Volta Trucks picks former Austrian MAN plant to build trucks
08/09/2021 24:00
By Nick Carey
LONDON, Sept 8 (Reuters) - Electric truck startup Volta
Trucks said on Wednesday its first trucks will be made under
contract starting late 2022 at a former MAN truck plant in
Austria by Steyr Automotive, a newly formed company that has
taken over the factory.
As part of a cost cutting plan, Volkswagen AG VOWG_p.DE
unit MAN recently turned its plant in Steyr, Austria, over to
Steyr Automotive, run by former Canadian auto supplier Magna
International Inc MG.TO executive Siegfried Wolf. The plant
will keep making vehicles for MAN until 2023, but is looking to
serve as a contract manufacturer for other firms.
Stockholm-based Volta Trucks, which also operates in the UK,
needs to start producing the Volta Zero, a 16-tonne electric
truck, in late 2022 and produce 5,000 vehicles for customers in
2023 ahead of a diesel truck ban in Paris effective in 2024.
Instead of building its own expensive plant and slogging
through working out how to build its electric trucks at scale,
Volta will hire Steyr Automotive to build them.
"Apart from an excellent manufacturing facility, Steyr
Automotive has trained engineers and experienced managers at all
levels of their workforce," Volta Trucks Chief Technology
Officer Kjell Waloen told Reuters. "If you start up a brand new
product in a brand new plant without experience, you multiply
the risks and complications many, many times."
Rather than going through "manufacturing hell" as Tesla Inc
TSLA.O did when ramping up production of its mass-market Model
3 sedan in 2017 and 2018, several electric startups have chosen
to hand that over to operators who already build vehicles at
scale. urn:newsml:reuters.com:*:nL1N2P30QH
REE Automotive REE.O and Fisker Inc FSR.N have both
teamed up with Magna to build their EVs, while Fisker has a
similar agreement with Taiwan's Foxconn Technology Co Ltd
2354.TW .
Volta Trucks currently plans four electric truck models of
different sizes and says it expects to produce more than 27,000
trucks annually by 2025.
(Reporting By Nick Carey; Editing by David Gregorio)
((nick.carey@thomsonreuters.com; +44 7385 414 954;))