Volta Trucks Road-To-Zero Emissions Strategy
Volta Trucks has laid out its Road-to-Zero Emissions strategy and is launching four full-electric commercial vehicles. The trucks will be between 7.5t and 19t and manufactured at multiple facilities. The target is set to 27,000 vehicle sales annually across expanded markets.
The company plans to launch these new trucks by 2025. The Volta Zero was the first purpose-built full-electric 16-tonne commercial vehicle designed for inner-city last-mile deliveries, and Volta is building on the Zero for these new models. The company has plans to expand its product portfolio with three additional variants within the medium to lower end of the heavy-duty class.
The 4 Electric Trucks
The Volta Zero will be the first of the four delivered. Volta plans to have its Pilot Fleet trucks built by the end of 2021 and series production is planned to start around 12 months afterward. Currently, the vehicle is still in the engineering development phase and testing of the early prototype is due to start soon.
Following the production of the 16-tonne Volta Zero will be the largest vehicle, the 19-tonne one. After that will be the mid-size 12-tonne variants in 2023. Volta expects a Pilot Fleet of the smaller 7.5-tonne vehicles to be launched for customer trials in 2023, with production commencing in late 2024. The later vehicles are currently in the early design development phase.
Volta plans for all variants to be designed with optimized payloads, which offer fleet managers the chance to use a reduced number of larger Volta Zero vehicles — which, in turn, removes several smaller vans from their operations. This would help reduce inner-city traffic congestion.
27,000 Volta Trucks Per Year Starting In 2025
Volta is planning for its sales volumes to accelerate past 27,000 per year starting in 2025. Its strategy focuses on a Europe-first city-specific strategy. Following this are North America and Asia. Volta announced what was believed to be Europe’s single largest purchase of full-electric large commercial vehicles with the sale of 1,000 Volta Zeros to Petit Forestier in 2020. Forestier is Europe’s largest refrigerated commercial rental fleet.
Due to the strength of market demand for its trucks in Europe, Volta Trucks is accelerating its market entry in Europe. Initially, the Volta Zero was launched in the UK and France. Currently, it’s in Spain for a roadshow with customers. After its trip to Spain, Volta will bring its truck to Germany and North America over the summer. Due to the market demand for full-electric commercial vehicles that is driven by customers’ needs as well as regulations, Volta Trucks expects volumes to rise beyond 2025 after hitting 27,000 units a year.
Chief Executive Officer of Volta Trucks, Essa Al-Saleh, shared some thoughts on the company’s new Road-to-Zero Emissions strategy:
“We have seen huge success since launching the 16-tonne Volta Zero in September 2020. We have significant tailwinds 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 afterward. 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.”
Carl-Magnus Norden, Founder and Executive Chairman of Volta Trucks, also added his thoughts.
“When we created the Company, we originally set out to decarbonize logistics operations and to make city centers 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 decarbonization 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.”
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