this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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So are we able to get business to turn those existing plants into plants that can build Asian or European cars over here? Might be an opportunity there, or not. Perhaps we need to do what China did and start to build our cars for our own people.
We already have a Canadian-made EV in the works.
https://www.projectarrow.ca/
That's awesome π
Personally, I think it has the same issue loads of other current EV offerings have. It's trying too hard to look futuristic. Which, again this my personal opinion on what I want in a vehicle, that type of look is just bad. I really hate it. It looks like something a highschool student designed as their first CAD project.
Again, personal preference for car design, not trying to start an argument.
I think it's really important that Canada starts building up our own brands again. We used to have a bunch, they all got bought by American companies. We need to have our own brands.....
I agree. I personally can't stand all of the futuristic designs, they all look like giant metal blobs that barely resemble a car. Too much emphasis on ugly headlights and taillights as well. I would LOVE an EV that just looks like a regular sedan. I doubt most of these "futuristic" designs will age very well.
I'm less offended by the overall designs than the pointless gimmicks. Pet peeve is those flat door handles. What's wrong with boring old regular handles?
So many EV's are designed as luxury vehicles mostly. We need more Chevy Bolt and less Tesla.
Anything about production? I couldn't see it and it's their second one? Just a concept car it seems.
I haven't seen anything about actual production - the original car seemed like just a promotion - but you have to think if there's suddenly tons of car parts coming off the line and nobody to buy them this would be a quick, already worked out way to fix that.
Yes it's a concept vehicle ... in the works.
The government seems to be wanting to foster a domestic EV battery production industry. Might as well make entire cars while we're at it.
They could. For example the Chrysler plant many years back switched to running Volkswagen also. But would other brands come here is the question
I doubt it would make sense, as our marketplace isn't large enough to support it alone. You would only do this to give you more access to the North American marketplace.
I keep seeing this talking point. Is it true?
Consider that Australia has a similar population, similar geographic issues and they have domestic auto production.
South Korea is only slightly larger than us in terms of population and has 3 domestic companies building cars. We could certainly do like Korea and export vehicles.
The only thing stopping us from having a Canadian domestic auto industry is the pervasive and false belief that we can't because we need to sell to the US.
We don't. We can sell to anyone willing to buy.
Edit: To add. My first new car was built by an independent plant that manufactured for multiple car companies.
Australia had automotive production. They don't anymore, because it wasn't viable.
South Korea is definitely an exporter of automobiles. Thing is it took them about ~40 years to get to the point where they caught traction with it. The early Korean exports were pretty low quality and sort of unreliable (different people had different experiences). It took time for their R&D to work it out, and for economies of scale to develop.
It's not the belief that we need to sell to the United States that would be stopping us here. It's that they are right next door + 100 years ahead of us on R&D and progress, not to mention having long established integrated facilities and economies of scale. You'd have to enter the global marketplace with a car company built from scratch, that would need billions if not even maybe hundreds of billions dumped into R&D, design & development, which takes time. You would need manufacturing facilities that would be huge, that would also probably cost tens if not hundreds of billions to develop. Where is your steel going to come from? How are you going to stamp it? Where's all the parts coming from if you don't want to work with the US, and then how are you going to get them on a timely basis if they are coming by ship? Not to mention the zillion other questions one would need to figure out. It would take ~a decade to get this all sorted out. And godless sums of money. All to then compete in a global marketplace with international companies that have centuries of experience.
Magna would be the only developed enough option where this could even be feasible, but even they've sort of poked around looking at developing a product in the past, and the absence of said product in the marketplace kind of tells you everything you need to know about the viability of it.
According to the wiki they still have a plant, but yeah, it shrank over the decades. Then again, other Aussie industries expanded to take it's place.
We're not trying to build this from scratch, and we only need to guarantee continued operation for the near future, not forever. I don't think it's a totally straight comparison.
Both of those things are equally in Canada, and I'm surprised you don't know that given the current news cycle.
We're a big net exporter of that, too!
That's because crossing the border has been free and was assumed to always be free, so it's integrated with the US. American cars are Canadian cars, basically. Now that's changed, and the market (and politics) will have to adapt.
Organising a new company would be a huge problem, and selling overseas even bigger, but we have all the pieces on the production end.
