On the Move: Canada’s EV Revolution

Sonia Sennik: And I’m Sonia Sennik from Creative Destruction Lab.

If you’re like me, you may be listening to this on a public transit bus somewhere.

My daily commute in Toronto on the TTC has been made infinitely better by podcasts, and I’m enjoying the Toronto buses a lot more since they were electrified. It’s one of the biggest climate action efforts underway in Canada to get diesel buses off the road and a new generation of EV buses in their place.

There’s been a lot of headlines this year about the economic challenges of EV manufacturers and of battery companies. But one area where innovation is thriving is in larger and heavy duty vehicles.

Sonia Sennik: That’s right, John. And it’s not just about big batteries. AI is helping manufacturers change the way they make vehicles and also how those vehicles operate.

[00:01:00] But this transition isn’t just about technology. It’s about creating a robust, interconnected ecosystem to support the new technology. So in 2022, GM completely retooled the CAMI assembly plant in Southern Ontario in record time. To become the new global manufacturing home of BrightDrop’s fully electric delivery vans.

BrightDrop vans are compatible with emerging charging infrastructure and are designed to operate with zero tailpipe emissions, directly contributing to cleaner air in cities. This makes the CAMI assembly plant in Canada Our first full scale electric vehicle manufacturing plant. The vans represent a pivotal shift within the transportation infrastructure of businesses and cities.

John Stackhouse: There’s a lot of shifting going on as well in the bus industry. There’s now something like 5, 000 electric buses on the road and the target is 20, 000. But the transition is complicated. You don’t need to be a big city mayor to know that most cities can’t afford those new fleets and riders aren’t willing to pay more.

It’s also been challenged by infrastructure. [00:02:00] I remember a Toronto official telling me about the moment he discovered one of the TTC’s new buses couldn’t complete a long, hilly, suburban route with enough charge to get back to the depot. It’s just one of the many small challenges that manufacturers and operators are working their way through for all of our benefit.

Sonia Sennik: Logistics. Canada must be strategic about strengthening our whole EV supply chain and focusing on where we could build and should build capacity. And when we say supply chain in this context, we mean all the processes involved in the production, distribution, and support of EVs.

John Stackhouse: So as the saying goes, fasten your seatbelts, we’re going to take you on a special journey today in how we move people and goods in a more cost minded way.

As well as climate minded age. We’ll talk to the CEO of the New Flyer Group, a Winnipeg company that’s making a big portion of North America’s electrified buses. But first we’re joined by Kristen Aquilina, who’s president and managing director of GM Canada. Which is trying to [00:03:00] revolutionize the delivery van business from its Cammie manufacturing facility in Southwestern Ontario.

Kristian, welcome to the podcast.

Kristian Aquilina: Well, thanks John and Sonia. Great to be here. And I look forward to talking to you about GM today.

John Stackhouse: Listeners will quickly wonder about your accent, Kristian. Tell us a bit about how you came to Canada and where from.

Kristian Aquilina: I’m originally from Australia as the accent might give away.

I started with General Motors there in Melbourne that was under the brand of General Motors Holgan and that’s where my journey in the automotive industry started and of course had some great opportunities working for a large organization like that to work in many parts of the world and landed here in Canada just last year.

John Stackhouse: Well, we’re almost at the end of 2024 curious how you and GM are seeing the EV market both leaving this year and casting ahead to 2025.

Kristian Aquilina: Well, 2024 has been a period of incredible growth for our EV business. We’ve brought on a portfolio of EVs under the [00:04:00] Chevrolet brand and the Cadillac brand and also just more recently GMC.

We’ve just seen incredible growth where it’s around 20 percent of our sales now and really has become an important line of business for General Motors. And at times we’ve managed to outsell the likes of Tesla and others in the marketplace to be number one in the market on EVs, which many people wouldn’t think of when they think of General Motors.

That’s something that we’re very excited about.

John Stackhouse: As EV share 5 to 10 to 15%, what are you learning about consumers and what are they telling you right now?

Kristian Aquilina: Yeah. So what customers are telling us. Is when it comes to an EV and they make that switch to an EV for the first time, the first thing that is apparent is just the convenience of their automotive life under an EV.

