Volta Trucks, a leading and disruptive all-electric commercial vehicle manufacturer and services provider, has concluded its demanding winter testing programme. To push the Volta Zero, the world’s first purpose-built fully-electric 16-tonne commercial vehicle, to its limits, the testing was undertaken at 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 all-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 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.
Road handling was also tested including traction with different levels of grip and mileage accumulation with different cargo weights, all undertaken in temperatures as low as minus-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.
Ian Collins, Volta Trucks chief product officer, 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.”
