The Current - “Maple Motors” could an all Canadian car hit the roads?

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

A domestic car brand is an idea that's been kicking around, especially in this time of uncertainty in the Canadian automotive sector. Flavio Volpe, the president of Canada's Automotive Parts Manufacturers' Association believes the answer is to take back control of its car manufacturing sector and launch a local brand, but some experts say it's not that easy.

Did you know that it was once illegal to shop on Sundays? That's true for when I was born. I remember this, and I'm not that old. I'm not, okay? Leave me alone. Anyway, I'm Phelan Johnson, and I host See You in Court, a new podcast about the cases that changed Canada and the ordinary people who drove that change. From the drugstore owner who defied the Lord's Day, to the migma man who defended his treaty right to fish, to the gay teacher who got fired and fought back. Find and follow, see you in court, wherever you get your. Podcasts. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast.

In the history of car making in this country, there have been very few attempts to launch a Canadian car. One was in 1974. A two-seat sports car is called the Brickland. Good opportunity to get in on a brand new concept of cars, a car that nobody's manufactured before. Listen that sci-fi futuristic music there. It was a car that had never been manufactured before, nor ever again. The company produced just under 3,000 cars in New Brunswick and then folded.

Now, with tariffs hitting Canada's auto industry hard, the automotive parts manufacturers association wants to revive that idea of making a Canadian car. Rolling into the era of a Canadian car company, this zero-emission's EV prototype is called Project Arrow. and 97% of the materials used to build it come from Canada. At a time when everybody was looking to make major investments in EVs, we want to make a statement that Canada can do the whole thing for you. Do the whole thing for you. Project Arrow is a prototype, proof of concept of what could perhaps be achieved in this country. You heard his voice there in that clip.

Flavio Volpe is president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association. He's with me in studio. Good morning. Thanks for having me. Why is now the time to build a Canadian car? Well, what we're saying now is a time to really study very deeply whether we can build a sustainable business model that makes cars. We made 120 million cars in this country since 1904 when we first partnered with Ford. But the White House has gotten in the way right now and said, we don't want those cars to cross the border. And if they do, we're going to injure their price to the point where Donald Trump has said, we want to end Canadian car production.

President Shane Baum in Mexico said, well, how do I build some insurance for Mexico? It was facing the same thing. Well, they launched Olinia. And what she said was, we're going to make electric cars, city cars, $10,000 city cars that are going to go to help expand the Mexican market and buy some insurance. So what kind of car, if we'll talk about some of the things that would take to get this car on the road, but if the car were to make it under that, what kind of car are we talking about here? Well, we've got a steering committee that's going to scope the feasibility study.

Well, I'll tell you what I think, what I think, what it shouldn't, be is a car that competes with Toyota's Rav 4 made in Woodstock or General Motors pickup trucks in, in, uh, uh, uh, Oshua. I think there's a couple of opportunities here to say, look, if we're going to hold back to Chinese as we're doing with tariffs, uh, we should see if we can't do something like Jeff Bezos has done with his slate pickup truck, a $20,000 EV. Can we do it? Um, uh, a lot of people will tell you that we can't, but no one's really studied how to do it here. But just to be clear, this would be a consumer car. This is a car that at some point in time, I might drive through wherever I happen to be.

Could be. We're also committing to spend 5% of GDP on defense expenditures here in Canada. Part of defense expenditures is maybe we need a presence in the north. What kind of vehicle do you need to put up there? This is about vehicle production, whether they're on-road or off-road, project there will prove that we can build anything. And then as you get into the future of automotive and the Chinese have shown this, but sort of the Japanese and the Koreans and the Americans, you're building a platform,

a skateboard of sorts. then you build different use cases around it. How would we go about doing this? We build a lot of cars, but the cars are not Canadian cars. They end up heading elsewhere. They are companies that are rooted elsewhere. How would we do this? Well, first of all, like any other enterprise,

take a look at say, can we build a profitable business model? And this one in this business, Sergio Marciona, famous Canadian Italian who ran fiat, said, this thing eats capital. You've got to turn around and say, is there a growth market like the Mexican said? We have three times as many people as Canada. We have 30% less vehicle sales. Why?

