Grant: Automotive Partnership Canada Project

Rising expectations for vehicle efficiency, safety, sustainability, and comfort are the primary market drivers in the global automotive industry today. It is highly anticipated that development of leading-edge technological solutions that will both enhance fuel efficiency and reduce harmful emissions, without sacrificing performance, cost-efficiency and safety, will continue to be at the forefront of strategic R&D initiatives well into the future. With the potential for low-to-zero emissions, vehicle electrification is one of the most promising green solutions to both the global energy crisis and rapidly approaching emissions restrictions. In fact, electric vehicles (EV) are predicted to dominate the passenger vehicle market before 2030. However, electric vehicles are complex multidisciplinary systems, requiring a raft of complex components and subsystems that pose significant design and development challenges that cannot be solved with well-established conventional technologies and processes. Given the short lead time to meet aggressive new carbon management targets, there is an urgent need for Canadian companies to develop cost-effective and time-efficient solutions to these challenges to ensure they stay ahead of the transition to sustainable road mobility systems. The proposed project will address many of the challenges hindering widespread adoption of electric vehicles, including development and validation of key enabling technologies, such as vehicle stability control, power management systems, and battery monitoring and charging devices. Innovative design tools that will streamline the design-to-commercialization process will also be developed to reduce both time and cost of EV production in Canada. Collectively, these advancements will drastically reduce environmental impacts while accelerating fabrication of Canadian-made electric vehicles and related systems.