Wednesday, December 18, 2024
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Volta Trucks announces its Road-to-Zero emissions strategy

Volta Trucks releases its commercial, product and manufacturing road map to 2025 with four new models and a Europe-first city-specific strategy.

Full-electric commercial vehicle manufacturer, Volta Trucks, has announced its Road-to-Zero emissions strategy, offering a wide range of full-electric commercial vehicles with four new fully electric commercial vehicles on the market by 2025.

Building upon its Volta Zero model – a 16-tonne commercial vehicle designed for inner-city last mile deliveries – the company plans to expand its product line with three additional variants in the medium/lower-end of the Heavy-Duty class: 7.5-tonne, 12-tonne, 16-tonne and 19-tonne.

The 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

Europe-first city-specific strategy

The Volta Zero was launched in September 2020 into the London and Paris markets to much interest and the company will follow up this Europe-first strategy with a launch into US and Asian cities. Volta expects to introduce the Volta Zero in all its four weight variants across its core markets and given the growing market demand for fully-electric commercial vehicles, the company expects to shift >27,000 units per year by the end of 2025.

Volta will also be launching a Truck-as-a-Service (“TaaS”) proposition, which the company hopes will “revolutionise the financing and servicing of commercial vehicle fleets”.

TaaS will offer fleet managers a “frictionless way to electrify their fleets”, with a monthly fee providing access to a Volta Zero, and all of its servicing, maintenance, insurance and training requirements.

Given its sustainability ambitions, Volta Trucks says it will adopt a network manufacturing strategy with a number of assembly facilities distributed across its key geographies, minimising unnecessary transportation and cost. The company recently announced it has “expressed an interest” in manufacturing vehicles at the Decarbonisation Hub project in the former Nissan manufacturing facilities in Barcelona.

Any vehicles manufactured in Spain could potentially serve southern European markets but would not be the first vehicles built. Volta is considering a number of additional manufacturing locations across Europe, North America and Asia, to have the capacity to meet the significant volume ramp-up envisaged within its plan.

Announcing the company’s ambitious Road-to-Zero emissions strategy, CEO 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.”

Image: Volta Trucks

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