Because there's nothing hitting the disposable income of Mexicans to grow that market. So they said, let's take aim at a $10,000 car. When we do our feasibility study, we're going to say, what are the growth markets for Canada? And then what are the exportable opportunities? I think there's something in this new NATO spend. And I think if we can solve for something, our NATO partners can buy these platforms. We're going to have to buy a bunch of stuff that rolls on wheels from other people because we've committed to the 5%.

We should try ourselves. Mexico has, what, three times the population of Canada? So is there actually a market for something like this here? Well, the Mexican market is 1.7 million car sales a year, and the Canadian one is two million. So in terms of the population that buys vehicles, Canada is bigger. Who would buy the car, do you think? Well, you know, you're, you should join. in the steering committee because what I'm committing to publicly here is that we have to study

these things. But who do you think? I mean, if you take a look at those cars that are bought, people buy different cars for any number of reasons. There's a bunch of cars we can't buy. You mentioned Chinese. We can't buy. Well, you can buy them.

You just have to pay a tariff. At an extraordinary tariff. But they are at kind of the cutting edge in many ways of EV technology. Who would buy this car? Is it a patriotic thing? Is it, are you going to be able to create a car that is going to, if people are choosing which vehicle they're going to buy that that's the best investment for them well that that's the type of decision people need to make on that vehicle and you have to work a business case to it and in i've been

saying this very carefully thoughtfully we're going to study the business case because if you can't answer that we're also going to be very humble and say it doesn't work now there are growing use cases around the world for micromobility things that roll on wheels that are powered whether they're powered solely by battery or some type of hybrid those are those those dense markets around the world, then you usually have to hit them at a lower price point. But again, I want to say this, 5% of GDP is a lot of money. And 5% of GDP in all the NATO countries, a lot of money. That means that all those NATO countries who are going to have to do things, spend on

things that roll on wheels, is a new market. Those are new volumes. We should study whether we can do that. It doesn't have to be a consumer car. It just has to be a company that employs the same, type of people that make cars right now and uses the same type of suppliers and raw materials and draws from Canadian strengths perhaps in critical mineral wealth so that we should aim for electrified platforms. And if we get to the end of it, we're not going to launch a safety

sports car like Malcolm Brickland into a market that doesn't exist. We'll say we really studied it. We learned a bunch of things where our strengths are. And then we'll turn our policy towards that. Right now, we are serving American, Japanese, and soon to be a German auto maker here, and we're doing quite well, but we're completely vulnerable to the whims of a wannabe tyrant. And you think this is the opportunity for us, us as Canadians, to grab the wheel? My mother, who took a real interest in our education, would never look at the marks we got. She'd look at the marks you got for effort. Everybody fails. You're not defined by your failure. You're defined by your effort. If you're not going to show up, what are you

telling the next generation. You know, we had a group of kids, we had 24 schools bid on the design of the arrow. We had a group of four kids from Carlton University School of Industrial Design. They don't do automotive. They won that design program. We're going to hear from one of those kids coming out. Yeah, that car's gone around the world to tell the Canadian story.

That kid didn't go to that school. Those four didn't go to that school saying they want to be in the car business. But you know what? Their work has been featured around the world in 15 different languages and has got $500 million a new business. for the suppliers that put their money and their parts on the line there. How people use this word existential all the time to talk about the state of our economy,

the state of parts of our economy. How much of this is about whatever you, if you want to call it, an existential crisis that the auto sector finds itself in right now? You have jobs that are going to the United States. You have plants that are going to shut down or at the very least reduce their employees significantly because those jobs are heading to the,

How much of this is about saving those jobs? A lot of it, and a lot of it is about being smart. What are those jobs? And I think everybody thinks about those jobs as melting plastic and bashing metal. Those jobs, again, are making the best cars in the best rated plants for the best companies in the world. And we're doing them for ourselves. I never want to say we're not doing them for Canadians. But, boy, we should have a home team in the league.

