When most people picture a hydrogen vehicle, they picture a Toyota Mirai. A sensible midsize sedan, fuels up in five minutes, and has spent most of its life parked on dealer lots because almost nobody can find a working station to fill it at. That is the public face of hydrogen on the road, and it has not gone well.<\/p>\n
The largest hydrogen vehicle ever built is not a sedan. It is a 290-metric-ton mining truck that stands as tall as a three-story building, hauls platinum ore around an open pit in northern South Africa, and was meant to be the first domino in a plan to wipe diesel out of one of the dirtiest corners of heavy industry. Anglo American pulled the sheet off it at its Mogalakwena platinum mine in May 2022 and called it, accurately, the biggest hydrogen-powered vehicle on the planet. Four years later the truck still holds that title. Almost everything else about the plan has come apart.<\/p>\n
It is a strange thing to write about, because on a purely engineering level the truck is a genuine achievement. The disappointment isn’t the machine. It’s the assumption everyone built on top of it.<\/p>\n
The nuGen truck started life as an ordinary Komatsu 930E-4, the kind of ultra-class haul truck that does the heavy lifting at open-pit mines all over the world. Engineers pulled out the 2,700-horsepower diesel engine and dropped in a hybrid powerplant instead: eight hydrogen fuel cells wired in parallel, producing a combined 837 kilowatts, paired with a 1.2-megawatt-hour lithium-ion battery. Together they put out a peak of 2 megawatts, which is actually more<\/em> power than the diesel mill it replaced. Roughly half the energy comes from the fuel cells and half from the battery, and the battery claws back energy every time the loaded truck rumbles downhill through regenerative braking.<\/p>\n The numbers are the fun part. The truck weighs 220 metric tons empty and carries a 290-metric-ton payload, which works out to around 640,000 pounds of rock per load and a total laden weight north of 500 tons. It holds about 68 kilograms of hydrogen on board, good for one to two shifts depending on the load, and it tops off at an on-site pump in roughly nine minutes. The only thing coming out of the tailpipe is water vapor. ENGIE, the French utility that built the fueling side, ran the project under the codename “Rhyno” before it was rebadged nuGen, which tells you roughly how subtle the whole thing was meant to be.<\/p>\n For scale, this is a different animal from the hydrogen trucks you may have read about heading for public roads, like the long-haul hydrogen rig Saudi Arabia has been testing<\/a>. Those are highway machines. This thing never leaves the pit, never sees a paved road, and exists in a world where a single vehicle burning a million liters of diesel a year is considered normal.<\/p>\n The truck only counts as zero-emission if the hydrogen feeding it is clean, and this is where the project got ambitious. Anglo and ENGIE built a complete hydrogen production, storage, and refueling complex right at Mogalakwena, fed by a solar field that powers an electrolyzer to split water into hydrogen on-site. Anglo billed the setup as the largest electrolyzer in Africa. The plant can crank out roughly 1.4 tons of hydrogen a day and store it as a compressed gas, around 800 kilograms held at 500 bar, so trucks can fuel on demand without anyone trucking hydrogen in from elsewhere.<\/p>\n There’s a tidy bit of symmetry to the location that nobody seems to have planned. Mogalakwena is the world’s biggest open-pit platinum-group-metals mine, sitting on South Africa’s Bushveld Complex, which holds something like 70% of the planet’s known platinum. And platinum is the catalyst that makes a hydrogen fuel cell work in the first place. So you have a truck whose fuel cells depend on platinum, digging up platinum, in a mine that produces the exact metal its own powertrain needs. If hydrogen fuel cells ever did take over heavy transport, mines like this one would be selling the shovels and using them at the same time.<\/p>\n One record-setting truck is a science fair project. The reason Anglo spent the money was the fleet behind it. The plan was to retrofit all 40 of the diesel haul trucks at Mogalakwena to run on hydrogen, converting somewhere between 10 and 20 a year, then roll the technology out across the company’s global fleet of roughly 400 ultra-class trucks. Since haul trucks account for about 80% of diesel use at Anglo’s open-pit sites, pulling that off would gut the bulk of the diesel emissions across the whole operation.<\/p>\n That fed into a much bigger target. Anglo wanted eight of its mines carbon-neutral by 2030 and all of its operations there by 2040, and the haul-truck conversion was supposed to be the workhorse that got it most of the way. In December 2022 the company doubled down, folding the powertrain developer it had been working with, Seattle-based First Mode, into the nuGen program in a deal that valued the combined business at $1.5 billion and came with a $200 million cash injection from Anglo. First Mode signed a 15-year agreement to supply the systems and retrofit those 400 trucks. On paper, hydrogen haulage had a real industrial backer and a real timeline.