Volta Trucks has concluded its demanding winter testing programme, undertaken in the Arctic Circle in northern Sweden.

The cold weather testing programme was part of a rigorous regime of vehicle tests designed to ensure that the full-electric Volta Zero will deliver the highest levels of quality, reliability, and durability when series production of customer specification vehicles starts later this year.

Volta Trucks engineers evaluate a wide variety of technical aspects of the vehicle in some of the world’s harshest conditions. This 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.

“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,” said Ian Collins, chief product officer at Volta Trucks.

“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.”