Or at the very least, give it a hell of a try. Just last question, and this is about that. Mark Carney, the prime minister, is definitely. in Washington right now. He will be meeting with the president later on today. Are you optimistic that anything concrete will come out of that meeting? Typically, you don't see head of government to head of government meetings without something coming out of it, and you usually pre-negotiate those things. We're headed to an early renegotiation or review of the Kuzma, USMCA. There's three sectoral tariffs that are related.

Automotive tariffs, steel and aluminum. It's hurting Ford. motor company based in Dearborn, Michigan. And I think that that might be an easy one for the president to signal. We're going to do something together. But again, we're dealing with a president that can't be modeled. He could, in a show of defiance, just receive Mark Carney and send him away. We do need to go face to face. I went there last week.

We brought nine companies down. We met officials from all sorts of departments, people from a defense to commerce. They seemed terribly uninterested. in the Canadian issues. And so how do you elevate that? Well, we do have a boss here too. And he's humble enough to go there. And he's a pretty smart guy

in that we do have some leverage. And maybe we don't get something today. I'm not expecting a lot today. But the gumption to go right to it is important. We'll see what happens. Philafo, good to see you. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

Flavia Volpe is the president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers Association. All right. It is October. It is officially spooky season, which is great timing because there is a new Canadian thriller series out. It's called Wayward, and I think we should be talking about it. My name is Alameen Abdul Mahmood and I love pop culture. And this week on my podcast, Promotion, I called up some of my favorite critics to get into the show about a school for troubled teens and then things start to go wrong. It is just wonderful. And it's bringing something new and interesting to the thriller genre. For that episode and a whole lot more, you can find and follow Commotion with Elamina Abduh. Mahmoud on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Peter Fry's is a professor of mechanical and automotive engineering at the University of Windsor. He is in our Windsor studio this morning. Peter, good morning to you. Good morning, Matt. What do you make of this idea? A Canadian car, a truly Canadian car?

Well, I think it's very exciting. And as a Canadian and as an engineer, I'd love to see it work. But, you know, Canada is facing a kind of a cliff that we have. have to jump off of and we need to make sure that we're going to land somewhere good. There's only so many projects that our country can take on with a population of 40 million. 40 million isn't small, but it's not huge. And there's only so many resources we have. And so I think it's important that we go into all of these projects with a clear vision and a really good set of facts that will give us confidence that we're making the right

decision. And so Flavio's idea of a feasibility study is a very good idea. I think it's absolutely the right thing to do. What are the barriers that are in front of us in terms of launching a domestic automobile? Well, they're huge. And that's, you know, they're quite daunting in my view. And I'm not against the idea, but, you know, this has been tried before. And it is, it is, The numbers are very hard to make it work. For instance, we sell about 1.8 million cars a year in Canada. If we got 2% of the market share, that would be 36,000. And the life of a model is usually around five years.

So that would be about 180,000 cars. And if you look at the cost to develop a car, which is entirely different from developing a concept car, which was another fabulous achievement by Flavio's group. The amortized cost of developing a car could be, you know, several billion dollars. That could add $10,000 or $12,000 to each of the cars sold in Canada. If we got 2% of the Canadian market, if we got 5%, that number would drop to about $6,000 or $7,000. But that's a huge burden to put on a consumer product. The other thing is every, every, you know, I call it Maple Motors.

call it Maple Motors. So every Maple Motors car sold is a Toyota that is not sold or a Ford. The car market is not really growing very fast, if at all. And so every one of those Maple Motors sales has to be a Conquest sale. You're taking away a sale from an established manufacturer that has a huge advertising budget, a huge dealership network, parts distribution. They've been around a long time. Cars last a long time. The average car on the Canadian road is 10 or 11 years old. So, you know, people before they part with their money would have to have confidence that that product is going to be there in 10 or 15 years because, you know, the Toyota would be or the Ford or the Shev. Maple Motors. I like the sound of that. Well, it's just a name.

