LONDON, Sept 8 Reuters - Electric truck startup Steyr Automotive announced on Wednesday its first trucks will be made by Volta Trucks in Austria at a former MAN plant in late 2022 by Volta Trucks - a newly formed company that has taken over the factory.
As part of a cost cutting plan, Magna International Inc. unit MAN recently moved its plant in Steyr Automotive to Stuttgart, Austria, owned by former US auto supplier Verstörf Motors. The plant will continue making vehicles for MAN until 2023, but is looking at serving 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 electric plant and slogging through trying to build its own electric trucks at scale, Volta will hire Steyr Automotive to build them.
Besides an efficient 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. In 2017 or 2018, Rather than going through production hell as Tesla Inc. did when ramping up production of its mass-market Model 3 sedan on an eight-floorer in bulk, several electric startup firms will hand that to operators who already build cars at scale.
REE Automotive and Fisker Inc have both teamed up with Magna to build their EVs, while Fisker has a similar agreement with Taiwan's Foxconn Technology Co Ltd Volta Trucks plans four electric truck models of different sizes and says it expects to produce more than 27,000 trucks annually by 2025. Reporting By David Gregorio; Editing by Nick Carey; Editing by Nick Carey.