Electric cars are in high demand in Quebec, and that means garages need to hire mechanics who know how to repair them.
But finding or training qualified mechanics can be challenging — the only course available to students in English is offered by the West Island Career Center, which is operated by the Lester B. Pearson School Board.
While the classroom looks like a typical garage, it’s equipped with many more computers than wrenches to help them learn about their future trade, given the design of electric vehicles.
“There are a lot fewer parts. It’s a lot simpler, but it’s a completely different animal,” said Cesar Brunet, the school’s hybrid-electric auto mechanics teacher.
For the most part, students have to rely on scanners to help them diagnose problems with the car.
“The scanner gets plugged in and then we get the information that the car is telling us. From there, we’re going to go in a direction,” explained teacher Mark Wyjad.
The computers in each vehicle communicate with each other in unique ways. The challenge for students is to learn how to identify where the breakdowns are occurring before they start to fix them.
For student Jean-Luc Parent, that’s what distinguishes electric vehicle repair from a usual mechanical car repair.
“It’s all computers. it’s all electrical, there’s no mechanical or anything, so you can’t just walk over to it and pull things out and change it,” Parent said.
“It’s more a process of diagnosing and then going and checking.” But that doesn’t mean they aren’t equipped to take on any kind of repair job.
All the students taking the course have already graduated from the career center’s regular auto mechanics program.
The additional electric program is 600 hours long and is aimed at giving rookie mechanics an edge when they enter the job market, though that market is rapidly changing.
Quebec plans to ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035, so Brunet thinks this type of training presents students with a big opportunity.
“There’s going to be a lot of shops that aren’t going to be able to ride out the wave and don’t want to adapt. They’re just going to say ‘it’s too complicated for me’,” he said, giving some of the “little guys” the chance to open their own shops.