Former chief operating officer for Volvo Trucks North and South America, Patrick Collignon, has launched Trova Commercial Vehicles (TrovaCV), a new company offering customised engineering and manufacturing expertise for fully electric commercial vehicles.
Boasting over 30 years of international experience in the commercial industry with both US automotive megalith General Motors as well as Swedish automotive giant Volvo Group, Collignon has incubated several companies and held board positions in economic and industry federations.
Before launching TrovaCV, Collignon served as senior vice president of operations for the Americas for Volvo Trucks, where he led a strategic initiative to develop and manufacture the new Mack medium duty truck platform.
Collignon’s green credentials are similarly strong, having been instrumental in 2007 in making the Volvo plant in Ghent, Belgium, the world’s first carbon dioxide neutral automotive plant.
TrovaCV intends to focus on the engineering, design, and production of fully electric commercial vehicles with the stated goal of “achieving mass production cost-effectively.” Specifically, TrovaCV will seek to offer its industrial model and manufacturing capability to other commercial vehicle OEMs while simultaneously developing its own fully electric vehicles.
“This is an exciting time as the electric commercial vehicle market is being reshaped,” says Collignon, founder and CEO. “While technology and innovation have made it possible to convert fuel-powered commercial vehicles into electric vehicles, we haven’t seen a production model capable of producing the required volume of fully electric commercial vehicles to meet the demand.
“We believe that our engineering approach will offer OEMs the opportunity to build a higher volume of electric vehicles at a lower cost. At the same time, we will utilize our chassis design experience to achieve a complete EV build design from the ground up.”
TrovaCV’s website highlights the company’s desire to serve as both a design and manufacturing company as well as a EV consultancy, describing their role as helping customers “find industrialization solutions focusing on solving your specific industrialization needs, without you having to recruit, train or reassign your own valuable employees.”
Among the services the company looks to offer their customers are a total product cost reduction service as well as industrial and manufacturing engineering service, launch management, and on-site full-service management. TrovaCV will also offer full scale complete vehicle manufacturing on their own production site.
Unsurprisingly, no specific ‘products’ are offered just yet, but the company explains that it is “pursuing proprietary product development and industrialization of vehicles with alternative drivelines covering applications in specific niche segments.”
The new company will take up residence in a business incubation centre in Fairlawn, Virginia, and has already received support from the local Pulaski County Board of Supervisors, the Economic Development Authority, and the Virginia Economic Development Partnership (VEDP).
