‘Explosive growth’ | More than 10,000 hydrogen-powered vehicles hit the road in China in 2025
Source：hydrogeninsight
More than 10,000 hydrogen-powered fuel-cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) hit the road in 2025 — a year-on-year increase of more than 50%, according to newly published figures.
Incredibly, a total of 6,334 were registered in December alone, as part of a “year-end sales push”, according to the Gaogong Hydrogen and Electricity Industry Research Institute (GGII).
“This marks the first time in history that annual sales of hydrogen vehicles [in China] have exceeded 10,000 units,” says GGII.
By contrast, only 6,105 FCEVs were sold worldwide outside of China in the first nine months of 2025, with the vast majority of those in South Korea, according to the latest figures from Korean analyst SNE Research.
FCEV sales have been falling since 2022 worldwide, with the exception of South Korea (where last year’s introduction of the new Nexo FCEV significantly boosted sales) and China.
The cumulative number of FCEVs registered in China — from the first demonstration programmes in 2021 to the end of 2025 — amounts to 32,216, adds GGII, which uses official vehicle registration data and insurance records to compile its statistics.
Exceeding the 10,000 annual sales figure for the first time is “a key milestone, marking that the demonstration and promotion of hydrogen vehicles has passed the initial exploratory stage”, says GGII.
“However, at the same time, the reliance on year-end sales targets, the strong pull of policies and subsidies, and constraints in infrastructure, cost, and business models still indicate that the path to industrialisation still faces many challenges.
“The next challenge is how to shift from ‘pulsating growth’ to ‘normalized sales’, a question the entire industry must address together.”
The China Association of Automobile Manufacturers (CAAM) released its own sales figures for 2025 last week, which differ noticeably from GGII’s statistics.
This is because CAAM measures sales by manufacturers to wholesalers (ie, dealerships, fleet buyers or distributors), rather than vehicles given licence plates and insured by specific drivers.
CAAM says that 7,797 FCEVs were sold in China last year, with 3,587 of those sold in December — a 1,238% increase compared to the same month in 2024, which the institute describes as “explosive growth”.
This compares to only 132 units sold in January 2025.
However, while the association puts the number of FCEVs sold to date in China at 31,298 units, it points out that the official government target was to see “approximately 50,000” FCEVs on the road by 2025, as stated in its “Medium and Long-Term Plan for the Development of the Hydrogen Energy Industry (2021-2035)”.
CAAM says that there are three “core reasons” for this failure to hit the official target:
1) Overly ambitious target setting by the five major FCEV demonstration city clusters that they were not able to meet;
2) Bottlenecks in the hydrogen supply chain and the relative high cost of green hydrogen production;
3) The fact that heavy-duty fuel-cell trucks still cost more to buy and operate than diesel-powered units.
“The conditions for market-driven growth to replace policy-driven growth are not yet mature,” it explained.