Volta Trucks plans four new-electric trucks to reach zero-emissions target

Volta Trucks is planning to launch four new full-electric commercial vehicles as part of the company’s ‘Road to Zero emissions’ strategy.

The company is set to expand its product portfolio to include three new models ranging from 7.5 to 19 tonnes.

A 16-tonne Volta Zero will be the first vehicle delivered, with Pilot Fleet trucks built by the end of 2021, and series production starting around 12 months afterwards. This vehicle is currently in the engineering development phase, with early prototype testing due to start shortly.

Production of the 16-tonne vehicle will be closely followed by the largest 19-tonne and mid-size 12-tonne variants in 2023. A Pilot Fleet of the smaller 7.5-tonne vehicles is expected to be launched for customer trials in the same year, with production commencing in late 2024.

The vehicles will join Volta’s first purpose-built full-electric commercial vehicle, the Volta Zero, which was designed for inner-city last mile deliveries.

Volta said all trucks will adopt a new, innovative low-seat central driving position with a glasshouse-style cab, offering 220-degrees of visibility to maximise visual communication between the driver and vulnerable road users around the vehicle.

Also, like the 16-tonne vehicle, all variants will be designed with optimised payloads, thus offering fleet managers the opportunity of using a reduced number of larger Volta Zero vehicles and removing several smaller vans from their operations.

Volta has announced that it is to accelerate its market entry with a Europe-first strategy, followed by US and Asian cities. The Volta Zero, developed by Prodrive, was initially launched in the UK and France and is currently in Spain for a tailored roadshow with customers.

Afterwards, it will be presented in Germany and North America over the summer, with other European markets including Netherlands, Italy, and Belgium to be confirmed by year end. Volta Trucks expects to introduce the Volta Zero in all its four weight variants across all its core markets.

The company has also set its sights on the sale of more than 27,000 units per year by the end of 2025, with volumes increasing further in the following years.

Chief executive officer of Volta Trucks, Essa Al-Saleh, said: “We have seen huge success since launching the 16-tonne Volta Zero in September 2020. We have significant tail winds with zero emission large commercial vehicles, thanks to forthcoming legislation changes that are driving demand, as well as many customers with uncompromising sustainability agendas wanting to purchase the most environmentally focused vehicles for their fleets. This has created a very strong order book that encourages us to rapidly accelerate our plans.

“When we launched the Volta Zero, we’d expected to be selling 5,000 vehicles a year with a single model by 2025. Given our pace of development, driven by customer demand, we clearly see the opportunity to expand the Volta Zero into a portfolio of vehicles to offer customers a wider selection of full-electric vehicle sizes, and to accelerate the change to zero emissions. This leads us to far more ambitious sales expectations, with more than five times the number of vehicles now expected to be built compared to our original proposal. That’ll see over 27,000 vehicles sold per year by 2025, and further volume growth afterwards.

“To achieve these ambitious goals and timelines, we will work in a very nimble and agile way to ensure our speed to market. We will also need a network of world-class manufacturing facilities. I’m pleased that recently, we expressed an interest to build Volta Zeros in Barcelona and are also investigating several other facilities in Europe, Asia and North America to ensure we can keep up with demand.”

Founder and executive chairman of Volta Trucks, Carl-Magnus Norden, added; “When we created the company, we originally set out to decarbonise logistics operations, and to make city centres safer and more sustainable places to live and work in. But we originally believed that we couldn’t achieve this objective by ourselves, and we strongly encouraged other manufacturers on their journeys towards zero emissions. Over the past months though, we’ve seen unprecedented demand in the marketplace, confirming that our ambition resonates well with our customers, but we’ve also seen very few other start-ups or OEMs announcing new fully electric commercial vehicles in the Medium and lower-Heavy Duty sectors. On this basis, we will have to deliver more of the decarbonisation of the logistics industry ourselves, and the launch of four separate fully electric commercial vehicles targeting more than 27,000 truck sales per year by 2025, just three years after starting production, is a very strong statement of intent to deliver on our original vision.”