Some of the reticence and maybe the hesitation around EV adoption might be a fear of inconvenience, but the fact of the matter is that an EV owner who charges at home [00:05:00] may never go to a gas station, never need to go to a gas station. The charging happens overnight while they sleep. And that gas prices that they avoid by doing that and the electricity prices that can optimize because they can choose when they charge their vehicle and really the whole anxieties that perhaps they had before entering the EV space before they did it do melt away pretty quickly when they realize the benefits and get to experience the benefits of an EV ownership lifestyle.

Sonia Sennik: Kristian, on the transport and delivery side, can you share more with us about BrightDrop and how does it play into GM’s broader strategy for an all electric future?

Kristian Aquilina: Well, as we work towards the greater electrification of our portfolio, we saw that there was equally a need. to address part of the transport fleet and the commercial space.

So the first EV to be produced and the only EV to be produced in Canada right now is a Chevrolet BrightDrop van. [00:06:00] And these vans originated as a delivery van, but our customers quickly took that and said, basically this vehicle can do far more than just act as a delivery van. So let’s treat it as a broader commercial van offering and with its varying capabilities made for North America and all wheel drive and two wheel drive and vehicle mass capacities, we can really satisfy a market opportunity.

So it’s doing the job of taking quite CO2 producing vehicles off the road. Customers are loving the convenience and the cost savings that come with running a large fleet of vans that are powered by electricity rather than gas or diesel.

Sonia Sennik: Kristian, a recent Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers Association report highlighted the challenges with EV infrastructure, and I’m curious to understand what role GM sees for itself in addressing these gaps in Canada, and how critical is infrastructure to general consumer adoption?

Kristian Aquilina: I think it’s actually the number one issue, Sonia, in terms [00:07:00] of unlocking greater EV adoption. It’s one of probably the greatest barriers to greater adoption that we see. I think the opportunity exists for Canada and its layers of government and its electricity producers and distributors to actually come together and collaborate with the likes of General Motors and perhaps others.

To map out kind of a broader strategy that is required to support this transition. When it comes to the consumer point of view, often a customer considering an EV may be hesitant on the basis that, oh, I cannot charge my car when I need to in, you know, a remote location, but often that is maybe a once or twice a year kind of occasion for everyday use cases.

In fact, the average Canadian driver drives about 40, 42 kilometers per day. You do not need charging infrastructure on every corner to supply the needs of most [00:08:00] Canadians. That would be cost prohibitive and not necessarily deliver great economic and efficient outcomes. However, a strategic approach that uses the best data driven decisions on where we can optimize for locations and the speed of charges and the uptime of charges.

Now, that becomes a strategy, an intelligent way forward that is working with various levels of government and infrastructure providers and perhaps brings out a more commercial outcome, economically efficient outcome. And we can use actually AI to come up with those outcomes. We’re doing that in the U. S.

right now with our partners there in the charging infrastructure space. In Canada, there’s a real opportunity to get organized around this mission. And just to put it in perspective, the CVMI. Also talked about the number of charges that we need throughout the country in order to satisfy the mandated outcomes that the government has legislated for.

And quite frankly, it’s eye watering 40,000 new charges per year for the [00:09:00] next 10 or 11 years. We can be smart about when to place those charges and where to do it in order to optimize for the most economic efficient outcome.

John Stackhouse: Are the needs for those chargers in the broader infrastructure, very different for fleets and heavier vehicles, school buses, delivery vans than they are for passenger vehicles. And how do we balance those competing needs?

Kristian Aquilina: Yeah, I think they’re quite distinct, John. The use cases for those sorts of larger vehicles, such as a BrightDrop van, is have slower charges, less costly charges, but a lot of them in one location that you return to.

Whereas from a public infrastructure perspective, a relatively low cost charger at the home will satisfy most of the population. But there is anxiety around being able to charge when you get to the other end of that trip or when the colder weather sets in and that range reduces a little bit because of [00:10:00] the way that the chemistry behaves.

So in order to do that, we need to have strategically located charges that are reliable and are fast enough. To make it as convenient as it is as having one at home, and that is all achievable if we can get man to walk on the moon, we can definitely be able to solve a charging problem in Canada, and I think like you are suggesting through your question, there is a segmentation of what seems like a big overwhelming problem or a big overwhelming thing to solve for segmenting it, breaking it down into the use cases just like we did in In this conversation can really sort of provide some relief here and say, you know, it’s not as big and overwhelming a task as it seems up front.

