Volta Trucks, a full-electric commercial vehicle manufacturer and services provider, has begun manufacturing of the first road-going ‘Design Verification’ (DV) prototype Volta Zero vehicle at a dedicated facility in Coventry, UK.
The DV prototypes are the first full-electric Volta Zero trucks to be created in the production-ready design that was just presented. A total of 25 vehicles will be produced, and once completed in January, the fleet will be subjected to rigorous testing. This will entail Volta Trucks engineers simulating a wide range of customer usage and delivery cycles, as well as subjecting the Volta Zero to extreme cold weather environments in the Arctic, hot weather environments in equatorial conditions, and crash testing, all in order to validate the vehicle’s safety, durability, and reliability.
The complete DV testing program’s results will be transmitted into the last prototype stage – ‘Production Verification’ (PV). In mid-2022, the PV prototype vehicle will be manufactured at the company’s new production factory in Steyr, Austria. Many of these production-spec prototypes will be given to chosen clients for prolonged periods of time to be evaluated in real-world logistics settings, logging millions of delivery kilometers alongside Volta Trucks’ own engineers.
“The first Volta Zero rolling chassis began testing in August, and we’ve already collected massive quantities of data from that vehicle,” stated Ian Collins, Chief Product Officer of Volta Trucks. “We’ve incorporated that feedback into the Design Verification prototypes, which are going into production today.” We are presently in the quick test – learn – iterate – develop phase. Given our ambitious goal of starting series production in a year, which is driven by customer demand for zero-emission vehicles, this will be significantly more concentrated and rigorous than a typical vehicle testing program. This will take us to some of the world’s hottest, coldest, and most severe circumstances, all to guarantee that the production specification vehicles that roll off the assembly line by the end of 2022 meet or exceed our customers’ expectations.”