Automotive News Canada - June 2017 - v2 - 20

* JUNE 2017

With Allard for a last name, who better to restart the brand?
By MICHAEL GOETZ
TORONTO CORRESPONDENT

ROGER ALLARD

REVIVING A LEGENDARY MARQUE
"I'VE SAID MANY TIMES, IF MY
name was Smith, I would have never
started this project."
But his surname is Allard, and it
was just one more
thing that ultimately propelled this
Montreal-based
entrepreneur to
successfully revive
the storied British
marque Allard.
Sydney Allard
(no relation) founded his low-volume
car company in
1945. With lightweight chassis and large
American V-8 engines, Allards became
known for their sporting performance.
Fewer than 2,000 were produced before
the company folded in 1958.
As a car enthusiast, Roger Allard
noted the sudden demand and interest
in modern cars and motorcycles with
retro styling.

He sensed there were "frustrated car
lovers out there who wanted to see and
drive something else."
A bit later he became aware of the
car bearing his name while on a trip
to England, and the ball was put in
motion. He created Allard Motor Works
and set about re-creating the legend.
So far, 16 examples of the "new"
Allard J2X have been built, in facilities in Montreal and New York state.
Production of the next and updated
series of the car will shift to California.
Allard said the car is a properly engineered-and-built sports car that's miles
above "kit car" standards. He said he
needed to go "high end" or not all.

TIM SHERSTYUK

CHANGING HOW BATTERIES CHARGE
FUTURE FAST-CHARGE-BATTERY
technology could result from a fatherson basement project.
Tim Sherstyuk and his father, Nick,
share a love of tinkering and experimentation, and did a lot of it in the basement
"lab" of the family home. "We've always
done geeky projects together," says the
younger Sherstyuk.
One such project was a prototype
of what would eventually be called the

Tim Sherstyuk did a lot
of tinkering at home
with his father before
developing technology
that aids fast charging
of batteries.

Active Battery Management System
(ActiveBMS).
The pair founded their own company, GBatteries, to take it to market.
"Our tech enables batteries to
charge extremely fast, and still retain
long life," Sherstyuk says, adding that
fast charging typically degrades a battery, but ActiveBMS stifles lithium-ion
degradation by continuously adapting
bursts of energy during the charging
process, and does so for each individual battery cell.
All this can be done without altering
how the battery is manufactured.
Fast charging will have a huge
impact for EVs. "Our mission is to
enable EVs to replace internal-combustion vehicles. We believe we can
help make that happen by making cars
charge as quickly as it takes to fill
up a tank of gas. We can pretty much
already do that today ... our next step
is to commercialize the tech with an
OEM partner," Sherstyuk says.

SHIVA BHARDWAJ

LEVERAGING DATA TO CHANGE
THE REPAIR INDUSTRY

Roger Allard with the new
Allard XJ2, one of the first 16 examples.
(PHOTO: ALLARD MOTOR WORKS)

PEOPLE TAKE THEIR VEHICLES IN
for service when they hear from service
providers, by following broad service
guidelines and when something eventually breaks.
Shiva Bhardwaj wants to change all
that.

canadianblackbook.com

The end game of his brainchild,
Pitstop Connect, is to empower vehicle
owners by letting them know through
their mobile devices when a part could
be about to fail, when their vehicle is
affected by a recall or service bulletin,
and when they should go in for service based on their actual driving and
what's happening inside their vehicles.
It sounds like magic, but it's what is
achievable now though telematics and
artificial intelligence, says Bhardwaj.
The electrical engineering graduate from the University of Waterloo
spent some time in
Silicon Valley before
he decided to take the
more entrepreneurial
and challenging path
of founding Pitstop,
now based in the
Greater Toronto Area
with 12 full-time and
five part-time employees. He also grew up
Shiva
Bhardwaj's
in the repair indusPitstop
try. His father still
Connect softoperates GB Autos in
ware uses
Etobicoke, Ont.
data from
Bhardwaj said the
vehicles to let
industry has "tons of
owners know
data" it doesn't know
when service
what to do with. "I
is needed.
felt I had the opportunity to make software intelligent, based
on this info and data set."
Dealers install the device in a vehicle's diagnostic port. Pitstop collects
and aggregates data, but also ultimately analyses it through sophisticated
algorithms for each make and model to
deliver precise service recommendations and part-failure tendencies.
Currently, he said, about 2,000 vehicles and several Ontario dealers are on
the Pitstop platform. - ANC

Judge fines CarGurus $305,000
for copyright infringement
By ERIC FREEDMAN
LEGAL CORRESPONDENT

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AN ONTARIO JUSTICE HAS
ordered a digital marketing
company to pay $305,064 for
infringing on a competitor's
copyright on 152,532 photographs. CarGurus Inc.
must pay the damages - equivalent to $2
per photo - to Trader
Corp., Justice Barbara
Conway ruled.
CarGurus launched
its Canadian website
in May 2015 by "scraping" photos from dealerships' websites and
posting them on its own site.
The practice is common in the
United States.
But the photos in question
had been taken for dealerships
by Trader-paid photographers.
Trader sued when it learned
that CarGurus was using its
photos without a syndication
agreement. After the copyright
suit began, CarGurus took down
more than one million photos.
Conway rejected CarGurus'
argument that photos taken by
Trader's employees and contractors aren't protected by
copyright and found that the
infringement took place when
CarGurus posted them.

Trader sought almost
$100 million in damages, but
Conway said that amount
"would be grossly out of proportion to the infringement."

TECH WAS 'DRIVEN BY GREED'
A TECHNICIAN FIRED FOR
falsely reporting that the brake
pads of a car needed replacing is not
entitled to termination and severance
pay, Ontario Superior
Court Justice Mario
Faieta has ruled. The
judge rejected a claim
against Mercedes-Benz
Burlington, where
Peter Cummings worked for
more than nine years before his
January 2015 discharge.
Cummings intentionally
misrepresented to a service
adviser that a brake job was
necessary although he hadn't
conducted a full inspection.
"The evidence makes it clear
that Cummings' actions were
driven by greed," Faieta wrote,
because Cummings "had completed two unprofitable recall
services that same day" and
wanted "to proceed with a
lucrative brake replacement
service." This usually took 1.5
hours although customers were
billed for four hours of labour.
- ANC

http://www.canadianblackbook.com http://www.canadianblackbook.com/cbbconnect-english http://www.canadianblackbook.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Automotive News Canada - June 2017 - v2