The companies signed a letter of intent outlining the cooperation, whereby they will jointly seek to deliver turnkey solutions for fleets to transition to zero-emission urban transportation.
The offering will be designed to require minimal upfront investment or technical knowledge. The companies’ joint focus will be on charging, facility upgrade and energy management solutions.
“Through our partnership with Volta Trucks, we intend to co-create Transportation as a Service solutions, and deliver Volta Trucks’ customers higher uptime, a commitment to reliability through performance-based contracts, and reduced energy expenditure,” said Thomas Kiessling, chief technology officer of Siemens Smart Infrastructure. Kiessling added, “As commercial fleets look to meet sustainability goals and deliver cost effective, robust infrastructure solutions, we are pleased to be able to partner with Volta Trucks.”
In June this year, Siemens launched Siemens Xcelerator, a new, open digital business platform featuring a portfolio of IoT-enabled hardware and software, an ecosystem of partners, and a marketplace. The objective is to deliver digital solutions for commercial and industrial customers. The technical infrastructure of the installations will be overseen by Siemens, including the hardware and software required to operate the charging and power distribution infrastructure for fleets of Volta Zeros.
Volta’s trucks are the world’s first purpose-built full-electric 16-ton commercial vehicles. Volta recently completed a series of hot weather tests for their new vehicle, completing more than 2,500km of customer-focused driving cycles at motorway, town and city speeds.
Through Siemens’ performance management platform, the partnership aims to continually optimize the entire operation to achieve higher uptime at minimum expenditure. This optimization approach will be powered by advanced analytical and simulation models and considers factors such as fleet duty cycles, charging times, battery life, optimal energy utilization and costs, and asset management.
“I am delighted that Volta Trucks will be working with Siemens to bring industry-leading charging infrastructure solutions for our Truck as a Service customers,” said Essa Al-Saleh, CEO of Volta Trucks. “To deliver the electrification of urban logistics at pace and scale, we need operationally efficient electrification infrastructure aligned to the exact requirement of each fleet.”
By establishing the partnership with Volta Trucks and its Truck as a Service solution – which revolutionizes the ownership, finance and servicing of commercial fleets – Siemens seeks to support the delivery of turnkey transport solutions to simplify the transition to fleet electrification. This would lead to vast benefits for customers. Siemens and Volta Trucks will work together to fully manage the infrastructure, and the power capacity from the grid, or on-premise sustainable power sources.
Customers will have all their depot energy needs captured and managed as part of the design and installation process, ensuring load capacity is increased in line with the sites’ real-time demands. The charging infrastructure will be cost-efficient, not only at the point of installation, but also through charging algorithms that allow fleets to manage energy costs without compromising routing and service requirements.
