Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you to our witnesses for appearing today.
I find your interventions, particularly some of your recommendations, to be very practical and very pragmatic. Of course the big issue if we're talking about light-duty vehicles is the expected sales point, if you will, for an automaker.
I suspect we're not at that critical point yet; otherwise, they'd be building these vehicles in big numbers. It costs on average anywhere in the range from $1 billion to $5 billion to develop a single light-duty vehicle in the auto industry. That's a huge amount of development cost, so there has to be an expected return.
The Canadian market for light-duty vehicle sales is just under two million units a year, and we're about 9% of the North American market. I'm not sure that if we change much here it's going to influence the OEMs' decision to produce light-duty vehicles for market sales. I think largely they'll be driven, as it's always been, by what's happening in the United States.
Having said that, you're recommending that we talk with the OEMs. I'm not sure of what we're hoping to obtain from them, because it will be a purely economic decision about whether they have a market for it or not.
Have you had discussion with any of the OEMs? Have they indicated any barrier other than whether they expect to get the return for their developmental cost?