<\/p>\n The cracks showed up faster than anyone expected. In January 2024, barely a year after the big tie-up, First Mode quietly shifted its emphasis away from hydrogen-battery powertrains toward plain diesel-battery hybrids and cut about 20% of its U.S. workforce, with another round of cuts following in August. When the company building the hydrogen future starts hedging toward diesel, that is usually a sign.<\/p>\n It got worse. According to reporting from GeekWire<\/a>, Anglo American stopped funding First Mode, and in December 2024 the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Anglo committed tens of millions just to manage the wind-down. A couple of months later, in February 2025, Cummins picked up essentially all of First Mode’s assets<\/a> in the bankruptcy sale, including the hydrogen and battery powertrain technology, for $15 million in cash plus some assumed liabilities. The intellectual property behind the largest hydrogen vehicle ever built changed hands for about one percent of what the combined company had been valued at two years earlier. Cummins folded the technology into its zero-emissions arm, Accelera, where it sits today.<\/p>\n Cummins isn’t exactly leaning into it either. By April 2026 the trade press was writing about Cummins’s “long tail of hydrogen mistakes,” noting that the company had taken writedowns, pulled back from parts of its hydrogen business, and watched its zero-emissions division run deep in the red<\/a> as demand for hydrogen in energy applications came in slower, weaker, and far more subsidy-dependent than the early pitch suggested. The powertrain works. The market it was built for mostly didn’t show up.<\/p>\n The last piece is corporate. While First Mode was collapsing, Anglo American was busy tearing itself apart on purpose, slimming down to focus on copper, premium iron ore, and crop nutrients. As part of that, it spun off its entire platinum business, including Mogalakwena, into a standalone company called Valterra Platinum. The demerger took effect on May 31, 2025, with Valterra listing in Johannesburg and London and Anglo keeping a minority stake it plans to sell down over time.<\/p>\n So the mine where the world’s largest hydrogen truck lives now belongs to a different company than the one that built the truck, and that company has made its feelings clear. Asked for an update on the vehicle, Valterra CEO Craig Miller told Miningmx<\/a> that the truck “was an Anglo American project trialled at Mogalakwena. It was Anglo’s proof of concept,” and noted its development had been moved to a site in the United States. Valterra now forwards hydrogen-truck questions to Anglo and says it would rather chase “operational excellence within the portfolio.” Miller pointed out that around 80% of the mine’s emissions come from South Africa’s coal-heavy grid operator, Eskom, and that cleaning up the company’s electricity supply through renewables is a more sensible place to spend money than expensive downstream science. That is a polite way of saying the new owner has no plans to retrofit 40 trucks.<\/p>\n It’s worth being precise about what hasn’t happened, because the original press releases promised a lot. The fleet conversion at Mogalakwena was supposed to be “fully implemented” around 2026. The global 400-truck rollout was framed as a 15-year program. Neither has materialized on anything like the original schedule, and the three parties you’d need to make it happen, the technology owner, the mine owner, and the original sponsor, are now pulling in three different directions. The truck itself was real and it ran. The diesel-killing wave it was supposed to start is the part that stalled.<\/p>\n None of this erases the engineering. As of mid-2026 the nuGen truck is still the largest hydrogen-powered vehicle ever built, and the basic demonstration held up: you can move 290 metric tons of rock around a mine on hydrogen and a battery, with water as the only exhaust. That was the hard technical question, and the answer turned out to be yes.<\/p>\n The question that sank it was never really technical. It was whether anyone could make the economics work at scale, with green hydrogen this expensive and this dependent on subsidies, against a diesel truck that already does the job and doesn’t need a brand-new fueling complex bolted onto every mine. For now the answer to that one is no, and the biggest hydrogen vehicle on Earth sits in a South African pit less as the start of something than as a very large, very impressive monument to a plan that didn’t pencil out. Hydrogen enthusiasts have tried to keep the idea alive in other corners of the vehicle world<\/a>, with mixed results. The mining version, at least, is parked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When most people picture a hydrogen vehicle, they picture a Toyota Mirai. A sensible midsize sedan, fuels up in five … <\/p>\nGreen hydrogen made on-site, in the middle of a platinum mine<\/h2>\n
The 40-truck fleet was the whole point<\/h2>\n
Then the company that built the engine went bankrupt<\/h2>\n
The mine has a new owner, and it isn’t interested<\/h2>\n
The engineering held up. The economics didn’t.<\/h2>\n