Joël Houle: Ever since the day I turned 16, my entire life revolved around having access
to a car. I grew up actually outside a small town called Curran, Ontario,
population 400. Honestly, we were 10 kilometres in any direction from any form of restaurant,
any store — anything that’s entertaining for a teenager. My parents’ vehicle was really the key
to my social life, and now as an adult, my life still revolves around the car. I need it to
commute to and from work: I need it to bring the kids to music lessons or soccer practice:
and honestly, I need it to visit friends and family here and outside the city.
I’ve only really driven gas-powered vehicles. But with this worldwide push to reduce our
carbon footprint, I want to do my due diligence and really learn as much as I can about these
vehicles. I want to know, Are they really green? Are they safe? Are they reliable?
How do they charge? and all that stuff. I have this friend, his name is Yves Madore,
and he is a zero-emission vehicle expert at Natural Resources Canada. Hopefully,
he can tell us why these electric vehicles and these zero-emission vehicles are so great.
So let’s do it. Yves. How’s it going? Yves Madore: Very, very well. And you?
Joël: Very good. Thank you so much for helping
us out with this. Yves: My pleasure.
Joël: Okay. This is an electric vehicle? Yves: Yes, it’s a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle.
There’s a big battery in the back giving me electric-only range, and then there’s a
gas motor also inside that on longer trips can turn on or, when I run out of electric range,
can turn on and drive me the rest of the way. Joël: It’s like the best of both worlds?
Yves: Yes, exactly. Joël: Okay. This is a hybrid. There
are different types of electric vehicles, right? Yves: Yes. The first thing you’ll notice is the
green plate, which means I can drive on high-occupancy lanes,
even though I’d be a single occupant. Joël: And you can drive 150 in the fast lane.
Yves: [laughs] No, I’ll still get pulled over for that! Then on the side here, there’s the charging
port. This is where I can charge. That’s the big difference between a conventional hybrid
vehicle. Those vehicles have smaller batteries, and the batteries are there to help the gas motor.
Here, the batteries actually in this vehicle, in the plug-in hybrid, they’ll actually drive the
vehicle. Then the gas motor acts as a generator, and it’ll recharge the batteries and then
allow you to go further. Then there are fully EVs, so: much bigger battery, no gas motor, and a lot
longer range of electric-only. Joël: Okay. How does it feel
to drive an electric vehicle like this one? Yves: I think it feels just like a normal car,
only a lot quieter. But why don’t we take it for a spin and you tell me?
Joël: Are you actually going to let me drive your car?
Yves: Absolutely. I think you should. Joël: Really?
Yves: Yes. Joël: That’s awesome. You’re a brave man.
Yves: I’ve got insurance. Joël: That’s good to know.
Oh, wow — it’s nice and clean in here. Yves: Thanks. I like to take care of my toys.
Joël: That’s good. Yves: Okay. Foot on the break,
and we’re going to push the start button.
Joël: Okay. Yves: You can turn the
transmission dial to D for drive. Joël: Oh, it’s a dial.
Yves: Yes, it’s a little turning dial. Joël: Okay. Awesome. Let’s go.
Wow, it’s so quiet — it’s crazy! Yves: That’s the first thing that people really
catch onto, it’s so quiet, and there’s no vibration from the internal combustion engine
or anything like that. Joël: Whoa. Brakes!
Yves: Braking, it’ll take you about a minute to get used to,
and that’s just because most of the decelerating on this vehicle is done with the
regenerative braking. When you’re slowing down — when you’re coasting to decelerate,
as you’re pushing on the brake — then that energy is transformed to electricity and
is used to recharge the batteries. Joël: Okay.
Yves: Actually, one of the interesting things is once you come to a complete stop,
you get a rating on your braking. Joël: Wow.
Yves: 91% there was your breaking score. Joël: That’s an A+.
Yves: That’s an A+, but you’re going to decrease my stats a little bit.
Joël: Really?
Yves: What you want to do is coast as much as possible. Joël: Okay. Where do you rank right now?
