H2 still powers only a tiny fraction of total passenger vehicles in the country, but growth is high.

In China, the sale of hydrogen fuel cars took off in 2023, increasing by more than 70 percent when compared to sales the year before.

These vehicles still represent under 0.1 percent of the total Chinese “new-energy vehicle” market.

Last year, the country saw the sale of about 6,000 hydrogen fuel cars, which was an increase of 72 percent over the number of units sold in 2022, according to data released by the China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM).

December saw the strongest sales of H2-powered vehicles, when Chinese drivers purchased 1,512 units. Of those, 1,298 were manufactured within the country. As a result, China became the only country in Asia that experienced an increase in the sale of H2-powered vehicles in 2023. This may also make the country the largest market for the vehicles in the world.

That said, some of the vehicles included in those numbers might have been heavy- or light-duty vehicles used commercially, as opposed to being exclusively passenger vehicles. The Chinese government’s goal is to have 50,000 H2-powered cars on its roads by 2025

South Korea’s sales of hydrogen fuel cars reached 4,635 last year, but that was a year-over-year decrease.

In fact, despite South Korea’s strong-sounding numbers, the drop in sales from 2022 to 2023 was 54 percent. Similarly, Japan’s sales of the passenger vehicles were essentially slashed in half to 422 in 2023 compared to 848 in 2022.

The largest European market for the zero-carbon emission vehicles, Germany, saw sales drop about 70 percent from 2022 to 2023, when the number of units sold fell from 835 to 263 respectively.

The United States has yet to release its numbers

California is the only state in the US where there are any significant sales of hydrogen fuel cars, and the statistics from that state have yet to be released. It is expected that there might have been some growth. Still, as the state was also suffering from an H2 supply crisis, this factor could have impacted sales, and might continue to do so this year.

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