Grant: Alliance Grants

The automotive industry is undergoing a rapid transformation towards electrified vehicles (EVs), with Canada aiming to phase out new internal combustion engine vehicle sales by 2035. The proposed research program will develop new designs, methods, and tools to create technologies for the next generation of intelligent electrified vehicle (EV) drive systems including components that support higher power density, increased efficiency, improved reliability - and can be delivered at lower cost. We will achieve these goals by investigating wide bandgap semiconductor device technologies, higher voltage system architectures, rare-earth-free motor designs, improved thermal models, more robust software architectures to manage increasing complexity, and advanced reinforcement learning control algorithms which learn and improve over time. The project outcomes will enable our industry partner Stellantis to expedite its vehicle electrification strategy, minimize its reliance on rare-earth elements, and reduce exposure to supply chain and price volatility. This will help increase consumer affordability, enable more rapid adoption of EVs, and support the manufacture of more powerful, efficient, and affordable EVs in Canada and worldwide.