Volta Trucks, which is currently developing an electric commercial vehicle platform, says it has concluded a winter testing program in Sweden. Its engineers were evaluating a variety of elements on the prototype vehicles, including the preconditioning and thermal stability of the battery, interior thermal comfort and defrosting and demisting of the cabin, as well as traction with different levels of grip and mileage accumulation with different cargo weights, all undertaken in temperatures as low as -30°C.
According to the company, data from the different testing teams and locations is being captured and centralized immediately, then rolled out in real time to the other active testing teams, to accelerate the development process.
Ian Collins, chief product officer at Volta Trucks, remarked, “The completion of our winter testing program is another major milestone in our journey towards the start of production of the Volta Zero. In developing the world’s first purpose-built, full electric, medium-duty truck, we are encountering many challenges for the first time, and needing to understand and resolve those challenges quickly to get the vehicle to market at the pace our customers demand. It’s unlikely that customers in our launch markets of London and Paris will experience such conditions but we need to push the vehicle to the extremes to ensure we deliver the highest levels of quality and reliability from the very first customer vehicles produced.”
