Ontario to become the first province to test self-driving cars on public roads
The Ontario government served up a glimmer of optimism for 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 automatedvehicle technology 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.
“We don’t want to be a laggard in this regard,” Transportation Minister Steven Del Duca said.
“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.”
The Canadian 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 the turn of the century and only one has opened. Meanwhile, total auto industry employment has fallen by about onethird since 2001 and more job losses could be in the offing.
But Flavio Volpe, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association, said Canada has been one of the “early movers” in automated-vehicle technology. “There have been jurisdictions like Nevada and Michigan and California that have said, ‘Hey, you know what the future is? I’m going to allow these things on the road today so the product comes here,’? Volpe said in an interview.
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.
“It’s important to counter the narrative that the auto industry is a kind of old-age manufacturing industry, that Canada just has the labour-intensive assembly ( jobs),” said Yates, who is also vice-president academic at the University of Guelph.
“We have lots of capabilities in this sector which we need to build on.”
And there’s one other advantage that Ontario offers: winter.
It’s thought that one of the biggest challenges for self-driving cars will be teaching them to operate in the middle of a Canadian winter, when road signs could be covered in snow and there may be black ice lurking on the street.
“A lot of the testing right now for autonomous vehicles in colder conditions has to be done in Norway and random parts of Europe,” said Michael Skupien, co-founder and lead mechanical engineer at Varden Labs, a University of Waterloo-based developer of self-driving shuttles.
“Having laws like this in Ontario is quite exciting because it might allow these companies to bring some of the testing and work up to Ontario where we have this massive auto sector and potentially help employ people.”
This is the direction that the auto sector is headed in and we need to be at the leading edge of it.