Aberdeen Hydrogen Buses Sell for £30k After £556k Purchase Price

Aberdeen’s hydrogen double-decker experiment has reached a revealing milestone. First Bus is set to acquire 23 Wrightbus StreetDeck Hydroliners at roughly £30,000 per vehicle, a fraction of the approximately £556,000 each bus originally cost the city. The council’s initial outlay for the fleet totaled about £13.9 million.

The resale figure offers a market-based verdict that theoretical debates about fuel-cell efficiency and hydrogen infrastructure cannot match. It reflects how the secondhand value of these vehicles has settled after roughly five years of service, and it underscores the gap between subsidized procurement costs and real-world residual worth.

For fleet operators and policymakers, the numbers are a reminder that hydrogen’s business case depends not only on running costs but on what assets are worth once the first owner is done with them. Battery-electric buses, by contrast, have seen steadier resale demand as charging networks have expanded.

First Bus’s purchase price now stands as a concrete data point in the ongoing comparison between hydrogen and battery-electric transit strategies.