The EU-backed CoacHyfied project to demonstrate use of hydrogen fuel cell-electric power in coach applications was cancelled in May with no vehicles having been completed, papers have revealed.
It was a five-year workstream from 2021 to devise a solution for coaches in both medium-distance and scheduled service uses, and long-distance tourism-based applications. Demonstration of the first vehicle was initially slated for 2023.
A questionnaire to operators about the existing coach market was circulated by CoacHyfied, with responses received from parties in countries including the UK. Coventry University was among the scheme’s partners.
Precise details of the cancellation are difficult to ascertain, but a report submitted to the European Commission in July notes problems around development of a maintenance scheduler to optimise the lifetime and maintenance costs of the fuel cell and to reduce the vehicle total cost of ownership.
State of health indicators are named as core to the maintenance scheduler, and the paper gives delays in other work packages as complicating factors. The confidentiality position between some project partners is also cited as challenging.
CoacHyfied was “put on hold” by April 2024 and suspended three months later despite having been allocated €5 million of EU funding. It was terminated on 13 May 2025, at which time design of the vehicles to be deployed still was not finalised.
The project in its later stages was to have seen hydrogen coaches based on the Otokar Territo model join operator partner Dobeles Autobusu Parks (DAP) in Latvia. They would have been used between Dobele and capital Riga. However, DAP withdrew at an unspecified point.
Production of the first coach by Otokar began in September 2023 but delays caused by DAP’s withdrawal and regulatory changes saw manufacturing paused in April 2024.
Work on the first prototype was formally terminated with the end of CoacHyfied in May. Otokar cancelled an order for its fuel cell and hydrogen cylinders in late 2024.
The vehicle went for scrap after CoacHyfied was cancelled. Its body frame had been modified from that of a diesel Territo, but photographs within the papers show that it had reached the stage of gaining axles, some exterior panels, and the electric motor.
EC papers on CoacHyfied and its cancellation available here.
