Volta Trucks is collaborating with over-the-air connected vehicle systems pioneer Sibros as the EV manufacturer continues to develop its Volta Zero, a purpose-built full-electric 16-tonne commercial vehicle created specifically for city center freight distribution.
The partnership will provide end-to-end software and data solutions beginning with the integration of the Sibros OTA Deep Logger to provide Volta Trucks with real time, relevant, vehicle and fleet data management. The connected vehicle platform will allow access to driver alerts, charging infrastructure, over-the-air updates for navigation and content as well as service, insurance and maintenance data. It will provide Volta Trucks with full transparency and control over what data is collected and who it’s shared with, enabling customers to benefit from, and better understand, their data.
“We aim to fully power the connected vehicle ecosystem for Volta Trucks, empowering the team to build and launch innovative new trucking-as-a-service use cases at a rapid pace and global scale,” Sibros CEO and Co-founder Hemant Sikaria tells IndustryWeek. “This includes data monetization, fleet management, safety analytics, connected diagnostics and much more. Safety is paramount in the commercial trucking industry, and with deep data logging, software updates and remote commands for every safety critical system, component and sensor, we look forward to supporting Volta’s mission of revolutionizing last-mile logistics with safer, more sustainable electric trucks.”
Volta Trucks will utilize data insights to increase vehicle efficiencies, bringing increased productivity and profitability to its customer’s businesses. Volta Trucks will also be able to use the connected platform to share data with its global partners looking to develop solutions based on those insights.
The collaboration is a natural step in a rapidly evolving space. In addition to a large multi-disciplinary team, developing a connected vehicle platform requires tremendous amounts of time, money, expertise, coordination and focus, explains Sikaria. “A connected vehicle platform has three core foundations: software updates, data collection, and remote commands. To build such a platform, you need a dedicated cross-functional team that is tightly coordinated and has a singular goal in mind,” he says. “Since this type of platform has both a cloud and in-vehicle component, there are a lot of local and international compliance requirements including WP.29, SOC II Type 1 and Type 2, GDPR, CCPA, ISO26262, ASPICE Level II & III. The Sibros deep connected platform enables any organization to function at a higher level with more confidence and scale to multiple geographies quickly and with lower risk.”
According to Sikaria, when developing a new vehicle program, having the capability to do OTA updates, collect high quality event driven vehicle data and remotely send commands to interact with the vehicle is crucial. “This helps the engineering team stay focused on building the vehicle rather than the tools because that would otherwise result in delaying the product release. An out-of-the-box connected vehicle platform is unquestionably more economical, faster to integrate and deploy, and to configure to meet the needs of the automaker without requiring them to write a single line of code,” he says. “Additionally, the approach of building a connected vehicle platform in-house by leveraging other contractors or solution providers results in a fragmented solution. Fragmented solutions for data collection, software updates and other applications reduce speed and operational efficiency, cause major integration issues, increase the security attack surface area, expose more security holes and disable development of both basic and advanced applications in-vehicle and on-cloud.”
One of the vitally important components of an electric commercial vehicle is insight and actionable data about the vehicle usage, explains Duncan Forrester, chief communications officer, Volta Trucks. “This helps guide the fleet manager with the optimization of their operations, and helps the manufacturer better understand the usage of the vehicle, and how they can enhance it over time and with future generations,” says Forrester.
