Edison Motors moving up north after failing to find suitable industrial land for expansion in the Interior

In the last two-and-a-half years, the company has outgrown the backyard shop it started in and is now looking to expand.

Chace Barber and Eric Little, founders and CEOs of Edison Motors, grew up Merritt.

“I think the logging industry makes sense for electric because you’re going uphill, empty, and you’re coming downhill loaded with the logs so you can recharge your batteries coming downhill,” Barber said.

“We noticed that none of the other electric truck manufacturers were building anything for the logging and the heavy vocational industry, so we thought if they weren’t going to build one for us, we would just build our own.”

That’s just what they did. With the help of others, the pair turned a 1962 logging truck into the prototype for Edison Motors.

According to the company, these Canadian-made trucks sell for about 25 per cent more than a standard diesel logging truck. Edison Motors believes its hybrid model would cost half the price in fuel.

Since launching, Edison Motors has expanded its project to other types of hybrid and fully eclectic vehicles, as well as received eight orders for hybrid trucks and started looking to expand its production in Merritt.

“I grew up in Merritt. I’ve been hauling logs in Merritt for years and years and years. I didn’t want to leave Merritt — like we started this company here. All the employees work here. My family lives here,” he said.

Barber says available land was few and far between and what they could find was out of their price range.

“It’s really unfortunate. Right now we are sort of at our municipal boundary. We’ve hit the edges of our boundaries, right? We do have some landowners-developers who are looking to sell some land or lease land, but we don’t have any more space to develop industrial areas,” explained Merritt CAO Cynthia White. “We can’t zone our industrial areas anymore because we’re at the edges of the municipal boundary.”

Instead, the company is in the process of setting up shop in Terrace, B.C.

“It was actually the old Hayes truck factory where they used to do the rig up on their logging trucks,” Barber said. “We’re just going through the zoning process on that and hopefully that goes through because that’s the only piece of property we could find in all of B.C.”

To operate the new facility, Barber says they will be looking to fill 40-to-50 jobs.

If all goes as planned, production at the new site will begin this summer.