Page 23 - Commercial Vehicle Engineer - June 2021

VOLTA TRUCKS
Breaking into the commercial vehicle truck manufacturing market is difficult to do – the main seven manufacturers hold most of the mainstream market in the UK and have had for some years now – but Volta Trucks seems to be on the way to cracking it.
Building upon the initial sales success of the fully electric Volta Zero, launched last year, Volta Trucks has announced plans to expand its product portfolio with three additional size variants. Alongside this, Volta Trucks’ chief executive officer Essa Al-Saleh has announced bold plans to be selling 27,000 vehicles by 2025 – the company had only initially planned for 5,000 of one model.
NEW SIZES
This is all the more impressive as the Volta Zero has yet to enter series production. The original 16-tonne Volta Zero will be the
first vehicle delivered, with pilot fleet trucks scheduled to be built by the end of 2021, and series production starting about 12 months afterwards. This vehicle is currently in the engineering development phase, with early prototype testing due to start shortly.
But now, production of the 16-tonne vehicle will be closely followed by 19-tonne and mid-size 12-tonne variants in 2023. A pilot fleet of 7.5-tonne vehicles is expected to be launched for customer trials in the same year, with production commencing in late 2024. These later vehicles are currently in the early design development phase.
All the trucks in the range will have similar traits to the 16-tonne Zero, such as the low-seat central driving position with a glasshouse-style cab, which offers 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, thereby also having a positive effect on inner-city traffic congestion.
Inside the Volta Zero cab,
which includes cameras instead of traditional mirrors
COMMERCIAL VEHICLE ENGINEER > JUNE 2021 23