Sonia Sennik: One of the trends we’re looking to understand is this interconnectedness between all the different aspects of bringing EVs to the road, whether it’s delivery vans, transportation, large transport or consumer vehicles. So that vertical [00:11:00] integration, one of the examples we were looking at is GM’s recent offtake agreement with the Canadian Graphite company in Quebec.

So how do you see local sourcing strengthening Canada’s role in the global EV supply chain?

Kristian Aquilina: That’s just a great example of the advantages of nearshoring or onshoring. Some of the activity that we would in the past naturally go out to a supplier base located vastly throughout the world in order to come up with the product, the end solution.

Here is an opportunity where Canada can get involved and very much active in the trends to bring onshore or nearshore some of the activity here closer to where the customers are. That particular agreement that you mentioned is also a supply chain security action to make sure that in times of supply chain disruption, like we’ve seen in the past that we’ve got something closer to home and something easier to get our hands [00:12:00] on on key critical materials that that’s required to build a battery.

The Nouveau Mon graphite agreement is not just an offtake agreement. It’s our investment in that organization to make that project real. It’s to bring graphite that is predominantly only being mined in China onto North American soil into Canadian soil, extract the material process it in Quebec in the same location in the same province in which it’s extracted, and then be a source of that component that’s needed to build batteries in our North American plants throughout the continent.

And I think that promotes a healthier and stronger automotive industry in this country for the longterm. Thank you.

John Stackhouse: Kristian, you kicked off the conversation with a lot of enthusiasm about where EV adoption is right now and where it’s going. As you maybe think a bit longer term over the next few years, what both excites you most and what do you think will be the biggest challenges that we’ve got to work through?

Kristian Aquilina: Well, we’re still in transition of a [00:13:00] pretty significant technological change in our industry. It’s sometimes politicized, and it’s not necessarily a smooth transition in terms of consumer adoption and acceptance. The challenge comes from ambiguity and the disruptive nature of it. At the same time, that brings enormous opportunity too.

That’s what I love about disruption is that whilst more than 50 percent of those affected by disruption run away from it or want to shield themselves from it, there’s a smaller percentage that run towards it and look for the opportunity within it. And that’s where I see our role here as a business leader and perhaps an industry representative to see how uncertainty can be quite damaging to a profit and loss statement.

But it can also be quite inspirational if you can solve it through. The resources capabilities that you have as a company. So that is what I’m excited about. And you talked about the vertically integrated nature of how we’re [00:14:00] talking about the EV transition, and it goes beyond just solving the infrastructure.

We want the materials from those batteries that we create. At some future point to displace freshly mined product at some point. So we want to recycle those batteries. So we’re getting into the examining that, but then beyond it, where are the opportunities for industries and new employment and new industrialization to spring off these initial innovations in EVs.

We’re just scratching the surface of it. So that’s what I’m excited about.

John Stackhouse: Can hear the excitement in your voice. And that line run towards the disruption, that’s the spirit of our podcast. I think we may borrow that line from you in future episodes. Kristian, thanks so much for being on the podcast.

Thank you. It’s been a delight talking to you both.

Next up, we’re joined by Paul Soubry, president and CEO of the Winnipeg company, New Flyer Group, which is leading the evolution to global zero emission mobility. Paul, welcome to the podcast. [00:15:00] Thanks, John. Much appreciated. I got to tour your factory a number of months ago and was so impressed with all that you’re literally building, but also the complexities of making a bus.

I’m a daily bus user. Many of them are new flyer vehicles. I had little idea what goes into the manufacturing of those vehicles, especially as they get electrified. Maybe you could just briefly introduce our listeners to New Flyer for those who aren’t familiar with the Winnipeg company.

Paul Soubry: Well, it’s a really wonderful Manitoba Western Canadian story founded in 1930 here.

New Flyer started off with various structures and so forth of vehicles at that time and then in the 30s and 40s really focused only on buses. Over time, the business became the market leader in North America for transit buses, and then as we got into the 2010s and so forth, we really started to diversify to become what we call a pure play, a bus and coach manufacturer, and of course, all the stuff that’s tied around that.