You might want to trademark that. Flavia Volpe mentioned Mexico, which is launching this, its own domestic EV, the Olina. They've decided that, you know what, if, if, if. we are going to be buffeted by the waves from the United States, we need to figure out how to have some degree of control over our own destiny. Could that be a model for what we would do here? Well, it's an interesting, yeah, it could be, I suppose. I mean, a key point is that the Mexican market is three, the potential is three times bigger than ours because they have three times the population of Canada. I think that it's also important to remember. remember what kind of car they're planning to develop, which is a little city car, a $10,000 car. And I think that might be the right thing for us to do as well, although I'm not sure how big

the market would be in Canada. Maybe it would be big, but I think we have a better developed public transit system, and there's huge efforts all across Canada to get people to use public transit. So again, I'm just not sure how big the market would be. it's hard to get a $10,000 car through the safety crash test certifications that would need to be done. Maybe they can do it. I hope they can for their sake. But again, these are all things that a feasibility study would have to examine very carefully and dispassionately and make sure that we go into this with our eyes wide open.

The urgency of this you would know well. You are in Windsor. The tariffs are being felt more acutely there than in many other places. We did a program from Windsor not long ago and talked to people who were literally right on the front lines. They could see their jobs disappear. Oh, yes. How would you characterize that urgency? Well, it is desperately urgent.

You know, if you're a family in, you've got a mortgage and, you know, children in feed and retirement to prepare for and all those sort of things. What do you do if your job just evaporates? So if this isn't the answer, if building a new Canadian brand of car isn't the answer to protect the automotive industry, what is? Or is there an answer? Again, we're seeing companies literally pack up and move jobs down south. Yes, it's happening, you know, there are announcements, some big, some little. General Motors is bailing a shift in Oshawa for Indiana and so on.

And this is a very bad thing for our country, for our province and our region. I don't have an answer that's easy, but some of the nation-building projects that Prime Minister Carney is touting, I think, are the right kinds of things. I guess Flavio thinks that this could be one of those nation-building projects, right? That this is one of the, this is the moment. Yeah. And, you know, I think that it's, again, it's important that we go into this with our eyes open and make sure that we've asked the tough questions and gotten real answers and make sure that we have. a business case that's going to sustain. We can't have a government car company.

That is just not a good idea. I would never be supportive of that. Governments are not good at running businesses. And a car company is a very competitive business that requires the kind of agility that governments just don't have. You're expecting anything material to come out of this meeting between the president and the prime minister today?

Well, I think I'd follow Flavio's lead on it. You know, I doubt that the prime minister would spend the time and the political capital to go to Washington if there wasn't a good prospect of getting something decent out of it. It's hard to say. I would like to add one more thing. Sure. It's interesting. Flavio said something about a skateboard concept. When Project Arrow was beginning, that's precisely the concept we were looking at here at the University of Windsor.

and that was our bid to the project. So it's good that they've returned to what is a good idea. We'll see whether that skateboard hits the roads. Again, I would trademark if I were you, that Maple Motors is not a bat. It kind of rolls off the tongue. Well, yeah, it's got, and that's the point. Those are the kinds of things that have to be sorted out. The marketing, the dealership network, the parts distribution.

You know, what do you do about warranty? Because, again, this car company won't have a track record, Whereas General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Honda, Chrysler, they all have decades, a century or more of track record. And so it's easy to jump up and down and say, I'd buy one. But when you come time to write that check for $40 or $50,000 or $60,000 or even $10,000 or $12,000 for a city car, you know, everybody's going to think, gosh, this is a lot of money. It is indeed. Peter, Peter, good to talk to you. Thank you very much.

You're most welcome. Peter Fry's is a professor of mechanical and automotive engineering at the University of Windsor. He was in our Windsor studio. We've mentioned a couple of times, Project Arrow. This was one of the first ever made in Canada, zero emissions, electric vehicles. Whether it is the germ of a new industry remains to be seen, but the prototype is a significant accomplishment no matter. Project Arrow was designed by a group of students at Carleton University. Junwan Kim is one of those students and is on the line from Inshan, South Korea.

