Emission Impossible

The power goes out in your house. You should be sitting in the dark but, as soon as the blackout hits, your home stops siphoning power from the grid and immediately takes it from a funky-looking car parked in your garage. And that’s just one of the nifty things a newly developed zero-emission, four-person vehicle, known as the Kestrel, will be able to do.

The Kestrel is part of Project Eve, a Canadian consortium of companies that’s developing a line of eco-friendly vehicles. The project is co-founded by Motive Industries of Calgary, which is designing the interior and exterior of the car, as well as integrating all the mechanical components that are being built by other partners in the project. “We’re really trying to design a next-generation car,” says Nathan Armstrong, president of Motive Industries and vice-president of engineering for the Kestrel.

Among the Kestrel’s fancy features are a bio-composite body made from plant fibre, a paint-film finish that doesn’t ever need to be washed and a battery system that can feed power back into the electrical grid. “You can charge the car’s battery at night when prices are cheap, and use that power to run appliances in your home during the day when power is more expensive,” says Armstrong. “If the main grid goes down, you can also actually put the car’s power back into your house and provide up to 12 hours of backup power.”

The Kestrel prototype is being built in Alberta and the first models should be ready by this summer, at which time five to 20 vehicles will be given to research institutes and cities like Calgary, Vancouver and Toronto to test out. A few vehicles will also go to Transport Canada for crash testing and certification.
“The long-term goal is to create a line of vehicles for the Canadian market that are ideally suited for our climate,” says Armstrong.