So today we own New Flower, which is the largest transit bus manufacturer in North America, MCI Motor Coach Industries, which ironically also founded [00:16:00] in Winnipeg in 1932, North America’s largest motor coach manufacturer. We own the world’s largest double deck maker, which is headquartered in Scotland called Alexander Dennis that you would see when Toronto and go or you’d see it in Vancouver or you’d see it in Vegas.

And then we have a small business in the States in Indiana called Arbok that makes kind of specialty shuttle type buses and then around that all kinds of parts of service, but 9000 people close to 4 billion U. S. in sales. We got about 100, 000 buses on the road and service right now.

John Stackhouse: I want to ask you, Paul, about the evolution to electric vehicles and as more and more municipalities particularly are buying electric buses, you have the fascinating challenge of also changing your company and your assembly lines and how you work with your customers.

Tell us a bit about what you’re up against and where you see the opportunities going.

Paul Soubry: So a little context, Jada, so we’ve been building zero emission electric buses since 1969, Seattle, San Francisco on their trolley networks, Vancouver, and then as we got [00:17:00] to kind of 28s, 9s, 10s, we played around with fuel cells and battery electric and so forth.

It was a very interesting yet painful learning process. When we started to deliver battery electric buses in earnest, we also had at the same time, the big SPAC dynamic in the United States and in Canada, where we had a whole bunch of people coming to the market. We’re going to change this game overnight.

We’ll be the Tesla of buses. They’re coming. They’re going to change. You have to think about it not that of a vehicle perspective, but it’s an ecosystem. So you go walk into a transit agency and pick Winnipeg Transit. There’s two major garages. There’s 250 buses at each garage. The trial of some electric buses were five or seven.

It’s jerry rigged in the corner. You got charging infrastructure. You make it work. Now we’re in, they’re in really in earnest making orders, 50, 100, 200. So imagine your depot that’s set up to fuel diesel buses with all trained diesel mechanics and so forth now having to migrate and move towards the zero mission.

And so you got to get charging in there. You got to train all these people. The bus is the easy part now. [00:18:00] It’s that whole ecosystem that’s the hard part and doing it efficiently. The next part of that is where the hell is this power going to come from? I think the study in Winnipeg is that if we electrified 500 buses and charged them every night, that’s the equivalent of 35, 000 houses of electricity.

Not trivial. So that’s why this whole evolution thing is that we’ve got to play the game of migrating the vehicle and the propulsion system, the telematics and understanding what’s going on, state of charge of the batteries, the burndown of the batteries and so forth. We also got to understand what’s happening at the depot and the energy and the charging and the optimization of the fleet and so forth.

And then of course the vehicle gets that much more complex with batteries or fuel cells and so forth. And the skill change from the average technician at a transit agency, or even a driver, goes from X to Y.

Sonia Sennik: So the fuel cell buses in 2010, you mentioned in passing, it was interesting, but painful. What did you learn from that fuel cell innovation process that now perhaps you’re bringing into how you’re talking about the EV transformation?

Paul Soubry: At that time, the fuel cell [00:19:00] was the prime mover, the propulsion system. So you get this massive fuel cell, you don’t have a diesel engine, which means you need a significant amount of hydrogen. By the way, it’s not available at every street corner. That ecosystem around the fuel cells, the reality check came in.

So then everything migrated to battery electric buses. When we first started working with just battery, we thought, holy smokes, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to have very small batteries because they’re expensive and they’re heavy. We’ll have charging all over the routes. Then you start to realize the complexities of putting distributed charging throughout cities, right?

This is not trivial. So then what happened? The pendulum swung. We want all these batteries on buses. So the more batteries you have, the less people you can have, right? Expensive, heavy, parasitic load, all this other stuff. The fuel cells made its way back in where now we build electric buses with small fuel cells.

So the fuel cell’s job is just to top up the battery. So when we hear people say our batteries or fuel cells going to take over electric propulsion in buses, quite frankly, it’s an electric story. And how do you extend the range? One strategy is fuel cell. Here’s the other dynamic that [00:20:00] I think really hit me is, pick a transit agency.

I don’t know. Brampton transit, really progressive customer. They’ve got this capital investment in this very large fleet. They’re not going to hand the fleet over or wipe it overnight to put a whole bunch of zero emissions in there. There’s still your and my tax dollars in there to evolve that fleet over time.

