Zero-Emission Trucking Program

Speaker 1

The zero emission trucking program has four primary objective. The first is to provide capacity funding to provinces, territories, municipalities, standards development organizations to develop the code, standards and regulations that we need to facilitate safe deployment. The second objective is to build a commercial vehicle laboratory at Transport Canada's Motor Vehicle Test Center, where we can conduct state of their research within the federal family and for use by external stakeholders.

Thirdly, we're undertaking targeted research. So that means evaluating aerodynamic treatments on trailers and producing reports on the future of battery technologies for heavy duty vehicles. And then lastly, we have our zero emission trucking testbeds, which put heavy duty zero emissions vehicles into Canadian Commercial Freight Hall to evaluate their performance and cost of operation.

Speaker 2

On road transportation accounts for approximately 20% of Canada's GHG emissions and the adoption of zero emission trucking in the Canadian transportation sector will have a significant influence on reducing GHG emissions.

Speaker 3

To give an idea of size, a Class 8 electric truck which has to travel 1000 kilometres will reduce by the equivalent of about a ton of CO2 compared to a diesel truck. Therefore, consumption savings really come from the fact that we substituted a fossil fuel with an electric vehicle that consumes renewable energy.

Speaker 2

What we find particularly unique of this testbed is the vast number of collaborators and contributors to this particular project. So we have vehicle manufacturers, we have infrastructure providers, we have fleets, drivers, various staff within the fleet that are participating and as well as government contributors. And that depth of collaboration and involvement is really helping to identify the benefits and the challenges of implementing a zero emission truck.

Speaker 3

For this uptake to work, it is important to really understand where electric vehicles have their place. Several operational factors must be considered and integrated in the software and operations to make sure that these trucks can be used to their full potential. So, we have a very comprehensive approach where we use different data sources, we combine them in-house to get a global picture of the fleets and compare diesel vehicles to electric vehicles.

Speaker 2

Zero Emission trucking program and the staff at Transport Canada have been very collaborative and supportive of the work that’s being undertaken.

Speaker 1

It really takes a village to pull off these testbeds, all coming together to make sure that we can collect the data that we need, and to make sure that we can integrate these trucks safely into the Canadian landscape. Our specific objectives are to accelerate the safe uptake of zero emissions trucks through research and deployment, making the data as publicly available as we can, so others can learn from our experiences and then start further along the process.