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Turns out $20 million could be a good price for a new EV. If that car is the Project Arrow prototype — an all-Canadian electric vehicle dreamt up by an auto industry body that has already drummed up $500 million in contracts for the companies which contributed their technologies, that is.
The EV concept, named after the avant-garde but controversial Canadian-built Avro Arrow supersonic fighter jet cancelled in 1959, has been logging thousands of air miles of its own since its launch in 2020. The distinctive gun-metal grey design was on display at Canada’s pavillion at the COP28 climate conference in Dubai, UAE, and has been in the spotlight at industry exhibitions around the world.
International interest in the eye-catching EV model has already translated into half a billion dollars in deals for the 25 home-grown startups that delivered technologies for the prototype, ranging from an innovative electric drive-train through a 3D-printed chassis to a state-of-the-art navigation system.
For Flavio Volpe, who as head of Canada’s Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association (APMA) spearheaded development of the project, the enthusiasm and deal-making are a vindication of the “true value for money” of the EV concept, which raised $12 million from the Canadian auto sector and received $8 million in government backing to build the prototype.
“This is not about prototyping a design for mass production. These are designed to be a platform and showcase,” he stated, speaking with Canada’s National Observer.
“So $20 million is a lot for a car, but not when you think about it in terms of what it can generate for the Canadian auto sector, for the Canadian economy.”
“With Project Arrow, Canada shows it has the technology and the people to do an ‘all-Canadian’ car,” said Volpe.
An industrial net-zero call-to-arms
The spark of conception for the Arrow came five years ago during the federal throne speech, which included a government call-to-arms to all in industry to imagine what their sectors “could look like in a net-zero future.”
Volpe took the question to representatives from APMA’s 400-plus parts-supplier members with the challenge of designing and building a new EV. The car that took shape had “innovation” as its watchword.
The Arrow design came from a team at Carleton University in Ottawa, Ont., and “every last part” came from one of more than 60 Canadian suppliers. This included power train engineers Narmco, software developers Ettractive and YQG Technologies, injection moulding specialist Papp Plastics, and cybersecurity outfit Vehiqilla. The prototype was assembled by Ontario Tech University, in Oshawa, Ont.
“We are saying: ‘If a [car-maker] is interested in the Arrow’s navigation system or the power-train — or the steering wheel, seats or door handles, here are the companies to buy from,’” said Volpe, who also sits on the Prime Minister’s Council on Canada-US Relations.
Progress on the project was given a major boost last November when APMA secured a further $11 million to build the first dozen “Arrow 2.0s,” demonstrator models that could be used as virtual kit-cars by any automaker looking to start manufacturing an all-Canadian EV.
“Through Project Arrow [the Canadian auto sector] will prove that we can land on the moon. But it is not for APMA to colonize it,” said Volpe, noting he has had many requests to launch a car company off the back of the prototype.
Still, the idea is tempting. Particularly given that Canada’s vaunted $100 billion EV ecosystem strategy has been misfiring in the last year due to a slow-down in electric car and truck demand growth and the impact of the “uncertainty shock” to the auto sector from the imposition of US tariffs.
An EV designed and built in Canada with exclusively Canadian parts and technology will have a domestic market eventually, Volpe said, whatever US President Donald Trump’s “ambitions” or the industrial vagaries of the transition from internal combustion engines to electric drive-trains.
Statista, a data provider, forecast Canada’s EV market to reach over $11.5 billion in 2025 and grow almost 10 per cent a year to $17 billion by 2029, by which time almost 250,000 EVs will be on Canadian roads.
“The technologies being delivered by our member companies are going to drive down the cost of vehicles. If we are going to compete with the Chinese, we have to invest in these product innovations and also in the process and technologies to manufacture these EVs,” he added.
“Things are changing very rapidly. This is an occasion for a big rethink of the auto sector canon. We can’t continue to think conventionally,” Volpe said of the transition to EVs, adding: “If I launched a car today, it wouldn't combust anything. It would be electric.”