No doubt we have a lot of production capabilities, and you are right, I'm sure you could piece most of the rest together. The marketplace is the biggest conundrum, I would propose. All those manufacturing facilities are in SW Ontario, so the only way to get them to other markets (which is going to be necessary here, because the Canadian marketplace isn't big enough), it is going to involve ocean liners. Which is feasible, but your margins are going to get cooked here. There's too much risk.
This ain't the industry Canada needs to double down on, in a suddenly protectionist world. It's natural resources, and maybe service related. And hopefully all sorts of other industries that we aren't even thinking about.
Yes, in the long term it might make more sense to just let Europe, South Korea and Japan take the lead. Or a poor country - hopefully a democratic one; I trust China only slightly more than the US right now.
The reason intervention would make sense is just to make the transition tolerably gradual. Right now we're talking about production lines and parts companies just sitting and rotting for (sudden, artificial) lack of customers, while Canadian consumers have trouble buying new cars at the same time.
I know you were using hyperbole with 100 years of R&D and progress so for fun I wanted to know how old the modern car is and wikipedia said: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_automobile#%3A%7E%3Atext=Benz+was+granted+a+patent%2Cwas+capable+of+extended+travel. 1886.
So like, 139 years of automotive history and being 100 years behind would really suck lol.
In all seriousness, you raise very real points and links to globalisation and Pierre Trudeau's analogy of sleeping with an elephant has never been more real. I'm not gonna lie, I'm worried.
I'm worried too. I was born and raised in SW Ontario, so most of my family and friends work in some sort of auto manufacturing or automotive-related industry. It's already been pretty bad the past decade or so, this will likely be the death knell if it grows legs.
Fun fact, did you know that there was actually even electric cars made in the late 1800s? Some even in Canada. Car companies in this era all eventually failed though, or merged into other companies. There wasn't ever really any production volumes in auto until Oldsmobile and Ford came onto the scene, especially with the latter who established the golden standard of auto production lines.
Yeah, but we have history and old blueprints and universities full of people who know how to make good cars. And an existing advanced auto industry (just integrated with the US). OP was just guessing at a lot of things, and missed the mark quite a bit.
I wasn't guessing. I cut my teeth in automotive. I have an education in automotive engineering, amongst other things, and I have extensive working experience at both the retailer, and Tier 1 and 2 manufacturing experience earlier in my career. Not proclaiming to be the end all be all, or the smartest person in the world, or that I know much of anything, but I'm also far from being the village idiot on this topic.
It ain't happening bud, I'm sorry. There's not enough marketplace to recover the costs, it would be complicated to transport finished goods to other markets, especially considering that most of the manufacturing facilities are located in southern Ontario. Which means you'd have to pretty much stick everything on a ship, and that adds costs, versus trucking to the states. It obviously can be done, easily enough, but it cuts into margins at higher production levels. Margins aren't high in this industry, and the labour is mostly unionized, or very quickly will be if it's not, and that adds a dearth of costs. Volatility in commodities pricing alone would be enough to knock something like this into non-profitable territory. It likely wouldn't be profitable for a decade either. Even look at something like Tesla, it took them 17 years to turn a profit, and it actually doesn't really turn a profit from its cars, it's actually from the sale of environmental credits.
If you are going to see any automotive investment and new OEMs, something like a new Tesla or whatever, it's almost certainly going to be in Europe, not North America. Donald Trump has all but guaranteed that there's not going to be one dime spent in deepening or expanding automotive manufacturing capabilities spent here, for quite a while, likely a decade or more if he keeps it up. Canada has learned its lesson here, and I would imagine if anything happens in the automotive sector, it'll be a contraction, not an expansion. Even as close as four of five months ago, there have been new plans launched for factory expansion and construction of tier 1 suppliers in Southwestern Ontario, but I would bet you that'll be off now. We'll have to wait and see though, only those closest to the projects will know, and nobody else's crystal ball can predict the future.
And let's not even begin to consider that China is foaming at the mouth to dump mostly state backed, very viable electric cars here, for a fraction of the price tag that we've been paying. We aren't going to be able to block that off forever, they'll find a way around the tariffs eventually. How are you going to compete with that?
I'm sorry then. What I read there is that Canada doesn't already have an auto industry, and if that had been what you meant, that could only be a guess.
I'll respond to the rest on the thread with just you.