Mercedes-Benz Esprinter vs Hyundai Nexo

What's the difference?

The Mercedes-Benz Sprinter range of vans and cab-chassis models competes for buyers in the Light Duty (3501-8000kg GVM) segment of Australia’s highly competitive Heavy Commercial vehicle market.

In 2024 the German manufacturer expanded its diverse turbo-diesel van range by launching a full-electric variant called the eSprinter, which for the first time offered local buyers the opportunity to drive with zero tailpipe emissions.

We recently spent a working week with this unique offering to assess how competently it could fulfil the diverse job requirements of private tradie buyers and fleet operators.

The first time I drove the Hyundai Nexo it was in a place called Goyang in South Korea.

Goyang was a place of pure contrast. The old Korea clashed with the new as you walked through ancient seafood markets toward the towering Hyundai Motorstudio, an ultra-modernist expression of design, perched like a steel battleship above a simultaneously crumbling and rapidly modernising city. 

Part museum, part design expo, part car dealership of the future, it was as though the whole place was a metaphor for the breakneck pace at which megacorp Chaebols like Hyundai were advancing Korea at a faster rate than its populace could keep up with.

The brand’s Nexo SUV is the same in a lot of ways. It’s a mid-size SUV that might be popular right now, but it contains the technology of the future wrapped in a digestible format for the masses.

Of course, it’s the future from a certain point of view. VW would argue EVs alone are set to drive our brave zero emissions future, but Hyundai is of a different mind.

What you’re looking at here, or so Hyundai’s representatives tell us, is the ultimate replacement for diesel. Long range, high load capacity, and an ultra-fast refuelling time are part of the hydrogen fuel cell promise. One that promises to out-do many of Australia’s qualms with EVs.

A statement of the future it may be, but what’s the Hyundai Nexo actually like as a car? We went to its Australian launch to find out