On the road ‘for $35,000’
By APMA figuring, a compact SUV model Arrow could roll off a Canadian assembly line by 2029 with a sticker price of $35,000, he added, ready to be one of the two million cars sold each year in Canada.
Development of the next-generation Arrow is going to test the design for ultra-harsh Canadian winter conditions, with Ontario Tech set to put the car through its paces in the university’s climatic aerodynamic wind tunnel, which can simulate Arctic blizzards and “extreme weather events.”
Like the prototype, the Arrow 2.0 is retaining its identity as a “lighthouse for the sector but a showcase for our suppliers’ technologies,” said Volpe. But he feels the spirit of the project needs to continue reflecting its namesake, the Avro Arrow, developed in response to the “existential threat” of Russian bombers flying over the Arctic Circle to attack Canada and the US.
“We built a Canadian jet from a ‘clean sheet’ that could fly twice as fast and fly twice as high as anything out there in the ‘50s. We couldn't think conventionally to do this.”
The American economic attack on Canada with tariffs could be seen as comparable, Volpe said, given the damage that might be done to our national security and sovereignty, and provides government and industry with the opportunity to reposition the auto sector “to play to our existing strengths.”
“We have a world-class auto manufacturing cluster in southwestern Ontario, we have a strong advanced technology cluster — software and hardware — we have steel and aluminum, and we have critical minerals for energy-dense EV batteries. And then there is AI and machine learning, which Canadians pioneered.”
Through Project Arrow, Canada now also has its own EV prototype. And Volpe adds APMA is happy to hand over the “five years of homework done for this project to anybody who wants to take a shot at it.”
Comments
$35,000 on the car lot? That's less than my diesel VW Golf cost me in 2015! Someone should obviously buy the GM factory in Oshawa that just reduced from 3 to 2 shifts (and ran 8 shifts a decade ago) and start building Arrow 3.0.
Please, let's not this one go the way of the first!
EVs are not just a mode of transportation, they are also seen in some quarters as part of an inefficient system that caters to unsustainable car dependency, literally bankrupting public accounts to feed car-centric urbanism.
Behemoths like the Arrow prototype and a number of existing massive SUV models rolling over supersized freeways and inhumane arterials in North America would be banned from the quiet human-scaled neighbourhoods of Amsterdam and Copenhagen. Yet those streets have not banned motorized transport. Vehicles there are far, far less in number and more appropriately sized for the urban conditions.
The Arrow adopts the amoured tank design mentally of the North American auto industry. That front bumper is so in-your-face, like it came from an earth mover. Those windows are disproportionately small in relation to the body. The following car-oriented design of our cities have damaged too much of the Canadian landscape and made major contributions to altering the planet's climate, and merely changing out the power train is supposed to fix all that?
What is needed is a wholesale reconsideration of our deep addiction to personal transport. Stop tinkering with the vehicle; start humanizing our cities. Move human beings, not cars.
Sustainable urbanism is what is needed more than ever. It's already a thing but it's applied in only small scales so far in Canada. It will take generations to urbanize our suburbs using the human scale at the sidewalk level and electric rail transit as a replacement for supersized road infrastructure that literally sucks the life off the street and public financial resources out of government accounts.
It will take generations to humanize urban design over the majority of the urban landscape, and that means cars will be with us for generations to come. The climate energency dictates that the size and quantity of cars overall must decrease to stop imposing such egregious impacts on healthcare, city engineering budgets, commuting times, personal loss, legal costs and what have you, while travelling on the tracks to climate mitigation.
The EV is not just a transport machine, it is a carraige for a battery pack. Batteries are the core and that is where any industrial effort must begin. The Arrow as poropised is just another impractical gigantic urban assault vehicle design. Not a word on battery chemistry or the level of local vs imported battery components. Not a peep on the consideration that an EV battery maker should be able to adapt their tech for home and business use, and at huge scales for the grid. Batteries should be part of a package offered with solar and wind power systems, from residential right up to multiple megawatt solar and wind farms.
So, Arrow proponents, what about China? Allowing BYD and a few other excellent quality Chinese car models into Canada by dramatically lowering or removing tariffs in exchange for removing their tariffs on Canadian potash will devastate North America's currently far outdated auto industry.
