Transport committee  What I want to express here is that I think there are still lots of places for batteries to be used sensibly in vehicles. It's mainly in the hybrid area. In the electric vehicles right now, batteries can be used, of course, but there needs to be additional development in order to be broadly applied.

Transport committee  That's an interesting question. Today, electronic vehicles struggle to get to around the 100-kilometre range. What we've seen as we do work on batteries is that with lithium-ion technology, nickel metal hydride, lead acid, and so on—but nickel metal hydride is the premium one right now—as you add energy into a battery, because to get more range you need to have more energy in a given space, you challenge the safety aspect of the battery.

Transport committee  There's no horizon, as far as I know, for an electric car that goes 500 kilometres. For electric cars as a high volume, it would be, in my opinion, greater than, let's say, 10 years, probably greater than 15 years. In the near and medium term, probably just a few per cent of the vehicles will be electric cars.

Transport committee  What I think regarding investment in electric vehicles is that it's good to look to the future, because if we're going to get there one day we have to make some investment. It's really a bit of a calculated risk, because we don't know when we're going to get to having broad-based, high-volume, across-the-board electric vehicles.

Transport committee  First on the question about the ratio of filling stations, I think part of the challenge in Canada is that we have such a vast land. In Toronto, for example, I think they have one filling station. That puts it into perspective. If you own a vehicle and are on one side of Toronto but have to drive halfway across to fill up, and then go home, it makes no sense, does it?

Transport committee  I do. I think it is definitely part of the resolution. It's a way to deploy filling stations, because even if we start to put them at corner gas stations or whatever, they won't satisfy everybody's need, and there will be people who want a natural gas vehicle who will say that the station is still too far away for them.

Transport committee  To my knowledge, there are a number of deployed home filling stations today, and I believe they are safe. I think that if there are issues, there are ways to deal with them. For example, if there are issues—and I haven't done a deep dive on the safety with respect to these, other than to know that they're deployed already—you could put the station on the outside of the house and have the car in the driveway, rather than put it in the garage, if there's some issue about gas collecting, or something like that.

Transport committee  I'd like to get that information for you. Should I send it in to you?

Transport committee  There are a few public examples out there. GM has had some cars coming out that look like futuristic bubbles and that sort of thing. I don't think these vehicles will look quite like that or like Jetson-style vehicles, but there is a class of vehicle that is being talked about a lot and that is probably going to come out in the next couple of years, which has a pedelec-type of drive that is 300 watt-hours.

Transport committee  I want to make sure, because when you put a bubble around something and have heating inside and maybe windshield wipers.... If it's going to be treated as a bicycle, that's great. The other area that I would like to have—

Transport committee  Yes, that's true for those. The thought is: how long does it take to put legislation through for something that is this different, and when should we start? If Magna or GM or some other company does developments on these types of vehicles and the vehicles are ready to go, how long does it take to get legislation through?

Transport committee  Yes, we want to participate.

Transport committee  Natural gas on the short and medium term has a much bigger potential to be broadly applied. So electric cars will see a small percentage of the vehicles—a very small percent—and natural gas can potentially be a larger percent and have a bigger impact.

Transport committee  Magna today does natural gas, but only at prototype level, such as natural gas fuel tanks. We've done a natural gas vehicle. We can do the integration. We can do the valving and plumbing and so on. So we know how to get involved with it. We believe it's a big part of the future, so we want to participate.

Transport committee  Decoma does trim. We have a power train group that does power train. We have Magna Steyr. Most of our development activity was done at Magna Steyr.