Yves: I haven’t actually checked in a while. It’s one of these things when I get together with my
dad. I grew up a car guy. I grew up around cars. Not so long ago, it was, “Well, okay,
how quickly can this vehicle accelerate?” Now, we’re talking about something different. We’re
talking about our eco-braking score and how much range we’re able to get on our EVs and
everything else. That’s what I use the app for. Joël: I see. Well, you’ll be happy to know that
I just got 100% on that last one. Yves: That’s good.
Joël: There’s no way to go but down right now [laughs].
Yves: Or just maintain. Joël: 100% — come on, 100%! I’m already
competitive, and it’s been like a minute. Yves: It’s pretty fun. I like doing it.
Joël: For this vehicle, seeing as it’s a hybrid, how much do you get purely from electrical power?
Yves: This is a plug-in hybrid, pure electric. The EnerGuide rating range is 35 kilometres.
Now, that varies a lot, depending on your driving behavior, a little bit how you drive,
some impact depending on temperature and the use of climate. If it’s like minus 30 degrees,
and it’s really cold outside, I’m getting about 16 kilometres of electric-only range,
just because of the amount of electricity that it takes to keep the cabin warm. But in the summer,
I can extend that to about 50 kilometres, when I’m not using the batteries’ electricity to heat the
cabin. Now, the good news is with this electric car, I can set it so that the cabin is warm
by the time I leave the house in the morning. Joël: Really?
Yves: Yes. Then I can say, “Okay, 7:15 a.m. every morning. The cabin is at 21 degrees by the time
I get into the car.” That’s not depleting the battery’s range, because I’m plugged in at home.
Joël: Wow, okay — that’s a huge advantage. With the infrastructure that we have right now, could
we drive from Ottawa to, I don’t know, Victoria right now, where it’s actually much warmer than
it is now? Can we drive there on mostly electric? Yves: There’s a lot of stories online about people
who have done cross-country trips on electric vehicles. One of the government’s commitments
was to establish a coast-to-coast network of fast chargers. You’re seeing those pop up.
We also have a map on the Natural Resources Canada website that has all that, so you can plan your
trip: you can say, “Okay, I’m going from this destination to this destination.” You can see all
the charging stations in between that and plan your trip accordingly. So absolutely:
for long trips, for short trips, you drive these like you drive a normal car.
Joël: How does the hybrid look under the hood compared with an internal combustion engine?
Where’s the battery? How is this different? Yves: Why don’t we go visit our friends at
Transport Canada and pop the hood and look underneath maybe and show you some
batteries and what they look like? Joël: That sounds awesome. Let’s go.
Yves: Let’s do that. Joël: Okay. You have to
tell me where to go, though. Yves: Okay. Well, let’s see.
[music]
Joël: Well, this is a nice facility. Just so you know, that scratch was there before I got in….
Yves: So, you arrive home. Joël: Okay, we’re home.
Yves: Often what people do when they get home is they take their cell phone out,
and they charge it. Well, it’s just the same thing with this car. When you buy an EV it’ll come with
its own charger. This is what you call a Level 1 charger, because it uses just a standard wall
plug. We walk over, open up the charging port. This is a standard. We can go look at any of
these EVs here, and they’ll have a plug like this. Tesla is a bit different. But even with Tesla,
they have an adapter so that they can use these kinds of plugs. We plug it in here like this,
and then we’ll come to the wall here and plug it in. Then you get a green light saying that,
“Yes, the vehicle is charging.” Over on the side here, if you see the LEDs saying,
“Okay, yes, we’re charging now,” the more LED lights you see, the more fully charged it is.
Joël: If the car is parked in your driveway in your garage,
you can just take a look and see how…. Yves: You can take a look. You can open your app,
and it’ll tell you as well. On Level 1, it can take for this car five hours to
go from fully depleted to fully charged. Joël: Which is fine if you’re at home.
Yves: We’re at the Transport Canada facility, and they have some Level 2 chargers,
so essentially we can charge twice as fast. Right here on the wall, we’ve got the unit — you can
install one of these at your home. It’s not a big — just that size. We’ll plug this one
in now and basically charge in half the time, and then most of the charging is done at home
overnight. So you don’t even think about it, and then you don’t have to go to gas stations anymore.
