- GM is closing the cold-weather testing facility it’s operated in Kapuskasing, Ontario for over 50 years
- The company says advanced in vehicle development have made the site “redundant”
- Kapuskasing’s mayor says winters in the town have been “unpredictable,” blaming global warming
General Motors is closing the Northern Ontario facility where it’s conducted cold-weather vehicle development research for the past 50 years, the automaker said late October. The Cold Weather Development Centre in Kapuskasing, Ontario was the only cold-weather durability testing site that GM operated in Canada, but improvements in “cold-weather testing capability” at the supplier and development stages has made “testing on full vehicles onsite […] redundant,” per a statement quoted by Automotive News.
Until this year, every GM vehicle destined for North American roads would be put through some (extremely cold) paces at the Kapuskasing test facility, typically some five to seven years ahead of its on-sale date. As of late, that included EVs like the GMC Hummer EV pickup and Cadillac Lyriq EV crossover.
Kapuskasing is situated some 800 km north of Toronto, and temperatures there average about -30 C in winter, making it an ideal location for real-world cold-weather testing. General Motors’ use of the facilities there for testing dates back to 1941, when the company needed to evaluate the vehicles it was building for the Canadian military. Passenger-car development started at what was then the Kapuskasing Proving Grounds in February 1973.
The site has grown from a modest 23 acres back then; to some 272 acres today, and includes features like a 3.6-kilometre test track, a 13-vehicle garage, and a decommissioned airport runway. Since 2015, General Motors invested CDN$16 million-plus into updating Kaspuskasing for EV testing, building an on-site battery lab and installing 21 Level 2 chargers and six state-of-the-art 400-kilowatt DC fast-chargers.
The site also played home to some 30 “cold cellblocks,” which act like two-car freezers designed to get test vehicles down to consistent frigid-cold temps, sometimes as low as -45 C.
Kapuskasing Mayor Dave Plourde told Automotive News that while he was shocked by the decision, he had to admit winter weather in the town had become “unpredictable” over the past few years. “If there’s something that I can blame it on,” he told News regarding the closure, “I certainly would use climate as a good excuse.”
General Motors isn’t the only automaker shrinking its testing footprint. Rival Stellantis also said late October that it was planning to sell off its Arizona Proving Grounds by the end of the year and pivot to using Toyota’s nearby testing facilities, which that automaker made available for others to use beginning in 2021. Stellantis’ sale of the 4,000-acre site, which it bought from Ford in 2007, for US$35 million, is strictly a cost-cutting measure, the company said.
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