Digital Ecology 10 editions · since 2026-W32

Electro Mobility Evolution Lab

Empowered by the Electron Vector and the Hydrogen Vector. Same method for both.

Method

Who publishes this

Digital Ecology (digital-ecology.eu) is published by ISCEER S.L. ISCEER is active as a consultancy in the hydrogen field. That is a commercial interest in the subject this site covers, and we state it plainly so you can weigh our figures accordingly. It is the reason every figure on this site is dated, attributed to a named source, and given with its system boundary and caveats, and why the same method is applied to both vectors.

Publisher details are in the imprint. Our safeguard against bias is the method below, applied identically to every technology.

Thesis

Electro Mobility, empowered by the Electron Vector and the Hydrogen Vector.

A fuel-cell vehicle is an electric vehicle. In both cases an electric motor drives the wheels; the only difference is the path of the electrons to that motor — stored in a cell, or released from a molecule. So there is no “hydrogen against battery”: there is one form of mobility and two vectors that feed it.

The boundary follows from this. A hydrogen combustion engine, an ammonia ship and an e-SAF aircraft are combustion machines. They belong to the hydrogen world, not to electro mobility, and therefore appear in the depth of the Hydrogen Vector, never in the comparison.

The core shows where the two vectors compete; the periphery shows where only one gets there. Both are findings.

Provenance

— Via Azul, ISCEER: “Move electrical energy to the Point-of-Sale — NOT fuels!” The position treated hydrogen as an energy vector alongside electricity. The thesis is seventeen years old and documented. This is an attribution of origin, not a brand.

Structure: a symmetric core and technology depth

Each weekly edition has two layers.

Where we show no number

A number appears only where two technologies really compete inside the core. Every pair of technologies carries one of three states, and the reason is printed with it:

“Not comparable” is never used for a pair that really competes. That would say “this is physically impossible” where the truth is “this is possible, but it is not electro mobility, and here is why”.

Weeks are ISO weeks

From edition W42 a week is the ISO calendar week, Monday 00:00 to Sunday 24:00 (CET/CEST), and “W42” means what ISO week 42 means: the label of an edition is always the ISO week it reports, so W42 reports 12 to 18 October and is planned for Monday 19 October. A publication with its own definition of a week cannot be reconciled against anyone else’s weekly series; one with the standard definition can.

The ten earlier editions, W32 to W41, were published with a Tuesday-to-Monday window (the first two with irregular ones) and keep it. They are the published record and are not re-dated; each carries a note that states its reporting window.

Convergence is quarterly, not weekly

New registrations are published monthly to annually. A convergence curve drawn every week would show noise. The curve therefore moves to a quarterly layer, built from national and association monthly data; the weekly editions carry what really happens weekly: events, prices, infrastructure, final investment decisions and policy steps. Every figure shows when it was collected and when the next collection is due, so that a monthly value unchanged for three weeks reads as current, not as a gap.

What the statistics do not separate

Fuel-cell vehicles are not reported separately across the EU. The European car manufacturers’ association (ACEA) reports battery-electric cars on their own and files fuel-cell cars under “others” together with natural gas, LPG, E85 and other fuels (footnote to its registration tables, press release of 23 July 2026). Eurostat bundles fuel-cell vehicles and hydrogen combustion vehicles in a single code (HYD_FCELL); its transport glossary defines a hydrogen vehicle as a road vehicle using hydrogen for propulsion, fuel-cell vehicles included, and its code list has no separate code for hydrogen combustion. The reason is scale: in 2025 the EU27 registered 531 hydrogen passenger cars (Eurostat, road_eqr_carpda), against about 1.9 million electric ones (code ELC, same table).

Germany is the exception that proves the point: the Kraftfahrt-Bundesamt keeps “fuel cell” and “hydrogen” in separate columns, so the German resolution is higher than the EU’s (what the second column contains is not defined by the KBA; see the quarterly retro). This is a measurement, not a gap: a technology too small to receive its own statistics is thereby described. Where we use the Eurostat figure it is an aggregate with a stated composition. It is an upper bound for “hydrogen vehicles in total”, never part of the convergence, and never booked as fuel-cell vehicles. The battery side has the same construction: “electrically chargeable” (battery plus plug-in hybrid) is an aggregate in its own right. Includes hydrogen combustion vehicles. At the present scale this has no effect on the reading; the separation becomes material once hydrogen trucks and buses are registered in series.

Empty cells are findings

When a figure could not be found, the edition says so and names where we looked. We do not estimate, interpolate or fill a gap to make a table look complete.

Sourcing rules