Heavy-vehicle sector driving innovation

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This article was published 26/10/2023 (709 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Even though battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell passenger vehicles have been designed and are increasingly being commercially produced, there’s plenty of research and development work still going on.

About 175 design staff, technicians and engineers from heavy vehicle and equipment manufacturers from Manitoba and across the country, along with academics working in the field, shared ideas and best practices at the third Heavy Vehicle and Equipment Technology conference, a two-day event this week at the Victoria Inn in Winnipeg.

The conference is part of a virtuous circle between the province’s Vehicle Technology Centre (VTC) and Red River College Polytechnic’s Vehicle Technology & Energy Centre, the co-organizers of the event.

The VTC works with the province’s vehicle and equipment manufacturers — a $1.5-billion industry in Manitoba — and RRC Polytechnic’s applied research team learns from them about what industry is working on these days and has the opportunity to collaborate and design courses that will train workers with skills it knows employers are going to need.

Thomas Small, the director of new product development at New Flyer, said about 50 per cent of the new bids the Winnipeg bus maker is winning now are for zero emission buses.

While production design has taken place over many years, the company will continue to innovate, he said.

“Yes, the production design may be set for this generation of battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell buses, but for the next generation, we will continue to be innovative and evolve,” he said.

For instance, among other things New Flyer is working on is broadband connectivity, automated driver assistance and other kinds of digital technology interconnections including cybersecurity, which is a big issue, he said.

“I think our electrical control engineering group is now bigger than our mechanical design group,” he said. “Electronics and control are a very big part of the vehicle.”

The opening session of the conference was with Salvador Llamas, the chief operating officer of the Alameda-Contra Costa Transit District (AC Transit) in Oakland, Calif., where much of its fleet has already converted to battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell buses.

Llamas said his transit authority is already working on contingency plans in the case of power outages or disruption in hydrogen fuel supply.

The kind of planning AC Transit is working on is likely what all transit authorities will eventually try to do, Small said.

“There’s going to be a balance between battery-electric and hydrogen fuel cell buses in transit authority fleets,” he said.

Ron Vanderwees, president and CEO of the VTC said that while technology does change quickly, designers are likely going to keep working on the current platforms to squeeze a few more kilometres out of a battery charge with changes to technologies, and squeeze out a few more kilometres from hydrogen fuel by figuring out how to put more hydrogen on the bus.

The industry is working in the context of a transition from diesel fuel-powered vehicles to electric power and figuring out ways to work around and adapt it to the legacy platforms.

RRC Polytechnic is working on creating courses that will be appropriate for the new designs and technologies. For instance, it has started a micro-credential course on the introduction to electric vehicles that diesel mechanics are taking.

But Vanderwees said it won’t be long before heavy-vehicle designers will forget about diesel engines and be working with a clean slate.

“Today they might be thinking, ‘We did this because the fuel tank was there or that structural element was always here 10-to-15 years ago’,” he said

“We will soon get to a vehicle that can’t even fit into the old diesel design. It will be optimized for hydrogen fuel cell or battery-electric or whatever the latest technology is.”

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca