by The University of New Brunswick graduate saw a gap in the transportation market, and now the 26-year-old is trying to fill it.
Sam Poirier graduated from UNB with a degree in mechanical engineering focusing on mechatronics, a combination of mechanics, electronics and computing. During his degree, he completed an internship in Germany and noticed the bans on gas and diesel vehicles, which affected around 13 million vehicles at the time.
He began to understand that the world is moving to electric transport.
“It’s happening now. It’s not happening in 10 to 15 years, it’s happening today, and there are going to be a lot of challenges in helping the world transition to sustainable electric transportation,” said Poirier. “So that’s where I started.”
New Brunswick’s Potential Motors develops technologies for e-vehicles for off-road customers.
This was the beginning of Potential Motors from Hanwell. The company’s founder and CEO NB Poirier said much of his team was involved in off-roading, but fitting trails to off-road vehicles wasn’t always easy.
What makes Adventure 1 unique?
Poirier said they combined the boom of off-road and van living to create an electric vehicle with off-road capabilities and the ability to sleep with everything a camper could need, including a full bed, pull-out kitchen and water. book.
Bill Lamey, vice president of engineering at Potential Motors, said it took them about a year and a half to get to the point where they have an Adventure 1 vehicle with a working “production-purpose” prototype. He said it has been a great effort from their small team.
Lamey said there are a few things that make Adventure 1 unique. Autonomous driving becomes more difficult in non-static environments, such as off-road situations, he said. So Adventure 1 has a “perception system”, which is a system of cameras and sensors that sees the terrain ahead and makes decisions about things like traction and stability.
“When you get an SUV, you don’t have that luxury [of stable conditions]. Everything changes dynamically every second you’re driving,” said Lamey. “So it’s a really big challenge to control the vehicles in these scenarios.”
The future of SUVs
Sheila Gonzalez, a software developer at Potential Motors, said that every part of the Adventure 1, from the sensors to the motors, is controlled by a single computer. So if they need to change a software parameter, they don’t need to recode the software, they can just connect to the computer remotely and change the values.
Gonzalez said one of the company’s goals is to eventually make the software available for other electric vehicles.
“We design it to be universal and scalable so that every other electric vehicle can really use it with, say, little effort.”
Lamey said he thinks this is the future of off-road vehicles, “but it’s also the future of on-road vehicles.” In the next decade, he expects all vehicles to run on these types of “smart” platforms.
Adventure 1, which is already available for pre-order, costs $136,600. While not everyone can afford the Adventure 1, Poirier believes it will set the stage for future versions that may be available to a wider audience.
As for the near future, Poirier is looking forward to showing the vehicle around North America, but also addresses the “hard road to production.”
Lamey said being in New Brunswick brings new challenges. With no major auto industry in the province, he said attracting talent has been a challenge. But they’ve been able to bring people in by offering a great company culture and exciting projects, he said.
“There aren’t many companies in the world that do projects like this, where you build a vehicle from the ground up for a specific purpose,” Lamey said.
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