EU city bus market: electric powertrains pass majority in 2025
Market inflection: city buses flip to zero-emission
A structural shift in European urban transit became visible in 2025 when more than half of newly registered city buses used non-diesel powertrains, marking a step-change in fleet composition and procurement behaviour. Battery-electric buses took the bulk of new sales, fuel-cell buses recorded only single-digit market share and legacy alternatives—hybrids and gas—declined sharply. Policy impetus from the Clean Vehicles Directive accelerated tenders and provided clearer demand signals, while cities with centralized procurement or targeted fiscal support moved fastest.
The transition is uneven. Several smaller Member States and a number of large markets—notably the UK and Italy—registered particularly strong BEV new-sales shares, while a minority of states lagged despite hosting vehicle production hubs. Compliance with formal procurement-phase targets remains patchy in places, highlighting a gap between registration statistics and documented tender-based compliance.
Real-world operational experience and individual procurement decisions are already shaping technology trajectories. A recent collapse of a Polish hydrogen-bus supplier—leaving about twenty ordered vehicles undelivered and endangering subsidy commitments—illustrates delivery and commercial-risk exposures for hydrogen programmes. Comparative trials in Polish cities found hydrogen fleets faced higher fuel costs, more frequent fuel supply issues and lower availability than BEV counterparts. Separately, Zurich’s transit operator has cancelled follow-on framework orders and opened a roughly CHF 140 million tender for a large batch of battery-electric buses, citing persistent reliability and delivery problems with incumbent platforms. These episodes show buyers’ growing preference for mass-proven BEV platforms when network dependability is at stake.
Cost modelling reinforces this procurement tilt. Conservative ten-year, high-use models cited purchase-price estimates of roughly €235,000 for diesel, €610,000 for battery-electric buses and €750,000 for hydrogen buses; energy-cost assumptions produced per-kilometre energy figures near €0.40 for diesel, €0.21 for BEV and €0.74 for hydrogen. When capital, operating costs and monetised emissions were combined, net-present-value outcomes favoured BEV fleets strongly in urban duty cycles.
Supply-chain and systems effects are now the decisive constraints. The concentration of near-term demand into battery cells, electric driveline suppliers and depot charging equipment is creating orders for megawatt-scale chargers, transformers and grid reinforcements. Where hydrogen retains traction, it is locally driven by industrial strategy or niche duty profiles rather than broad commercial economics. Policymakers face a clear trade-off: spreading scarce procurement across alternative powertrains fragments order books and risks higher per-unit costs and stranded assets, whereas targeted aggregation on mature BEV platforms can speed deployment, raise fleet availability and lower lifecycle costs.
If the 2023–25 momentum persists—combined with tighter procurement rules and maturing OEM product lines—full zero-emission replacement of new city buses could be reached years ahead of prior expectations, compressing investment timelines and reshaping competitive dynamics in the supplier base. However, electrification will expose operational challenges: depot electrification, grid upgrades, high-power charging logistics and battery lifecycle management are now the critical gating factors, and unresolved issues in these areas could produce short-term service disruptions and concentrated material bottlenecks.
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