Hello to you. Hi, how are you? I'm well, thanks. For people who don't know of this idea, can you describe what this car looked like? This car? Well, of course, this was a project dedicated for Canadians. So we took a lot of inspiration from what represents Canada.

So we took a lot of look at the landscapes and animals that are related to Canada. And big idea is the representation of a. Canadian value, which is freedom, through the stance of a polar bear and stack rock, such as a Canadian shield landscape. And so how does that roll into what the car actually looks like? Well, from the exterior point of view, if you're able to take a look at the image of the vehicle, we took overall proportion from the stance of the polar bear. and also it looks like two rocks that are stacked on top of each other with a little bit of a chisel shifting going on from the exterior.

I'm just looking at it. I mean, it's like a four-door sedan, but the way that you, I mean, all of those things kind of rolled in. To you, when you look at it, does it look Canadian? To us, of course. Yeah, it does. But, of course, this was designed in 2019. So we would like to update some more stuff if there's time.

What was it like when you saw the real thing for the first time? When we saw the first thing, for the first time, it was amazing because as Flavio mentioned, Canada, we don't really have an automotive design program. And those programs usually are set in stone if there's a car company's within that country. But we have industrial design program. But we were able to experience but being part of the automotive design industry just by going through this competition. So seeing from what we sketched and modeled through computer modeling and renderings and seeing it in the first time for the full-size vehicle was quite a good experience. This opened up doors for you.

You got a job with a Canadian company as an industrial designer, but you recently resigned, right? For sure, yes. With this opportunity, with this competition, we got quite a bit of opportunities. And I was actually able to work for two and a half years at a company called BRP. They design snowmobiles, off-road vehicles, quite a bit of an interesting transportation design company in Canada. But, yeah, I resigned recently because I want to try full pursuit for the car design industry. And your senses, I mean, those jobs just don't exist here in Canada right now. For the moment, yes.

For the car-related designs, not in Canada. And so what would your dream job be? Where would you want to end up? for myself right now anything related to any car design company will be perfect for me because that's the dream that's the reason i went into the design and then of course at the time there weren't automotive design program in canada so i chose industrial design and stuff but my dream job is anything related to car design because that's what got me interested in design what do you think of this idea of creating a canadian car do you think now is the opportunity to do that? Oh, well, it's always, always would have been good. Of course, now a lot of people might seem to

have noticed time for a car company for Canada, for sure. But of course, there will be an interesting viewpoint for economics and job-wise, but for my personal view as an educational point, it would be great to have a Canadian car company for sure. Like I said, without a Canadian car company, we don't really have a car design program that could kind of elevate from school. So with that, because there's a lot of Canadian students who actually are interested in car designs, but it's hard to get those experience. But if there's a company that's from Canada, it will definitely enhance those people's and talents to get into jobs later in the future.

Do you think Canadians would buy a car? I mean, whether it's your car, whether it's the arrow or something else, do you think Canadians would buy a car made? Canada? For sure, but of course it's not a simple answer because a car is one of the second major investment aside from your house. So of course, made in Canada has a great set value, but there's also needs to be reliability, marketing and design and engineering that all has to balance and play well together. But I think it's really interesting. When I asked you about what this car was, you didn't talk about those things first. You talked about Canadian values. You

talked about the value of the car. Why was that so important? Well, at the first, because the project free that we were received as a student was to make sure that this car can represent Canada. Of course, like I said, all the balance has to come together in different fields. But as a designer, we also have to make sure that design can stand out. There's a lot of car designs in the world right now. There's cars from Japan, USA, Korea, Germany and France. So they all have a distinct design characteristic. So our job as a student and as a designer was to kind of create the characteristic through the value of Canadians. Well, maybe if this project gets off the ground, someone like you would be lured back to help

design that car in the future. June 1, Kim, good to talk to you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Junwan Kim is an industrial designer. One of the designers of the first ever all-Canadian zero emission electric vehicle. He is in Korea. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.