Canadian electric mobility history

[CanAutoMuseum]

Hello! I represent the Canadian Automotive Museum in Oshawa, Ontario. We're building research files on the history of electric vehicle use in Canada, especially electric bikes, scooters and motorcycles. We have a great deal of material on electrics in Canada in the early 20th century, and from the last 20 years, but almost nothing in the interim period between 1920 and 2000, or thereabouts.

So, we're looking for peoples' personal stories- did you build an e-bike from a kit? Were you the first adopter of electric mobility technology in your community long before it was popular? Did you work for an early Canadian electric vehicle startup? We're on the hunt for documents, photographs, video, recollections and anything else that can help us build a research file on this fairly poorly-documented part of Canadian vehicle history.

 

[amberwolf]

You may want to start by looking thru the many posts by various canadians on their builds and adventures over the last almost-couple of decades here on the forum, as they may include info on earlier builds, etc.

The search on the newer Xenforo forum isn't very good yet, but the archived version of old posts here:

ES 1.0 Graveyard - Search

works well enough for this, if you use search terms like Canad* and various locations in Canada, regions or cities, etc., for those that didn't state canada or canadian, etc. It'll at least get you started, because it's likely that almost no one that is actually from the early era is still posting on the forum, so you probably won't get much in the way of "live" history, and will have to research archival material instead. Most of the builds here happened after the time period you're looking for because the forum didn't start till after that, but some people did document earlier builds.

You can also use what you find about the various Canadians posting around the forum to try contacting them via whatever means they have in their profiles and/or posts.

Some possible searches, then go to the last page of results for the oldest stuff, which may have stuff that you're looking for

ES 1.0 Graveyard - Information

ES 1.0 Graveyard - Information

ES 1.0 Graveyard - Information

etc.

You may also want to contact VEVA to see if they have archival material, or contact info for members that built things back then.

EVAlbum is also another good research tool.

 

[CanAutoMuseum]

Thanks for the details, I'll do some digging!

 

[Chalo]

The good folks at Grin Technologies in Vancouver BC have been messing with e-bikes for a long time, and probably know what the state of the art was at the time they started messing.