Canada is emerging as not only an early adopter of zero emissions transportation tech, but also a manufacturer and supplier of such technologies. During a Greentech educational session at Truck World, we spoke to several Canadian companies that are leading the way in developing zero emission transport technologies. Patrick Gervais is VP trucks and public affairs with Lion Electric. He outlines the company’s Canadian manufacturing footprint.

Patrick Gervais: So, we are we manufactured in St. Jerome, so it’s 45 minutes north of Montreal, where we have a capacity there of about 2,500 vehicles a year and also in Maribel not too far away since December 2022.

We have our own battery manufacturing facility. So in Canada, we build our batteries for our vehicles. That’s new, but very amazing. And then there is a capacity of five gigawatt hours, which means about 14,000 medium- and heavy-duty vehicles that we could produce batteries for. We also have facilities in the U.S. but we’re a Canadian company. And then we are building medium- and heavy-duty vehicles here in Canada.

It’s not just trucks and their battery packs that are being produced in Canad. Gina Succi, CEO of Westhill innovation explained solar technology is also being built here.

Gina Succi: So Westhill Innovation, we’re located in Simcoe, Ontario, Norfolk County, so that is about an hour and 20 minutes outside of, southwest of Toronto. We are a designer, manufacturer, OEM of – actually – we have three verticals in our business.

Lightweight composites for components of tractor-trailers. We began our company in Simcoe in the latter part of 2017. Fast forward a couple of years we started building solar electric mobility kits for commercial and recreational transportation and that’s really focused on power electric kit and solar panels and communication technology which helped to provide fully sustainable power to refrigeration systems for commercial refrigerated freight.

And we also have another line of, we’ll call it solar power for low-speed vehicles. So anything like a two-seater golf cart up until up into 14 seater people mover, but fully solar power never need to charge.

Hexagon Purus is a global company, but it recently opened an EV battery R&D and manufacturing facility in Kelowna, B.C. Bo Dhaliwal, vice-president business development, tells us about that location.

Bo Dhaliwal: Hexagon Purus’s global headquarters is in Norway, but the Canadian team is involved with the heavy-duty commercial vehicle electrification side in Kelowna. We have 60,000 square feet, 105 people so far, by 2025, we should be about 150.

We’re growing quite rapidly. Kelowna is where we do the battery-electric systems design, we do the battery modules, battery packs are built, they’re tested, they’re developed there. We do hydrogen system design as well, as well as all the vehicle integration work. Vehicle manufacturing is not done there.

We actually do the assembly for the vehicles in our new location in Dallas, at the end of August by this year, being a Tier, what we call a 0.5. So the rolling chassis comes from the OEM. We install our system, we electrify it and then it goes back into their sales channel. And then they sell. They sell it from their dealership network. And they provide the first line of defense for service and then we back them up if they can’t handle that service service calls.

So, what is the allure of Canada to these manufacturers? It’s not always the location itself. Bo Dhaliwal explains as it related to Kelowna.

Bo Dhaliwal: Logistically, it’s horrible. But you kind of touched on it earlier. There’s a strong legacy of commercial trucking there. Western Star was born there in 1967. Stayed there building trucks, well, you know, 30 years till 2000 when DTNA – Daimler Truck – bought the trucking organization and moved that to Portland in 2002.

It just so happened that a lot of industry that was there to support a lot of Tier 1s were there to support that, and that still resides there. So there’s a strong metal fabrication, a strong industry that understands trucking, and that’s where we came from.

So it was 20 years ago when my boss Todd decided with a bunch of other innovative young engineers to say let’s go on our own. There was a desire to get into storage systems. So they started building storage systems for natural gas systems, which has now turned into Agility, Fuel, which some people might be familiar with.

They currently supply 80% of the market for all the natural gas systems that are in North America today. And so that has been 20 years of, of learning and working with OEMs heavy-duty commercial Classes 6, 7 and 8 for natural gas storage. And then that same innovative team is there today and they’re the ones that said, ‘Hey, we’ve got a great relationship. We ended up realizing that Daimler was creating an Innovation Fleet in 2016. They were talking about it and we were awarded that program in 2018. And we’ve been doing battery systems ever since.