Why Doesn`t Canada Have a Car Company

You probably consider hundreds of millions of dollars, if not billions of dollars, to establish the company. Tesla Motors still hasn`t had a profitable year. Why doesn`t Canada have its own company or auto industry? Remember, Canada already has an auto industry – Chrysler, Ford, GM, Honda and Toyota all have plants in Canada. They employ not only many assembly line workers, but an entire industry of suppliers and engineers. Try to think of something more disgusting and difficult than starting a car business. Some Canadians owned vehicles at the turn of the 20th century, including an electric vehicle handmade in 1893 for a Toronto lawyer that would have been the country`s first battery-powered car. (Because they didn`t need to be maneuvered, electric cars were popular until the automatic gasoline engine starter was invented.) By 1903, small Canadian companies were building mass-produced cars such as the LeRoy, Queen and Redpath. It`s prohibitive to really start a car business from scratch. You pretty much have to piggyback on someone else. John DeLorean tried and was blocked by the industry at every turn – and if anyone could have done it, it was him. U.S.

automakers have plants in Canada that produce about the same amount of U.S. cars as those purchased in Canada. These companies are essentially North American car manufacturers. I understand that we make cars for other companies, so I think we might be able to work for ourselves in a Canadian company. So far, Canadians have received key investment pledges, including Ford`s $2 billion announcement to build up to five electric vehicles at its Oakville Assembly Plant starting in 2024 (with $500 million in funding from the Canadian government) and a commitment from Stellantis (formerly Chrysler) to build electric vehicles in Windsor by 2025. That means that there is already a kind of brain drain to these companies, people who could start an auto business in Canada; Any employable person in this industry is probably already associated with companies primarily based in the United States and Japan. While some automakers produce vehicles in Canadian plants, all are subsidiaries of companies based outside the country. Currently, no mainstream Canadian automaker manufactures cars. But we used to do it, and we were doing some pretty cool things when we did it. Bonus question: What does it take to start an automotive business from scratch in Canada? What could have been our first vehicle is as old as the country itself. Henry Seth Taylor, a watchmaker in Quebec, built a steam buggy in 1867. He couldn`t interest buyers, and after crushing it – despite all the work he put into it, he never added brakes – he was hidden in a barn and forgotten.

But after the creation of the first modern gasoline-powered car in Germany almost two decades later, everyone wanted to participate, including us. Because there is no need. “My country should have one” is not a very good business case. It would be expensive to build one, to build the industrial base, to design and build the product, to market it, to compete with other brands, and it would all be more expensive because there are no economies of scale. With the threat of protectionist measures in the U.S. aimed at keeping U.S. investment in electric vehicles in the country, a look back at how Canadians adapted economically to secure auto investment shows how a peripheral economy gained a major auto sector — and how it could sustain it in an electrified future. Tesla is doing a few things to get around these problems, but they are not without danger. 1. You sell directly rather than through dealers. Of course, there are a lot of dealers, and they see this as a threat, and in some states they have managed to block or restrict Tesla with varying degrees of success. 2.

They invest a lot of money in marketing a product that has such a small customer base because of its cost. They essentially take a loss for ten years to stay afloat long enough to have a consumer product. So why haven`t more Canadian automakers switched to Apple-Store-like outlets? The companies we contacted did not respond or declined to comment. Postmedia is committed to maintaining a lively but civic discussion forum and encourages all readers to share their opinions on our articles. It may take up to an hour for comments to be moderated before they appear on the website. We ask that you keep your comments relevant and respectful. We`ve enabled email notifications: you`ll now receive an email when you receive a response to your comment, a comment thread you`re following is updated, or a user you follow comments comments. For more information and details on how to adjust your email preferences, see our Community Guidelines.

Note: Before Tesla, Chrysler was the last “successful” automaker in North America in 1925. Car manufacturers are similar to cable companies in that in some cases they even have a monopoly on their own product, so no one else is noisy to join their market section. There were a few other blips on our car carrier. Studebaker`s subsidiary plant in Hamilton, Ontario, produced cars for two years after the company went bankrupt and closed in Indiana in 1964. Luxury car manufacturer Packard briefly built cars in Windsor in the 1930s. Volvo assembled dismantling units in Sweden, Nova Scotia for more than three decades, while Hyundai had a short-lived plant in Quebec. But perhaps most striking is the Bricklin, a sports car with gullwing doors and plastic body, built by American entrepreneur Malcolm Bricklin after convincing the New Brunswick government to finance his factories there. Canadians could not buy them because Bricklin sold them all to his American distribution company for less than what it cost to build. Futuristic cars faced manufacturing problems, and the province finally came to a halt in 1975 after gobbling $23 million into the Boondoggle. First of all, before you can sell a product, you have to invest an absurd amount of capital to buy a factory, figure out how to design a car and all its parts, build a prototype in order to raise a lot more money, get a much larger factory and hire thousands of people and inject several million dollars into marketing.

to tell the world that your business exists. And you probably have to be incredibly wealthy and risk tolerant yourself, as very few people are crazy enough to invest money in a startup car company. The factory could not make cars quickly enough, so it produced only 2,854 cars before the company went bankrupt and owed the New Brunswick government $23 million. Another thing that could have been a cause for the car`s disappearance was that it didn`t have a lighter or ashtray installed because billionaire Malcolm Bricklin, as a non-smoker, thought it was dangerous to smoke and drive. Secondly, to be profitable, you need to sell in a high volume. Cars are too expensive to manufacture and margins are too low to sell only a few a year. For this to be a good idea, you need to create not only a fantastic car, but also a car that a lot of people want to buy. We have auto factories that make cars for other companies and a lot of natural resources that we can harness to put in our own cars, and I`m sure a lot of smart, creative engineers live in Canada. Canada doesn`t have laws prohibiting automakers from opening their own stores, Compton says. Tesla and Mercedes Benz have factory outlets, he says. If you have any questions about driving or maintaining the vehicle, please contact our experts at globedrive@globeandmail.com. The diagram does not say that.

It is explicitly limited to Ford, GM, Chrysler and Tesla.