Americans celebrated when the Ford GT won the 24-hour race at Le Mans this month, but make no mistake – that was a Canadian car first over the line.
True to form, we stood back and let the United States take the glory with its Detroit engines, but Multimatic in Markham, Ont., built the car, everything but the powertrain and the interior. Multimatic’s Canadian engineers build all the road-going GTs, too, and Aston Martin One-77s and a bunch of other expensive stuff, not to mention humdrum components on everyday vehicles such as hinges and shock absorbers.
Our companies are good at this sort of thing, and there’s probably something Canadian in every car sold. Magna International is the largest of them, and it has infiltrated the global auto industry as successfully as we’ve taken over Hollywood and the music business.
But an entire car, with Canadians openly taking credit? There aren’t so many.
We’re still apologizing for the Bricklin, after all, built in the 1970s with $23-million of New Brunswick taxpayers’ money. Smooth-talking American Malcolm Bricklin, fresh from his dubious success of importing Subarus to North America, persuaded then-premier Richard Hatfield to front the cash in exchange for opening two assembly plants.
It was supposed to be a “performance safety vehicle” but the gullwing-door, fibreglass sports car was awful: too heavy, too unreliable, too underpowered and far too expensive. Fewer than 3,000 were built in 1974 and 1975, and the less said about it here, the better.
There have been other attempts to build sexy Canadian sports cars. Bricklin should have learned a lesson from the Manic GT of 1971, a two-seater made in Quebec that also had investment funding from the provincial and federal governments. It was based on the Renault 10 but with a fibreglass body, and it relied on engines and components from Renault in France. The supply was unreliable, though, and the company closed shop within the year. Probably a good thing: The Manic made 65 horsepower and rusted quickly.
HTT’s Plethore, also from Quebec, is far more powerful, and far more expensive. It was seen on CBC’s Dragons’ Den in 2011, and two of the dragons offered funding that later fell through. Its Corvette-based engine makes 750 horsepower and the car sells for more than $300,000. It stands out for its three-person seating: The driver sits in the centre and there’s a passenger seat to each side, slightly behind. We can’t vouch for it, though. We don’t know anyone who’s ever driven one.
Canada has a long history of making exclusive and expensive vehicles. In the earliest days of driving, cars were often built by companies that already made horse-drawn carriages, such as the Brockville Atlas Automobile Company. It built and sold about 300 of its unremarkable $2,000 cars, but was put out of business by the First World War. An offshoot company in Brockville, Ont., Briscoe, built more affordable – but no more reliable – cars until 1922.
The grandest, though, was McLaughlin-Buick. Its cars were considered the automobiles of royalty and for good reason: Future kings Edward and George toured Canada in a convertible in 1927, and King Edward later ordered a limousine for himself and Wallis Simpson. He drove in a McLaughlin-Buick to visit Britain’s prime minister in 1936 to announce his abdication, then took the car into exile with him in France.
The company’s fortunes were similar: McLaughlin-Buick had merged with Chevrolet to become a brand of General Motors, but when automobile production paused and then resumed after the Second World War, it became just Buick.
Now, several large auto makers assemble cars in Canada, all in Ontario. GM, Ford and Fiat-Chrysler all have plants near Toronto; Honda has a massive plant in Alliston that builds the CR-V and the Civic, Canada’s best-selling car; Toyota has plants in Cambridge and Woodstock that build the popular RAV4 and Lexus RX350.
For a while, it seemed the future might belong to Toronto’s Zenn Motor Company, which built its all-electric micro-car at a plant in Quebec. The Canadian government could not provide enough subsidies to keep it in business and fewer than 500 cars were made before production ended in 2009.
Perhaps the most successful all-Canadian companies, though, also seem the least Canadian. Both INKAS of Toronto and Terradyne of Newmarket, Ont., sell armoured vehicles to buyers around the world.
They range from bank delivery trucks to bulletproof sedans and even tactical support vehicles. They’re the choice of leaders and would-be leaders in the world’s most dangerous places and almost all are shipped straight out of Canada as soon as they’re made. Just as they should be. We’re far too nice for them to be needed here.