Joël: That’s true, because you leave with a full charge every day.
Yves: You leave with a full charge every day. Joël: Okay. Now that we’re charging,
I’m really curious to see what’s under the hood or what’s different about an EV or a hybrid.
Yves: I think the first thing to start is the batteries. For this vehicle, the batteries are
in the trunk. You don’t really see much except that there’s a little less space in the trunk of
this vehicle than there is in a regular Fusion. But if we want to go to the front of the hood,
maybe I can show you what it looks like underneath there. It just opens up like a regular
hood. Anything that is orange — that’s the high-tension stuff. That’s important, because
if you’re a first responder — if ever you have to do something like an extraction or something like
that — they know not to touch these things. That’s the control module that takes care of
everything. It’s the one that does the planning. What are you going to use? How are you going to
use it? This is a plug-in again, a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle. So there is a gasoline motor,
and there’s an electric motor underneath, and then in between them there’s your transmission.
But otherwise, it looks just like a normal car. You don’t really notice any difference.
You still have your windshield washer fluid. Joël: That’s very important.
Yves: Everything else that you normally have when you open up a vehicle hood.
Joël: Okay. We’re at Transport Canada right now, right?
Yves: Yes. Our friends. Joël: This is a very big
garage. What is this place, really? Yves: Wwe can see over here we’ve
got a few electric vehicles. We’ve got the fuel cell electric vehicle.
Joël: Fuel cell, what does that mean? Yves: It means that, basically,
instead of charging batteries, essentially what that car does is it’s producing its
electricity on board with that fuel cell. It uses hydrogen to create electricity to
go into some batteries and then power the vehicle. Joël: So to refuel it, you just add more hydrogen.
Yves: Yes, exactly. More and more hydrogen fuelling stations
are coming online. There’s one in Quebec City right now. You just fill it up almost
like a normal vehicle. Joël: This is like very
brand new technology, right? Yves: The fuel cell has been
around for a long time, but for seeing vehicles on the road being tested, it is relatively new.
Joël: Hydrogen, is that safe? Yves: That’s a great question, and even
when it comes down to electric vehicles you’ve got big batteries in the back, are they safe and
everything, and the tank is very well constructed. It is very safe, and we can’t forget that,
hey — you know what? — every gasoline vehicle out there has a big tank with gasoline in it,
and it’s a plastic tank. Joël: Fair enough.
Yves: All these vehicles have passed crash testing and have
proven to be worthy for our roads in Canada. Joël: That’s good. That’s an EV, right?
Yves: That’s a full electric vehicle. Joël: I can’t help but notice it’s on a hoist.
Do you think our friends at Transport Canada would mind if we raise it up and see what happens?
Yves: I don’t think they’ll mind. Joël: Let’s see what happens.
[music]
Yves: You brought your steel-toed boots, right? Joël: Sure.
Yves: Okay. These are some really cool features that we’re going to see here
underneath the vehicle. Joël: Whoa.
Yves: You see how it’s all flat and covered here? Joël: Yes.
Yves: This is aerodynamics. You don’t have to leave things
open like a big exhaust system or something like that, where heat is an issue.
I wonder if we can look at it now. These coil springs are pretty normal, but so for my vehicle,
for example, the coil springs are a little bit thicker. And you’ll notice even this sway bar
here is a lot thicker on my car because the batteries are in the back. On this vehicle
the batteries must be along the flat so it distributes the weight a little bit better.
But you know we were talking about some of the differences. Depending on where the batteries are
might include some bigger suspension components. Joël: Interesting. Thank you so much, Yves.
Yves: Thank you. See you in Episode 2! Joël: Sounds good. If you’re watching
this on YouTube, check out the links in the description below. Do the usual, like subscribe;
leave a comment; and share your experiences about EVs, because I want to learn more
about electric vehicles. I’d like to thank our friends at Transport Canada for letting us
film in this great location. And make sure to subscribe so you can tune in for Episode 2.