While US fleets keep debating whether hydrogen trucks have a future, SaudiArabia just put a self-driving one on the road

While U.S. fleets keep debating whether hydrogen trucks have a future, Saudi Arabia just put a self-driving one on the road for a consumer-goods giant — zero-emission, 930 miles on a tank

autonocion.com | Luis Reyes | Jun 6

If you’ve watched U.S. trucking for the past 18 months, the hydrogen storyline reads like a slow-motion pileup. Nikola went bankrupt. Hyzon pulled back to refuse trucks and then started shopping itself around. And the Department of Energy began clawing back money from the green-hydrogen hubs that were supposed to anchor the whole ecosystem. Heavy Duty Trucking summed up the moment bluntly: U.S. momentum for fuel-cell trucks has largely stalled since Nikola and Hyzon left the field. Toyota’s still in. Daimler and Volvo are still in. But actual hydrogen trucks on actual American roads stay thin on the ground.

Meanwhile, about 7,000 miles away, a laundry-detergent company just went and did the thing American freight has spent half a decade arguing over. On June 4, 2026, Saudi Arabia’s Transport General Authority announced the rollout of the Kingdom’s first hydrogen-powered heavy-duty truck with autonomous driving built in, and one of the three names writing checks is Procter & Gamble. The Tide and Pampers people. The other two are Saudi distributor Ismail Abudawood and Chinese self-driving firm Hyperview. So while U.S. fleets keep debating whether hydrogen has a future, P&G’s Riyadh supply chain is already putting hydrogen freight on the road.

What P&G actually put on the road

The headline numbers are real, not slideware. Per the TGA, the truck runs on clean hydrogen, emits zero carbon at the tailpipe, refuels in minutes, and covers up to 1,500 kilometers on a fill. That’s roughly 930 miles between stops, comfortably past the 500-mile range Toyota quotes for its own hydrogen Class 8 in Southern California, and far enough to pull long-haul diesel routes into the conversation instead of leaving them in the “someday” bin.

The autonomy isn’t robotaxi-grade, either. The partners describe a multi-level self-driving stack running on advanced software and AI, aimed at squeezing more efficiency out of operations rather than removing the driver. Hyperview’s earlier truck with Aramco ran a Level 3 system that handled route planning, lane-keeping and obstacle detection, which is the realistic ceiling here: a human in the seat, the computer grinding out the highway miles. A version of this same truck family showed up at Riyadh’s Future Minerals Forum in January 2025 carrying a 240-kW fuel cell, 59 kilograms of usable hydrogen, and a 72-kWh battery, good for about 800 kilometers then. The June 2026 launch is that platform grown up, with longer legs and a name-brand multinational behind the freight.

Why P&G is the unlock, not the truck
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https://www.autonocion.com/us/saudi-arabia-hydrogen-truck/

Saudi Arabia launches first driverless heavy truck running on hydrogen fuel

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