Volvo’s SuperTruck line of trucks has been nothing short of groundbreaking with each new release. The brand is proving it is high quality work with these trucks while also raising their investment stakes immensely. The project exists with a multi-million dollar base budget. The truck has been described by some as “just a truck in the same sense that a bald eagle is ‘just a bird.’” The first SuperTruck wowed the market which made the second version wildly anticipated.

The SuperTruck 2 in particular came as a result of Volvo’s partnership with the United States Department of Energy.

The Department of Energy challenged the company to create a 100% freight efficiency improvement after its baseline was established in 2009. Because of its nature, the SuperTruck is intended just to be an experiential project. While they experiment with building new and innovative vehicles, they struggle with finding the right parts that they need to effectively construct the ideal model. This has caused some custom part building to be done. The struggle to find parts was only worsened by the pandemic, in which nearly everything was constantly struggling due to supply chain issues.

The auto maker was actually able to exceed to Department of Energy’s task, by increasing the freight efficiency by 134%.

Volvo debuted their SuperTruck 2 at the American Trucking Association’s Management Conference and Exhibition in 2023. However, what was shown at the Austin, Texas based conference was not actually the physical car, but rather a video explaining and showing the concept of it. The North American President of Volvo Trucks, Peter Voorhoeve, referred to the video as an “innovation lab.” The SuperTruck 2’s premiere in this way acts as a sort of test run.

With this debut like this, the Volvo team was able to learn what parts did or did not work. Probably the biggest lesson they learned was that friction is bad. This is something that they and all other truck makers did know already, but this was proven at the conference. This made them really see the significance of aerodynamics. They started to push to have more fluidity in their movements, something that we will hopefully see when the truck eventually hits the market.