Volta Trucks, a leading and disruptive full-electric commercial vehicle manufacturer and services provider, and its strategic design partner, Astheimer Design of Warwick, UK, have won the Dezeen Product Design award 2021, announced during an online awards ceremony from Dezeen’s creative studio in London.
The Volta Zero is the world’s first purpose-built full-electric commercial vehicle designed specifically for urban logistics and was created by Astheimer Design. With traditional trucks responsible for a disproportionately large number of accidents and fatalities on city centre streets, Astheimer’s designers have created a completely new vehicle concept, designed from the ground up, without the legacy of an internal combustion engine, and with safety and sustainability at its core. The modern and innovative vehicle design and packaging features a revolutionary glasshouse-style cab with a low, central seating position to improve driver visibility and the safety of vulnerable road users around the vehicle.
The Volta Zero was shortlisted alongside the Pickup Truck from Canoo, My Football Kit from Nendo for Molten Corporation, InstaSwab from OPT Industries and Forest Crayons from Playtool. In presenting the Product Design award 2021, the world-renowned Dezeen judges noted that the “project is a good shift in thinking. It’s shown within the context of London where vans and cars are increasingly problematic, and it has such potential for application in cities.”
Receiving the award, Carsten Astheimer, Founder and Managing Director of Astheimer Design, said; “It is a rare occurrence for a designer to be given the opportunity to rethink and reinvent a category of vehicle. This was the responsibility given to us by Carl-Magnus Norden and Kjell Waloen, the founders of Volta Trucks. The team of designers at Astheimer, led by Russell Gillott, and working hand-in-hand with the growing engineering team at Volta Trucks, have not let this opportunity pass us by, delivering an innovative architecture with a pure uncompromising design, that will make cities safer, keep the air cleaner and will make deliveries more efficient.”
Carl-Magnus Norden, Founder and Executive Chairman of Volta Trucks, who originally commissioned the vehicle design from Astheimer, continued; “I knew that when we first met Carsten and the Astheimer team, they understood our objective to create a completely new, safer and more sustainable commercial vehicle concept, using the benefits of electrification. And the outcome is a world-class, industry-leading, and now award-winning design. Our constant motivation is to improve the safety and sustainability of trucks through an innovative design, and this recognition of the Volta Zero from Dezeen is an important validation of our goals.”
The first road-going Volta Zero prototype vehicles have started production and will commence a rigorous testing regime in early 2022, ahead of customer evaluation in mid-2022, and the start of manufacturing of the first production-specification vehicles by the end of next year.