YOUR NEXT SNOWMOBILE WILL BE A VOLT:

The estimated market for recreational power sports--snowmobiles, jet skis, and side-by-sides, or ATVs--is $40 billion. The impact of electrification on those segments is enormous from a climate standpoint. And the space is changing fast. The world's most dominant manufacturer, BRP Inc., which sells $1.8 billion worth of Ski-Doo snowmobiles and Sea-Doo jet skis each year (the two most polluting vehicle segments in this category), announced in March that it will spend $300 million to develop electric vehicles across all of its product lines over the next five years. BRP followed Minnesota-based Polaris, another of the four major snowmobile brands, which partnered with electric-power-train maker Zero Motorcycles in 2020 to do the same by 2025. In an interview with Axios after that announcement, Polaris CEO Scott Wine said, "I never thought I would invest in an electric snowmobile. I thought it was the dumbest idea ever."

He wasn't alone in that assessment. Since the first snowmobile was built in 1935 as a means of transportation, its piercing sound and exhaust fumes have been accepted side effects--the price of power, if you will. But while recreational sleds cost a few hundred dollars in the sixties, now they go for $15,000 and accelerate like rocket ships. More than 120,000 sleds are sold each year globally, including 94,000 in North America. Emissions standards that some consider too soft magnify their environmental impact.

Two-stroke snowmobiles, the more powerful of the two main designs (the other, a four-stroke, is slightly more environmentally friendly), are on average allowed to emit 105 times more carbon monoxide than a car. The average two-stroke limits for nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons are 843 times higher than for a car. Taiga cofounder and CEO Sam Bruneau calls it "startling" that two-strokes are still allowed to be mass produced.

Unlike automobiles, snowmobiles and jet skis aren't required to include a catalytic converter, which removes pollutants from emissions. (Side-by-sides contain a catalytic converter yet are still more polluting than cars.) Bruneau believes the emissions disparities reflect a misperception that snowmobiles aren't a big enough market to damage the atmosphere. Part of Taiga's mission is to improve air quality and reduce the machines' effects on snowpack in popular riding areas, including around ski resorts. "When you factor in the average between a two-stroke and four-stroke, electrifying one snowmobile is equivalent to taking 40 cars off the road," Bruneau tells me as we sit in his office, in front of a giant photo of a Taiga tester riding powder in Revelstoke, British Columbia.

While boy-genius-run startups are common in the tech world, motor sports are a different game. Taiga's founders were outsiders to the tight-knit "sledneck" community, which was both a pro and a con: they were able to see the potential of electric more clearly, but they also could be viewed as intruders. Bernatchez, a climber from Quebec City, went to robot science fairs as a kid and taught himself to code in high school. Hardware specialist Paul Achard grew up in Granby, Quebec, the son of IBM engineers. Bruneau's dad was a ski instructor at Mont Tremblant, and Bruneau learned to appreciate the quiet of backcountry skiing. The trio met at McGill University, in Montreal, where they teamed up to build 400-pound electric race cars as engineering students. "We just loved chasing performance," Bruneau says.

They couldn't run their cars in the winter, so they stuffed their power train in a snowmobile for the Society of Automotive Engineers' Clean Snowmobile Challenge, an annual competition for students to create more environmentally friendly designs. They won the zero-emissions category in 2013 and 2014. More importantly, after fielding inquiries from ski resorts and tour companies interested in purchasing electric snowmobiles, they realized no one was doing it commercially. "That was a lightbulb moment for us," Bruneau says.

Tweet   @brothersjudd