Volta Trucks, the leading and disruptive full-electric commercial vehicle manufacturer and services provider, has concluded its demanding winter testing programme, undertaken by the Arctic Circle in northern Sweden. The cold weather testing programme was part of a rigorous regime of vehicle tests designed to ensure that the full-electric Volta Zero will deliver the highest levels of quality, reliability, and durability when series production of customer specification vehicles starts later this year.  

Volta Trucks engineers were evaluating a wide variety of technical aspects of the vehicle in some of the world’s harshest conditions. This included the pre-conditioning and thermal stability of the battery, interior thermal comfort, defrosting and demisting of the cabin as well as traction with different levels of grip and mileage accumulation with different cargo weights, all undertaken in temperatures as low as -30 degrees Celsius.  

To deliver the full-electric Volta Zero at an industry-leading pace, the Vehicle Development team at Volta Trucks uses state-of-the-art tools to ensure consistency and communication across multiple simultaneous test activities. Information and improvements from the different testing teams and locations are captured and centralised immediately, then rolled out in real time to the other testing environments to accelerate the development process.

Confirming the successful conclusion of cold weather testing, Ian Collins, Chief Product Officer of Volta Trucks, said; “The completion of our winter testing programme is another major milestone in our journey towards the start of production of the Volta Zero. In developing the world’s first purpose-built full-electric medium duty truck, we are encountering many challenges for the first time, and needing to understand and resolve those challenges quickly to get the vehicle to market at the pace our customer’s demand. It’s unlikely that customers in our launch markets of London and Paris will experience such conditions but we need to push the vehicle to the extremes to ensure we deliver the highest levels of quality and reliability from the very first customer vehicles produced.” 

Editor’s notes.

About the Volta Zero.

The Volta Zero is the world’s first purpose-built full-electric 16-tonne vehicle designed for urban logistics, reducing the environmental impact of freight deliveries in city centres. Designed from the ground up with an operating pure-electric range of 150 – 200 kms (95 – 125 miles), the Volta Zero will eliminate an estimated 1.2M tonnes of CO₂ by 2025.

Safety is also at the heart of Volta Trucks, with its ambition of producing the safest trucks for our cities. The Volta Zero was designed for electric from the outset, which facilitates a step-change in vehicle, driver and pedestrian safety. Thanks to the removal of the internal combustion engine, the operator of a Volta Zero sits in a central driving position, with a much lower seat height than a conventional truck. This combination, plus a glass house-style cab design, gives the driver a wide 220-degrees of visibility, minimising dangerous blind spots. The prototype Volta Zero was launched in September 2020, with the first vehicles expected to be operating with customers in mid-2022. 

In November 2021, Volta Trucks announced Europe’s largest purchase of full-electric trucks with DB Schenker’s order of 1,470 vehicles. This followed Petit Forestier’s order of 1,000 Volta Zeros. Volta Trucks now has a total order bank of around 5,000 vehicles, with an order bank value of circa €1.2 billion. 

About Volta Trucks.

Volta Trucks is a scale-up full-electric commercial vehicle manufacturer and services company. Volta Trucks’ Head Office is in Stockholm, Sweden, with its engineering led from the UK, and forthcoming manufacturing facility in Steyr, Austria. The company also has sales teams across France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and the UK. Volta Trucks is partnering with a number of global leaders in the supply chain for the development and production of the Volta Zero.