Which goes back to that evolution story, it’s not just the technology and the training and the systems, there’s capital value in there that we got to make sure we phase out over time. And therein lies a very different dynamic than you and me choosing an electric car or an ICE car.

John Stackhouse: The cost of the vehicle is also an interesting challenge, same on the passenger side, but different scale. How do you work with municipalities and maybe other levels of government on the cost issue and how are you thinking about driving down those unit costs?

Paul Soubry: It’s a really important one, John, and when you walked through here, you saw the complexity.

First of all, the average person has no clue how customized vehicles are. Just to give you a little flavor, we’ll make, I don’t know, [00:21:00] on the transit bus side, 2, 000 2, 200 units a year here in North America. Last year, we created 68, 000 new part numbers for 2, 200 buses. Why? Because every city, every customer wants to customize elements with their bus.

So in addition to the rapid customization and variation, which includes non recurrent engineering, tooling, whatever, you also got this huge uplift of inflation that happened over the last couple of years. The good news we have in public transit is it will likely be the first all fleet to be converted because the government can control that.

It’s publicly funded. The bad news is that the there’s an outpouring of money upfront originally to not only fund the higher, more expensive buses, which by the way, we believe will be cost neutral over the life cycle. Cause you have less maintenance costs, but there’s that upfront cash. The other thing is they had to help operators understand how to invest in charging infrastructure.

And again, it’s not a couple of chargers. We just stick to the roof of a depot. It’s a big deal, which then goes back to why we as a company need to be part of the ecosystem, not just, do you like my bus? How many do you want? And what [00:22:00] color? It also pushed us into a dynamic that maybe we may not have totally thought about.

We’re now offering infrastructure charging solutions. So we’re acting as a general contractor where we’re bidding the bus, but bidding the charging infrastructure and trying to work through a customer to make sure that ecosystem works from day one, as opposed to the city of whatever, buying a charging system that doesn’t match with the bus and then all the complexities.

So the funding, thank God we have. Very successful and very prominent investment from both the Canadian, UK government to get that started as opposed to a pure economic business that says, Oh my God, I used to buy a truck for a hundred grand. Now you want three 50. Are you kidding me? And then I need all this charging stuff.

We have the bad news of we’re the guinea pigs, but the benefit of going first.

Sonia Sennik: Paul, folks may be visualizing an assembly line and the concept may give the illusion of standardization and your stat on the 68, 000 new parts last year is staggering. So I guess you’re saying getting potential alignment on some design specifications would help the [00:23:00] industry move faster.

Pardon the pun.

Paul Soubry: There’s no question on speed, but also Sonia on economics, we did this calculation of the permutations and combinations of side windows on a bus, everything from thickness tent frames is pushing in, pushing out. There’s 97 different configurations, which then means my aftermarket parts team and my service team has this infinite support dynamic associated with it.

So I think as the bus has got more expensive and the batteries and whatever, I think the sanity is going to get us back to configuration and that can drive optimization rather than pure customization for customization sake.

John Stackhouse: We all know there’s a change coming in Washington. You’ve had to adjust a fair bit with buy America as American customers want you to manufacture a good chunk of the vehicle locally, but you’ve strategized around that. But now you’re into kind of a new chapter in North America. How are you thinking about the next few years?

Paul Soubry: Well, a couple of things first on on the vehicle [00:24:00] itself and the different propulsion systems. We made the strategic decision when we started to get into zero emission in earnest that we do two things. We would design platforms or frames of buses that could accommodate any kind of propulsion system. So diesel, natural gas, hybrid, zero emission, battery, fuel cell, and so forth.

So that allows us to adapt depending on certain customers and the pace of adoption. The other thing we decided to do is not to build the zero emissions on separate production lines. Now, inherent in that is some inefficiencies, right? Because putting a zero emission through in the wires and the complexity is different than a diesel.

So you have labor inefficiencies, but we also have infinite flexibility that if it goes faster, we adapt faster. So that’s one of the things that I, I hope, and I think that that will prove as a good decision. With respect to the new administration, United States, there’s all the bluster around tariffs and will the Trump administration kill all the funding for green vehicles and on and on and on.

Some of what I just said plays into that. The other issue is that our business is really oriented towards buy America dynamics. And so for those that [00:25:00] don’t know that when a customer in the U S uses federal funds, 70 percent of the material must be U S origin and certain functions must physically happen in the United States.

