Ontario offers up its public roads for testing of self-driving vehicles
TORONTO The Ontario government served up a glimmer of optimism to Canada’s waning auto industry Tuesday, announcing it will become the first province to allow the testing of self-driving cars on public roads.
Beginning Jan. 1, Ontario will allow manufacturers, suppliers and tech companies to test automated-vehicle technologies on its roads, as long as there is someone in the driver’s seat who can take over if something goes wrong.
There are approximately 100 companies and institutions in Ontario involved in the connected- and automated-vehicle industry, but they currently have to go stateside or overseas if they want to test new self-driving technology in real-world situations.
“We don’t want to be a laggard in this regard,” Transportation Minister Steven Del Duca said in an interview.
“This is the direction that the auto sector is headed in and we need to be at the leading edge of it so that we can attract those jobs and that investment.”
Canada’s auto industry, based primarily in southern Ontario, has been struggling to retain jobs and investment as production increasingly migrates to low-cost jurisdictions like Mexico. The Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, announced last week, has only heightened fears that the sector will be unable to compete on the global stage.
Five Canadian assembly plants have closed since 2000 and only one has opened. Meanwhile, total auto industry employment has fallen by about one-third since 2001 and more job losses could be in the offing as the future of many remaining plants is murky.
But Flavio Volpe, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, said Canada has been one of the “early movers” in automated-vehicle technology, and Tuesday’s announcement “was a very critical next step in staying in the lead.”
Huge players such as Magna International Inc. are developing autonomous-driving technologies, but there are also small tech companies that could benefit from the ability to test these vehicles on public roads, said Charlotte Yates, lead researcher at the Canadian Automotive Policy Partnership.
“We have lots of capabilities in this sector which we need to build on,” said Yates, vice-president academic at the University of Guelph.