In PLM, there is almost always the question of what you already have in terms of product realization systems, and when—or if—there is time to update to new technologies. This is a delicate matter where the timing is of great importance, unless you can start from a blank slate.

In a previous pair of articles, I examined this problem through global ball bearing manufacturer SKF's handling of this question. These articles delve into how SKF solved the trade-offs between when and how to invest in new state-of-the-art PLM and manufacturing technology to maximize their competitiveness in an age when development is moving at breakneck speed.

However, there are also investments and start-up companies that do not have to find the balance between old and new. Instead, they start from a greenfield and develop great technical and business advantages—even when it involves a complex product such as the development, manufacture and business model for heavy 16-ton electrical trucks.

The Swedish startup Volta Trucks is an excellent example of how to start this type of advanced business, and to exploit the competitive advantages to be found when starting from a blank slate. The company’s approach is to work according to a distributed model with the business headquartered in Stockholm, the product development team located in the U.K. and—in the case of the new Volta Zero manufacturing facility—in a contracted Austrian ex-MAN factory located in Steyr.

Volta Trucks product development leader, Ian Collins, and his U.K. team managed to develop and see the first manufactured vehicle roll off the production line in Steyr, Austria, in September 2022. (Image courtesy of TECHNIA.)

In today’s article, I take a closer look at how Volta Trucks developed their premiere truck for urban deliveries, the heavy electrical 16-ton Volta Zero. Together with Dassault Systèmes’ dedicated partner TECHNIA, and with Dassault’s 3DEXPERIENCE PLM platform, Volta Trucks set up the PLM team and completed the development work, manufacturing set up and production of the first vehicle in just over 18 months. Starting early in 2021, Volta Trucks’ product development leader, Ian Collins, and his U.K. team managed to develop and see the first manufactured vehicle roll off the production line in Steyr, Austria, in September 2022.

Volta Trucks’ Development Team Works with TECHNIA and 3DEXPERIENCE

Some interesting commercial background here is that in November 2021, Volta Trucks Europe announced one of Europe's largest purchases of all-electric trucks with DB Schenker's order for 1,470 vehicles. This followed Petit Forestier's order for 1,000 Volta Zeros. In total, Volta Trucks now has an order bank of approximately 6,500 vehicles, with a value of approximately € 1.4 billion.

So, how did they accomplish all this? What is the difference between a Volta Zero truck and a more traditional one, besides the electrical parts? And what tools did they use?

Volta’s product development leader, Ian Collins, told us the story during TECHNIA’s recent PLMIF 2021 event. They moved fast, he said, from their project start in January 2021; in September this year, the first manufactured Volta Zero was ready. Since then, it has been real life tested in Paris.

The Volta Zero is the first in a series of second-generation production verification prototypes and will form part of a pilot fleet of trucks. These will be loaned to customers for extended periods in late 2022 and early 2023, to allow operators to understand how the first purpose-built all-electric medium-sized commercial vehicle will integrate into their operations.

The range of the Zero is between 150 and 200 km (93 and 124 miles) depending on the battery pack (150 to 225 kWh). Top speed is 90 km/h (56 mph).

The start of series production of customer-specific vehicles is on track to start in early 2023.

The vehicle's basic design, without the traditional internal combustion engine, has allowed designers and engineers to completely rethink truck design. (Image courtesy of Volta Trucks.)

Not Just an Electrified “Old Style” Truck

A brief look at the Volta Zero design reveals that the founders' concept was not just to electrify a truck, but to completely redesigned the entire vehicle. Concept features include a unique cabin package with all-round visibility and a low, centrally located driver's position. The design is purpose-built around this industry-leading driver view, visibility and ergonomics. The direct view from the driver's position is combined with state-of-the-art cameras and advanced driver assistance systems to provide a safety situation that beats anything else in the delivery sector for urban and suburban environments, claims Collins.

“In a traditionally designed truck, the driver is positioned above the engine. This means that the driver sits very high above the road, creating blind spot safety issues. In addition, it means that dangerous situations can arise when the driver has to get in and out of the cab in complex urban environments where up to 60 deliveries a day can be involved,” he says.

As a result, Collins and the team decided to move the entire drive system rearwards in the vehicle. As they use a very compact battery system and an electrified rear axle, the package fits easily underneath the low “driverbox.” This enabled them to move the entire cab down to a much lower level, improving not just the driver's direct view of the road but also making the cab far easier and safer to access.

“This also means that the cab will be much quieter with far less vibrations than the conventional truck as the driver is much further away from the power source,” Collins says.

The Volta Zero interior. Ian Collins and his team aimed at an electronics system that provides a platform for a fully connected vehicle with integrated cloud-based systems. (Image courtesy of Volta Trucks.)

A Fully Connected Vehicle

In terms of sustainability for Volta, however, electrification is not enough. All through the vehicle they are working to deliver solutions to meet customers’ needs with a minimum environmental impact, from the raw materials all the way through manufacturing and service, to end-of-life reuse or recycling.

Moreover, Collins adds that they aimed for an electronics system that provides a platform for a fully connected vehicle with integrated cloud-based systems. This enables Volta to develop data rich applications that can meet its customers’ specific needs and improve operational efficiency.