For example, we build a shell here. You can’t put a door or an air conditioner. You got to physically do it in the United States. So over the years, as that went from 50 to 60 to 65 to 70 percent content, we’ve migrated, unfortunately, tasks, supply chain skills to the United States. We’re on both sides of the border.

We’ve just announced recently, we’re going to work to build all Canadian vehicles for Canadian customers here. I think we’re going to have to continue to read and adapt. Some stuff may get more expensive. If our transistor radio gets more expensive, unfortunately, with tariffs and so forth, you and I are going to pay for it, right?

As opposed to the supplier taking it. So that’s the reality of bus prices going to go up, which may then indicate the funding dynamics out of sync and so forth. Here’s the good news that I see it. I don’t make typewriters that are ultimately going to get replaced by computers. We make buses and coaches that may change in type, size, propulsion, color, systems, but the [00:26:00] buses aren’t going away.

They are fundamental to every city as the backbone of those cities. So we’ve got to keep adapting our product offering and the surroundings around it, as opposed to worrying that I’m going to get disrupted in what I make. We’ll see how tariffs go, but it’s a game we’re going to have to figure out how to play.

I think we’re positioned from a good starting place because most of our supply chain is U. S. origin anyway.

Sonia Sennik: Paul, obviously you have such a depth of knowledge in this space, and it’s been really enlightening to understand the different levels of innovation that are taking place all at the same time.

What would be your messaging to a customer, someone who takes the bus, in understanding what the future of transportation looks like from your perspective?

Paul Soubry: I think that’s a really good question, Sonia, because I’ve been in the business 15, 16 years now, right? Buses have been moving people for 70 years. And for most of that, the choice of the bus and everything about it was always the same in terms of fuel it with a diesel.

And now the dynamic of it’s not a bus anymore, it’s the ecosystem. And it’s not a light switch because you got to [00:27:00] evolve to it. I think the same thing is going to apply in trucking or delivery, local delivery vans and so forth. The vehicle is kind of the easy part, right? The issue is you got to optimize the system.

And that’s a different higher order thinking for financing it, cashflow management, maintenance, procurement, life cycle, asset management, spare parts, and on and on and on. The interconnectedness of all things. Amen. Yes, exactly. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast, Paul. Sonia, pleasure to meet you. John, thanks for the opportunity.

Sonia Sennik: It was so fantastic to speak to both Paul and Kristian about the evolution of EVs. I loved how we kept coming back to this sense of interconnectedness between the systems surrounding the technology, not just the technology itself. As Paul said, it’s not just flipping a light switch.

John Stackhouse: I felt at times like I was in an MBA class listening to amazing case studies, even as they’re unfolding.

Both stories, New Flyer and GM and the BrightDrop line, are good reminders of how complex [00:28:00] the energy transition is. It’s not just about creating a battery and convincing consumers to buy a new vehicle. Entire supply chains have to be remade. They can’t be remade overnight, so whether you’re a city thinking about your fleet or a manufacturer thinking about retooling your lines as you go, or a consumer thinking about how you, uh, replace the vehicles in your driveway, all of this is complex.

It’ll take time. But boy, is it fascinating.

Sonia Sennik: I think one of the sayings I really appreciate and I think is true in this case is that innovation is only as impactful as the ecosystems that support it. And I felt that rang true with everything that Paul was communicating and what Kristian was saying about how much we’re transforming the future of transport.

John Stackhouse: Well, as we’ve often said on this podcast, innovation is a team sport. There’s very few companies that truly innovate on their own. They build partnerships. They work with their supply chain, they even work with their competitors. And of course. their customers listening to what they’re looking for and wanting.

Sonia Sennik: And they really [00:29:00] drive innovation.

John Stackhouse: Why don’t we park the conversation there, Sonia?

Sonia Sennik: Well, thanks for tuning in to this episode. If you’re as passionate as we are about understanding the intersection of advanced technologies and real world applications, be sure to subscribe and leave a review.

John Stackhouse: This has been Disruptors, an RBC podcast in collaboration with Creative Destruction Lab.

I’m John Stackhouse.

Sonia Sennik: And I’m Sonia Sennik.

Thanks for listening. Talk to you soon.

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