TFIE Strategy Briefing analysis goes behind those totals into the two hydrogen purchases, the country-level robustness checks and the procurement register itself. The concentration of hydrogen purchasing is at least as revealing as the vehicle count.

Procurement data require care because public announcements routinely describe the same buses several times. A tender, an award and a delivery announcement can all refer to one purchase, while framework options may never be exercised and funding approvals do not necessarily become contracts. That is why the firm-order total matters. It represents identifiable buying decisions rather than every optimistic number that has appeared in a press release.

Source link