Production has finally started on the Volta Trucks Zero road-going vehicles.
The so-called Design Verification prototypes aren’t quite the final versions of the zero-emissions trucks but they are a big step forwards toward final production.
A total of 25 vehicles will be manufactured at Volta’s facility in Coventry and, once completed in January, the fleet will embark on a “rigorous” testing regime.
Volta engineers will replicate a wide range of customer usage and delivery cycles, as well as taking the Volta Zero prototypes to the extreme cold weather scenarios in the Arctic, hot equatorial conditions, and crash testing.
The results of this testing program will be fed into the final prototype stage – Production Verification (PV). These PV 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.
“In August, the first Volta Zero rolling chassis started testing, and we’ve already extracted huge amounts of data from that vehicle. We have integrated that feedback into the Design Verification prototypes that start production today,” says Ian Collins, Chief Product Officer of Volta Trucks.
“We now move into a rapid test – learn – iterate – develop phase. This is going to be far more condensed and intensive than a normal vehicle testing programme, given our ambitious timeline to start series production in a year’s time, that is driven by customers’ needs for zero-emission trucks. This will take us to some of the hottest, coldest and most extreme conditions in the world, all to ensure that the production specification vehicles that roll off the production line by the end of 2022 deliver the highest possible quality standards and exceed our customers’ expectations.”
Keyword: Volta Begins Production of Road-Going Prototype Trucks