Volta Trucks, a leading and disruptive fully-electric commercial vehicle manufacturer and services provider, have confirmed the first road-going Volta Zero ‘Design Verification’ (DV) prototype is now complete and ready for final commissioning. There’s also a fleet of other vehicles already being built.
The Volta Zero is the world’s first purpose-built fully-electric 16-tonne commercial vehicle specifically created for inner-city logistics. The DV 1 prototype version is the first fully-electric Volta Zero vehicle to be built in the recently unveiled production-ready design. A rigorous, comprehensive testing programme lies ahead for the zero-emission electric that was built at a bespoke facility in Coventry, UK.
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.
Volta will also be taking the Volta Zero to the extremes of cold weather environments in the Arctic and hot weather locations in equatorial conditions. Plus, there will be extensive crash testing, all to validate the safety, durability and reliability of the vehicle.
The results of the comprehensive Design Verification testing programme will then be fed into the final prototype stage ready for ‘Production Verification’ (PV) models. Once at this stage, Volta Trucks will build the PV models 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. As a result, they will undertake millions of delivery kilometres, alongside Volta Trucks’ own engineers.
