Volvo Is Leading The Shift At Advanced Clean Transportation 2023
May 3, 2023
Source: CleanTechnica
Even if you’ve been to an ACT Expo at some point in the last dozen or so years, the 2023 Advanced Clean Transportation show in Anaheim, California, this week was almost unrecognizable. Gone are the niche sensibility and future-looking concepts, replaced with packed activations loaded with high-tech electric and hydrogen-fueled fleet solutions that are, if not ready today, coming in a matter of months.
One company that’s been “leading the shift” to more sustainable trucking, though, is Volvo, which sponsored the ACT media room and was kind enough to grant me an audience with some of its heavy hitters.
Fredy Daza, director of Volvo’s Innovation Lab in Mountainview, California, was one of them. “The Innovation Lab covers all the products in the Volvo Family,” he began, by way of explaining what Volvo’s IL is all about. “We are looking at all the connected systems in our products, the entire digital experience, and optimizing for both sustainability and safety.”
Volvo, of course, is all about safety, but some of the safety tech it is working on in its California incubator goes a step beyond the kind of crash test safety you’re probably thinking of. “It is not only tracking who is driving which vehicle,” says Daza, “but also ‘Smart Access’ that makes sure that the operator has the correct licensing to drive the vehicle. This is everything, from forklifts to tractors, to ensure that everyone moving these vehicles has the proper training.”
That’s just one example of the kind of tech being developed there. “Every pain point and challenge our customers face, from route planning to total production emissions by SKU, we try to enable and get value back from the data being generated.”
