Startup electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer Volta Trucks has revealed its first vehicle. The company says its Zero is the world’s first purpose-built full-electric 16-t (17.6-ton) commercial vehicle designed specifically for inner-city parcel and freight distribution. And it will be a significant contributor to the future vision of zero-emissions cities all over the world.

Volta Trucks was formed in Sweden by cofounders, Carl-Magnus Norden and Kjell Walöen. Its head office is in Stockholm, Sweden, but most of its business operations are undertaken in the UK, where its Chief Executive Officer and management team is based. As a startup, that is supported by a number of out-sourced partners and consultants, Volta Trucks currently has a core management/operating team of just 16 in Sweden and the UK.

The new truck will start operator trials with some of Europe’s largest parcel delivery and logistics companies in the first half of 2021. Orders have already started from companies for the first customer-specification vehicles, which are planned for delivery in 2022.

“Today’s large trucks dangerously impose themselves on our streets and dominate their surroundings,” said Rob Fowler, Chief Executive Officer of Volta Trucks, at the launch of the Zero. “Volta Trucks is redefining the perception of the large commercial vehicle, and how it operates in and integrates with, the zero-emission towns and cities of the future. This is made possible by the three pillars that define both Volta Trucks as a business and the Volta Zero—safety, sustainability, and electrification. Add to that our unique Truck as a Service proposition that reimagines a fleet manager’s business model.”

“Safety is at the heart of the Volta brand for one simple reason,” added Carl-Magnus Norden, Founder of Volta Trucks. “In London, as an example, 23% of pedestrian fatalities and 58% of cyclist deaths involve an HGV, yet large trucks only account for 4% of road miles. This is clearly unacceptable and must change. The Volta Zero completely reimagines the commercial vehicle, ensuring it can operate safely with all road users and become a friend of the zero-emission city.”

The Zero is designed to optimize its load-carrying capacity and thus minimize the number of vehicles in an operator’s fleet and the consequent congestion on city streets. It can operate on narrow city streets and take on the role that three or four 3.5-t (3.9-ton) vehicles would ordinarily be assigned. The truck is 9460 mm (372 in) long, 3470 mm (137 in) tall, and 2550 mm (100 in) wide on a 4800-m (189-in) wheelbase. The top speed is 90 km/h (56 mph).

With an overall volume of 37.7 m³ (1330 ft³) and a top payload of 8600 kg (19,000 lb), the Zero is designed to accommodate 16 Euro pallets. A similar-volume refrigerated cargo box will also be available, with integrated cooling for the vehicle’s battery and refrigeration unit; the latter is normally diesel-powered for commercial-vehicle operations.

 

Supplier engineering and design

Volta Trucks worked with a number of leading design and engineering consultancies, singling out Prodrive and Astheimer Design to produce the launch vehicle.

Prodrive Advanced Technology says it worked through the COVID-19 lockdown to build the first vehicle to the original schedule. It worked with Volta Trucks and partners Astheimer and Magtec to integrate all the high-voltage electrical, electronic, and mechanical systems and assemble the finished vehicle at its headquarters in Banbury, UK.  The project was completed from a clean sheet to a fully running demonstrator in just 10 months.

The Zero follows Prodrive’s recent work with Ford to create the world’s first plug-in hybrid Transit van, which went into full production at the end of 2019.

Astheimer Design helped design the Zero with a focus on safety and sustainability.

“Our starting point was the customer—understanding first-hand what urban deliveries was really like and interviewing logistics managers and drivers,” said Carsten Astheimer, Founder of Astheimer Design, and lead designer of the Zero. “We analyzed the competitors and researched sustainable materials and technologies.”

 

Driver centric

The Zero was designed with a driver-centric focus to make the vehicle safer for drivers as well as vulnerable pedestrians and cyclists. With no traditional internal combustion engine, designers, and engineers of the Zero were able to completely rethink how trucks have been designed.

A driver has a wide 220 degrees of direct vision around the vehicle to deliver a Transport for London five-star Direct Vision Standard rating. The protection of vulnerable road users is enhanced by rear-view cameras that replace traditional mirrors, a 360-degree birds-eye camera showing the complete surroundings, and blind-spot warning systems that detect objects along the vehicle’s sides. The driver sits far lower than in a conventional truck, with an eye-line at around 1.8 m (5.9 ft)—about the height of pedestrians and other road users.

Volta Trucks wants to change the experience and workspace for drivers, offering them an environment closer to a premium car than a traditional commercial vehicle. Driver safety and comfort are optimized by minimizing cognitive overload with intuitive user interfaces. Touchscreens on each side of the central information display are used for lights, climate control, navigation and trip planning, communication, and in-cab media.