One way to compete with Chinese models on price will be to automate Arrow plants to the point there isn't more than a token unionized workforce left. Robots don't need union scale salaries and benefit, and don't need lunch breaks. Is Arrow ready to propose robot factories in Ontario? Are Canadians ready for more erosion of labour unions and the rights they won for society?
Then you've got the battery chemistry. CATL and BYD in China have just released the sodium battery that, when hybrided with lithium iron phosphate units, possibly with manganese, outperforms other chemistries using problematic nickel and cobalt in cold weather performance while attaining equivalent or better charging speeds, energy density and range.
What is Arrow's response to these challenges? Would Arrow consider partnering with a Chinese company (government permitting) to build an electric vehicle industry independent from the US? Will Arrow reconsider its tank design mentality and adopt designs made from the inside out based on human body movements for all ages and abilities? That means less exterior mass, far more interior volume and cab-forward layouts to provide superior forward visibility
Most importantly, will Arrow consider consulting with urbanists to provide models better suited to compact urban conditions than oversized suburban precepts rhat are clearly from a past century? And branch into urban commercial vehicles as sustainable urbanism infiltrates more of our sprawling suburban landscapes? Why cab't Arrow branch out into public transport vehicles while they're at it.
Please, start addressing substance over style, especially when the style is merely copied then tweaked from other immature psuedomacho approaches by GM, Ford and Stellantis. Canadians need better cities first, then place better suited cars in what's left after full scale efforts in public transit, walkable urbanism and energy efficient buildings have been made.
Back to the drawing board with you.
"The Arrow as proposed..."
Well said, Alex.
I was going to simply throw the quote from the APMA fellow back at him:
"Things are changing very rapidly. This is an occasion for a big rethink of the auto sector canon. We can’t continue to think conventionally..."
I couldn't agree with him more.
Except his idea of a rethink, as you suggest, isn't much of a rethink, at all. Lipstick on a pig, comes to mind.
The Netherlands, with a population of 18 million, is ~ twice the size of PEI. Much of Canada is not served by passenger trains or affordable airfare, thus driving a car is the only option. How do you suggest a family would get from Ottawa to say St. John's, NL? Take the train to Halifax and bike from there to St. John's.
The vast majority of driving in Canada is done in cities on a daily basis, primarily suburb-to-suburb, or from the periphery to the centre. Longer road trips are made a few times a year, if that. The words "urbanism" and "suburbs" appeared many times in my comments for a reason.
Moreover, car ownership isn't cheap. Family budgets are greatly impacted by multiple car households. All that money and commuting time penalties just to have "freedom" ... to get stuck in traffic and work extra jobs to pay down car debts. I've had experience both ways, going car free for 10 years while living in the inner city, and having a 2.5 hour commute from the core to an exurban job. I quit that job because of the commute, literally 10 working weeks a year sitting on one's butt behind the wheel.
The Netherlands is a wonderful country, and their cities are rife with a plethora of transportation choices. The transit / shoe leather / biking mode share is huge because their cities weren't designed for cars. Even the new communities give way less space to cars than we do in Canada. We are lucky to hit 25% in most Canadian cities, with the rare occurrence of an urban core like Vancouver's exceeding 50%.
What are the features, range, charge time, battery life and self driving features and quality?
Unfortunately for independent auto parts companies, car manufacturers ordering parts from suppliers just isn't the way car manufacturing is going to work in the future - or even right now, at the leading companies.
At Tesla (please bracket our knowledge the CEO's politics from the way car manufacturing is going to work in the future!), they modify parts on the actual car assembly line, in response to the real-time data they're getting from the entire fleet of sold Teslas actually in use.
They can modify a part in one day and have it used in cars the next. They are doing this all the time to all of their parts. And yes, they have found a way to do it that complies with safety regulations etc.
They key thing to understand is that they have the data. There's no way an independent part supplier is a part of this way superior process for making cars.
Also, the leading EV companies are all competing to make cars with fewer parts. Ever seen a Tesla dashboard?