Europe’s biggest cities such as Paris and London are getting tough with their low emission policies for city centre traffic. It’s an increasing issue for the haulage industry that has traditionally relied on the kind of large diesel-powered trucks and lorries that are being particularly targeted.
Electric delivery vans, usually weighing up around 3.5-tonnes are now a common sight around urban environments. However, electrifying lorries in the 7.5 to 18-tonne category for urban deliveries has proven a much slower process. Until now, their weight has put them beyond the capabilities of battery technology.
However, Volta, an Anglo-Swedish electric lorries start-up, is seeking to address that technological gap in the market for haulage EVs. The company is currently hand-building 25 16-tonne electric lorry prototypes of the Volta Zero model it believes will set it on course to become the “Tesla of haulage”.
The first Volta Zeros will, if all goes according to plan, be on the streets of Paris by the first quarter of 2023, carrying loads for Europe’s biggest logistics companies including DB Schenker and DPD. Shortly after that, Volta Zeros are expected to be in use in London, operated by Clipper Logistics on behalf of the Crown Estate and serving central retail zones like Regent Street.
Although Volta’s R&D and manufacturing is very much a West Midlands operation, the company’s founder is the 67-year-old serial Swedish entrepreneur Carl-Magnus Norden. The Volta Zero was engineered and developed by the Prodrive group and the first 46,000 electric lorries, planned for delivery between 2023 and 2025, will be manufactured in Coventry.
Coventry, the heart of the traditional UK automaker industry, is starting to rise out of the ashes as a new EV manufacturing centre. Geely, the Chinese owner of Volvo, which is transforming into an all-electric marque, also based the research and development for its Polestar electric cars in Coventry. And LEVC, which is manufacturing the new generation of hybrid London black cabs is also based in the city.
The area will hopefully have another major EV operation to its name if things go as plan for Volta, which Norden said was inspired by the 300,000 orders for the Tesla Model X that had been received within days of its launch. Norden says:
“I looked at that and said ‘who is doing that for the commercial vehicle market?’.”
Norden saw a double opportunity in electric lorries. The first was the obvious trend towards urban centres taking increasingly progressive measures to improve air pollution levels making it problematic for traditional commercial vehicles to continue accessing city centres. The second was to tackle the haulage industry’s poor road-safety record through a revolution in lorry design. In support of the second issue, Norden quotes Transport for London figures that paint a grim picture:
“Only about 4 per cent of road miles are travelled by lorries, yet lorries are responsible for 26 per cent of pedestrian fatalities and 78 per cent of cyclist fatalities.”
The Volta Zero’s driver’s cab has been lowered to road-user level, which, in combination with a central driving position (which also handily means the same cabs can be sold in the UK and mainland Europe as there is no left and right-hand drive) minimises the driver’s blind spots by offering 220-degree visibility.
The redesign of the cabin is possible because the electric batteries that power the lorry take up much less space than the usual diesel engine, despite their massive 1.5-tonne weight. Their more compact size means that the batteries and motor are held in a single corridor through the chassis.
The one snag to mass commercialisation is the cost of Volta Zero at £200,000 each. A big chunk of that is taken up by the huge batteries which can still only provide a range of 100 miles on one charge. It takes a lot of electric power to run a 16-tonne lorry. However, Volta claims that range is more than enough for typical routes between out-of-town logistics hubs and urban city centres. And while the upfront investment is more capital intensive, lower fuel and maintenance costs will, says Volta, make the cost of ownership of a Volta Zero cheaper than that of a comparable diesel-engine lorry over eight years.
Volta has been focused on getting the Zero to market as quickly as possible to make the most of first-movers advantage by establishing its brand and having products to sell before competitors join the landgrab for lorry market share in Europe’s future zero-emission urban centres.