Volta Trucks recently announced that production has finally started for the first road-going ‘Design Verification’ (DV) electric truck prototype, Volta Zero, at the company’s bespoke facility in Coventry, UK.
The prototypes are the first full-electric Volta Zero vehicles to be built in the recently unveiled production-ready design.
A total of 25 vehicles will be manufactured and once completed in January, the fleet will embark on a rigorous testing regime.
This will involve Volta Trucks engineers replicating a wide range of customer usage and delivery cycles, as well as taking the Volta Zero to the extremes of cold weather environments in the Arctic, hot weathers in equatorial conditions, and crash testing, all to validate the safety, durability, and reliability of the vehicle.
The results of the comprehensive DV testing programme will be fed into the final prototype stage – ‘Production Verification’ (PV).
The PV prototype vehicles will be built at the company’s new manufacturing plant in Steyr, Austria, in mid-2022.
Many of these production-specification prototypes will be lent to selected customers for extended periods to be tested in their real-world logistics conditions, undertaking millions of delivery kilometres, alongside Volta Trucks’ own engineers.
The Volta Zero is the world’s first purpose-built full-electric 16-tonne vehicle designed for inner-city 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 km, 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-degree 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.
