INDUSTRY NEWS
Truck
Efficiency, cost, durability and emissions compliance. What is your fleet going to run on in
powertrain TRENDS FOR 2026
The only light-duty journey a heavyduty truck makes is repositioning within the depot. Fleet managers and maintenance technicians know that heavyduty trucks operate in very challenging conditions throughout South Africa.
Distances and topography are real challenges for heavy-duty truck fleets. The elevation gain from South Africa’ s coastal ports to its inland industrial and distribution hubs means trucks work very hard on the upward journeys from Richards Bay, Durban, or Cape Town to Gauteng. When selecting new heavy-duty trucks, fleet owners need performance to haul heavy loads from the coast to the Reef without excessive diesel consumption, reduced durability, or increased downtime.
Globally, turbodiesel engines still account for nearly all new heavy-duty truck sales. South Africa has seen some legacy and emerging truck brands offer battery powertrains to customers who want them, but the overall market remains overwhelmingly diesel. China has the world’ s most extensive electric truck charging infrastructure and the broadest selection of battery-powered commercial vehicle platforms, yet heavy-duty diesel trucks are still sold there.
Although emissions taxes in some markets, such as Europe, have created a future cost escalation for diesel as a transport fuel, they haven’ t influenced real-world demand. Diesel-powered trucks have the energy density, durability, established refuelling infrastructure, and curricular proven technical support and servicing skills that commercial fleets value.
Hydrogen or battery-electric?
What about the future risks for diesel as a heavy-duty truck fuel, and the alternatives? Some European truck manufacturers promised hydrogen as the solution, delivering the required performance with true zero duty-cycle emissions. But hydrogen infrastructure and fuel tanking have proven to be nearly impossible engineering challenges to solve at any reasonable cost.
Hydrogen has inarguable importance as an industrial chemical, for fuel refining and nitrogen fertiliser production. As a fuel, it has terrible volumetric efficiency, which makes it wildly expensive to compress, transport and bunker. That ' s before the issue of hydrogen, as the smallest element with volatile combustion, is considered.
Leakage and hydrogen’ s propensity to embrittle pipeline and storage infrastructure severely impact its potential as a commercial fuel. For heavy-duty trucks, hydrogen fuel cells are not going to replace diesel, and they are a very poor, problematic alternative to battery-electric trucks.
The fundamental engineering challenges associated with hydrogen as a fuel appear insurmountable. Aberdeen’ s hydrogen bus project, featuring the world’ s first fleet of double-decker hydrogen-powered buses, has been abandoned due to escalating technical issues. The entire fleet of 25 hydrogen buses had been idle since late 2024 due to problems with the refuelling infrastructure in Aberdeen.
There’ s also the issue of hydrogen source and processing emissions. Almost all hydrogen supplied today is a byproduct of natural gas processing, making it no more environmentally friendly than diesel. Green hydrogen? It is in desperately limited supply, being too expensive to produce and transport, making it unviable as a fuel for commercial truck fleets.
The technical reality is that diesel and battery-powered EV trucks will be the powertrain mix fleet managers choose from until 2030 and beyond. The demand curve probably favours short-haul urban lightduty trucks for EV powertrain adoption. But the majority of South African heavy-duty offhighway trucks and long-haul tractors will remain dieselpowered for the foreseeable future.
WORDS IN ACTION 17 MARCH 2026