Volta Trucks Claims Arctic Proving of its BEVs
BEV heavy goods vehicle maker, Volta Trucks, says it has Arctic proved its technology over the winter months.
The company adds it has concluded tests undertaken in the Arctic Circle in northern Sweden. Its cold weather testing program was part of a regime of vehicle tests designed to ensure that the full-electric Volta Zero will maintain reliability ahead of series production of customer specification vehicles starts later this year.
Tests by engineers included the pre-conditioning and thermal stability of the battery, interior thermal comfort, 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 degrees Celsius. Information and improvements from the different testing teams and locations were captured and centralized immediately, then rolled out in real time to the other testing environments to accelerate the development process.
Confirming the successful conclusion of cold weather testing, Ian Collins, chief product officer of Volta Trucks, said: “The completion of our winter testing programme 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 customer’s 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.”
— Paul Myles is a seasoned automotive journalist based in Europe. Follow him on Twitter @Paulmyles_