Since there is no internal combustion engine, the driver sits in a central position. A swivel seat enables entry/exit via fast opening sliding doors on either side of the cabin.

“We had three main priorities for the design of the cab,” said Astheimer. “We wanted it to be best in class for safety, ease and efficiency of ingress and egress, and the best driver environment of any truck on the market.”

The Zero offers the latest electronic advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) such as active steering, road-sign assist, and reversing assistant when operating in the confines of the city center. For highways, there are lane-change assist and lane-departure-warning systems. A technical status monitoring system, based on artificial intelligence, helps to avoid breakdowns and maximizes vehicle uptime.

 

Sustainable materials

“Sustainability is at the very core of our business,” said Norden. “Saving the planet cannot wait, it must happen now, and Volta Trucks wants to spearhead the rapid change in large commercial vehicles, from outdated diesel to clean and safe technological solutions.”

However, the company says that sustainability is more than just about tailpipe emissions. It says the Zero will be the first road vehicle to use sustainably sourced natural flax material in the construction of exterior body panels. The cab’s dark body panels and many interior trim parts are constructed from the flax material developed by supplier Bcomp of Switzerland in collaboration with the European Space Agency.

The flax weave is reinforced with patented powerRibs grid technology for a fully natural, extremely lightweight, high-performance fiber matting that is almost CO2 neutral over its lifecycle. It is said to match the stiffness and weight of carbon fiber but uses 75% less CO2 to produce. The flax matting is combined with a biodegradable resin derived from rape-seed oil by composites manufacturer Bamd in the UK to produce the Zero body panels.

In a crash, the flax composite bends, reshapes, and ultimately snaps, but offers a flexible fracture behavior without sharp edges to reduce the risk of sharp debris puncturing pedestrians. Simulations show that the pioneering combination of composite body panels combined with the cab’s inner metal spaceframe structure has the same crash and safety performance as conventional steel material.

 

Novel e-axle and batteries

Volta Trucks understands that the real-world operating range of an electric commercial vehicle is important for fleet operators. The driving range of pilot fleet vehicles driving on city streets during 2021 will be 150-200 km (95-125 mi), according to simulations, which the company believes is more than sufficient for the daily use of a “last-mile” delivery vehicle with a full payload.

At launch, Volta Trucks expects to be the first full-electric large commercial vehicle manufacturer in Europe to use an innovative e-axle to drive the rear wheels. Rather than the conventional electric motor and driveshaft set up used by the small number of other electric truck manufacturers, the single electric motor, transmission, and axle of the Zero are contained in a lightweight and compact unit. The e-axle also provides packaging benefits by freeing up space between the chassis rails, the safest possible location for the battery pack.

The Zero will use a 160- to 200-kW·h battery pack of lithium-iron-phosphate (instead of a nickel-cobalt-manganese as used in most passenger cars) that will be highly modular, says the company. It claims that battery technology is well suited to large commercial vehicle use because it delivers a long cycle life, robust cell design, and good thermal stability. Though safely between the chassis rails, should the vehicle be involved in a significant crash that punctures a battery cell, the battery tech is said to be very stable and would not ignite. The battery technology also furthers the company’s sustainability ambitions in that the lithium iron phosphate (unlike with the nickel cobalt manganese type) pack contains no precious metals, eliminating the associated sourcing issues of those materials.

 

Truck as a service

With the Zero, Volta Trucks will introduce an innovative Truck as a Service offering that the company says will revolutionize fleet financing and servicing. It will offer large fleet managers a frictionless and hassle-free way to electrify their fleets and provide aid to smaller operators that need to migrate to electric commercial vehicles but might be overwhelmed by the challenge. A single, affordable, monthly fee will provide access to a vehicle and all of its servicing, maintenance, insurance, and training requirements—and even a replacement Zero if needed to maximize uptime. Even though the Zero has 90% less mechanical parts than an equivalent internal combustion engine vehicle, the company is targeting the same total cost of ownership as with diesel-powered vehicles.

In the first half of 2021, the next stage of development will be the production of 12 pilot fleet vehicles. These vehicles will be built in the UK and used for testing and evaluation with a number of Europe’s leading logistics companies, including DPD Group in the UK and Bring and Posten (of Posten Norge AS) in Scandinavia, to provide operator input and feedback on the final production specification. Volta Trucks to create a further 130 skilled automotive and engineering roles during 2021.

For production in 2022, investigations are ongoing to secure a contract manufacturing partner anticipated to be in the UK. By the end of that year, the company aims to have built around 500 customer-specification vehicles, rising to 5000 vehicles a year by 2025, and increasing thereafter. Emphasizing the aim of reducing the environmental impact of freight deliveries in city centers, the company estimates that the Zero will have eliminated an estimated 180,000 t (198 ton) of CO2 by 2025.