• Volta Trucks, a Swedish developer of fully electric trucks, has commenced production of the first road-going design verification (DV) prototype of its 16-ton electric truck, “Volta Zero,” at its facility in Coventry, UK.

<ul><li>The company plans to manufacture 25 trucks by January, which will be built in the production-ready prototype unveiled earlier this month. Upon production, the units will be tested in areas including functionality in extreme weather conditions, simulations of a range of customer usage and delivery cycles, and crash testing for production validation.</ul>

<ul><li>Volta Trucks will feed the test results into the production verification (PV) prototypes that are to be built at its newly announced manufacturing facility in Steyr, Austria by mid-2022. The company intends to lend the PV prototypes to selected customers for real-world testing.</ul>

<ul><li> Analyst QuickTake: Volta Trucks unveiled the first prototype of Volta Zero in September 2020, and the first operational prototype in June this year. The necessary funds to produce DV prototypes were made available to the company two months ago when it raised EUR 37 million (USD 43.7 million) in Series B funding, partially for this purpose. Meanwhile, its peer startup Nikola, announced that it started pre-series production of its battery-electric truck in October, with plans to complete it in Q4 2021 and start commercial hauling in 2022.</ul>