Chace Barber (CEO), Eric Little (Co-Founder) and Theron Danger (Director) come across a broken down Electric Kenworth on the way to get work visas in Vancouver.
On Rout to the Visa office for an overseas Electric Truck work trip, we came across our first ever Kenworth Electric truck, broken down on the side of the highway. Naturally we stopped to investigate and managed to ask the delivery driver some questions.
Who We Are:
Edison Motors is a privately owned Canadian Clean Technology Company That Manufactures Electric Semi Trucks.
Dec 2021: Edison Motors was announced to the public
July 2022: Edison built North America’s first electric logging truck.
Oct 2022: Edison completed prototype testing
Nov 2022: Edison Motors began building their first production truck: an Edison L750
Edison Motors aims to produce Electric & Hybrid Vocational Trucks & EV Conversion Kits that deliver fuel savings without compromise.
Edison Motors was founded by Chace Barber and Eric Little who entered their business partnership in 2016 after graduating university and starting a trucking company with a 1969 Kenworth 5 axle Logging Truck (Old Blue). They began hauling logs in Merritt, BC. moved to hauling mining equipment into the Yukon and then expanded to moving drilling rigs in Alberta before returning back to BC Logging.
The business grew, more trucks were added and due to the frustration in serviceability of newer trucks the partners started rebuilding older trucks from the frame rails up to use in their own trucking operation instead of buying new truck. The business grew and expanded to hauling and installing power generation systems. In 2019 this added business aspect and growth to taking on the role of engineering and designing off-grid solar hybrid power systems. After their first successful project design and construction of a first nations community in northern BC Canada, Eric and Chace started to engineering process of a diesel-electric semi truck using the same principles.
After reserving a Tesla semi in 2017 and not receiving the truck for 4 years, in 2021 they decided to start building their own electric trucks because that was quicker than waiting for the Tesla delivery and resulted in designing of a more robust truck tailored to the logging and heavy vocational industries their trucking company operated in.
The Edison Truck is the result of a trucking company who remanufactured classic logging trucks with their engineering expertise of off-grid hybrid power systems. It is the aim of Edison Team to have the reliability and serviceability of a classic semi with the efficiency, power, and emissions standards of an electric truck.
Building The Truck Of The Future With The Quality Of The Past.
We only want to sell you the truck once.
Much like the Pacific trucks of the 1960’s and 1970’s. The Edison trucks are designed to be able to last, we understand the more uptime the truck sees and the longer it’s service life the better the Return on Investment is in the truck.
This is Edison Motors goal and philosophy, build the futures electric truck to run efficient as possible while being as simple to maintain as possible.
We are truckers, building truck, for truckers.
We let the engineers decided what components the truck needs for the electrical side, then we have experienced mechanics tell us what parts and being used and where those parts are going.
Our mechanics are use to working on logging trucks that are broken down in the middle of the bush, they know they’re the ones who will have to go repair them. We believe that nobody is better are make sure the truck is reliable and easy to fix as the ones who have to lay in snow at -40’ below or in spring mud.
Don’t kid yourself, these are the most efficient & modern trucks you can possible buy on the market today, but they’re made to be fixed in the bush. Our truck is high tech so your shop doesn’t have to be.
When your Edison Truck is delivered you can be sure you won’t need to go truck shopping again until you want to expand the fleet
In The Shop
It’s a fact in the vocational world that trucks are going to break-down. Off-road heavy hauling and logging in Canada beats up equipment. Edison plans for this by engineering our parts and equipment to make them as easy to service as possible for your mechanics.
Edison has a multi-layer process to achieve this goal:
* The first step is early involvement of mechanics into the design process, making sure experienced mechanics look at the design for serviceability
* Using commonly sourced parts, we try wherever possible to limit any custom built parts and opt for the common aftermarket parts companies use. This makes sure when something breaks you can go into any parts store and have the piece you need to get back on the road
* no fault codes, if there is a fault our computer will tell you exact what the check engine light means