“This also offers enhanced functionalities to support our innovative truck-as-a-service model. And so, we can offer in due course predictive maintenance, live diagnostics and secure access to vehicle networks. Thereby we can act on any issue before they arise and maximize life for every vehicle,” he asserts.

But as well as taking a new approach to the vehicle concept, Volta needed to optimize the development process as a fundamental step to Volta Trucks bringing this product to market as quickly as possible. This is important not just for the growth of the company as a business, but because the problems they address—sustainability—are urgent and need solutions right now.

“This means that we are building a team with expertise not just from the truck sector, but also passenger cars, buses and other related industries to harness the right expertise.”

Development work using virtual reality in Volta Trucks. (Image courtesy of Astheimer Design.)

Systems Engineering Approach from Day One

Starting from a clean slate, Collins claims that they can select the best people, processes and tools from across the sector. This idea shapes the fundamentals of how they are setting up their projects, creating a new company and new ways of doing things.

“To bring the product to market as quickly as we can, we have adopted a systems engineering approach from day one. Scaling-up a team of the size we need rapidly enough inevitably means a distributed working approach, which was especially true as we were in the middle of the pandemic,” he says.

This means that it was crucial to have everyone working with the same dataset and a single source of truth, so that the project could be set up and stabilized as quickly as possible, and could be moved into delivery mode beyond the initial setup. A PLM system is obviously a key part in a product development landscape such as this.

“So, we started in January 2021, bringing our own team as they come onboard, our suppliers as they were nominated, and our partners and subcontractors together from a wide variety of locations to collaborate in a single space on a single dataset,” says Collins.

European logistics firm DB Schenker has pre-ordered almost 1,500 Volta Zero trucks. (Image courtesy of DB Schenker.)

3DEXPERIENCE On-Cloud

To do this, Volta selected 3DEXPERIENCE (3DX) on a cloud solution to be up and running as quickly as possible.

“It was relatively straightforward to set up the 3DEXPERIENCE On-Cloud solution and it was very little disruption to get things up and running,” comments Collins, explaining that they also implemented CATIA 3DEXPERIENCE—the V6 version—as the CAD backbone.

The context here is that Volta Trucks started to work in CATIA V5 during 2020, but decided to make the most out of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform by switching to the V6 version.

“It was clear that V6 offered us a number of advantages,” Collins claims. “Particularly in respect to designing context and to ensuring that everyone was working in the same dataset and in a single space. So, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform has already become an integral part of the systems engineering tool ecosystem for Volta Trucks, starting with the Volta Zero model.”

In terms of their approach to the engineering and development program, the intention was to fully specify and validate Volta's products in the digital space before moving on to physical testing, Collins says.

“It's more than CAD and simulation, it is a cross-company multi-disciplinary approach governing every system and feature, driven by a very comprehensive set of requirements and processes followed all the way to delivery from there.”

Collins adds that they have a very significant focus on requirements capture and systems interactions.

“Yes, and it is very resource intensive at an early stage in the project, but that drives our entire development process all the way through.”

Contract manufacturing in an ex-MAN factory in Austria. Volta Zero is, according to the developer, “the world's first purpose-built all-electric vehicle of 16 tons designed for urban logistics.” (Image courtesy of Volta Trucks.)

Manufacturing in Austria

Volta Truck's business model is also interesting from the manufacturing perspective. The business model involves appointed local manufacturing partners, one of which is the former MAN factory in Steyr, Austria. A consequence of this is that from the start they were aiming to produce and deliver plant-specific mBOMs (manufacturing Bill of Materials) and a virtual representation of each assembly stage.

“This is to ensure the quality of whatever processes are used and regardless of in which plant the vehicle is built,” Collins said.

As mentioned above, the product development phase of the Volta Zero 16-ton vehicle started in January 2021. Four months later, they had around 60 users of the 3DEXPERIENCE platform from five separate organizations all working in concert on a common data set to deliver the product.

Both the eBOM (engineering Bill of Materials) and the mBOM (manufacturing Bill of Materials) is produced in Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE. (Image courtesy of Volta Trucks.)

TECHNIA Delivers Another Successful Automotive 3DEXPERIENCE V6 Implementation

The team setting up Volta Trucks’ PLM platform was put together with the PLM consultant TECHNIA, which is also one of the world's largest Dassault Systèmes and 3DEXPERIENCE partners in the market.

Notably, the 3DEXPERIENCE platform has had difficulties establishing the V6 version of the platform among automotive user communities; the V5 version still dominates. But there are examples of successful V6 implementations, and TECHNIA has provided one of them at the exclusive sportscar developer Koenigsegg. And on behalf of Volta, Collins says that he’s pleased with what they’ve done so far.

“As 3DEXPERIENCE experts, TECHNIA has helped us implement, set up our central PLM team and get the platform up and running efficiently,” claims Collins. “The out-of-the-box functionality of 3DEXPERIENCE is the backbone of what we're doing. But of course, we're developing workflows and part attributes as needed to support the requirements of the organization. And we're assembling what we believe is an optimum toolset to achieve all of this, and by connecting them together in a smart way they will collectively form a development program for all our projects.”

The 3DEXPERIENCE platform is at the heart of this, he sums up—and it’s probably no coincidence that the first Austrian-manufactured Volta Zero was just recently tested on the streets of Paris.