Canada Opens Center for Automotive Innovation

The Canadian government’s National Research Council’ has opened a Manufacturing and Automotive Innovation Hub in London, Ontario. The hub is an open-space concept laboratory which is meant to be a collaborative workspace.

The facility which covers 75,000 square feet is part of the NRC’s Automotive and Surface Transportation Research Center.

The National Research Council described the hub as a one-of-a-kind research station where all players at levels of the automotive and manufacturing supply chain can work together with NRC specialists and Canada’s research ecosystem.

The hub comprises four expandable laboratories for flexible and confidential work, two vehicle bays with lifts and related automotive shop capabilities, a high crane bay which serves as a manufacturing space for scale-up and/or digital micro-factory workspace development, private office workspace, meeting areas and conference rooms.

The labs as well as the offices in the hub are available for use along with research, design and development specialists from NRC by manufacturers, integrators and equipment makers.

Collaborators can use the digital factory to visualize and develop advanced manufacturing processes. They can try out new technologies related to connected and autonomous vehicles, vehicle lightweighting and alternative propulsion/electrification in the automotive lab.

“Through this facility, we will provide technical solutions and apply them directly to our collaborators’ products and processes,” the NRC said in a statement.

The goal of setting up the hub was to help Canadian automotive manufacturers to adopt advanced manufacturing approaches, including mass customization, process industrialization and data-driven factory automation.

It also will be used to manufacture new materials and other new vehicle technologies.

The NRC said that it is working to bring companies, governments, universities and colleges on the same platform to collaborate on breakthrough projects. The organization also said in a statement that the use of the facility is meant to expedite the development of advanced transportation technologies such as connected/autonomous vehicles. The facility has been specifically designed to be flexible and modular, and will address the immediate needs of industry to launch projects quickly.