Powering Heavy-Duty Innovation: How Edison Motors Builds Next-Gen Hybrid Trucks with Onshape

In Golden, British Columbia, a small team at Edison Motors is rethinking what it means to go electric. The company, which built Canada’s first electric-hybrid truck in 2023, designs and produces a wide variety of heavy-duty, hybrid-electric vocational vehicles. They specialize in trucks made for industries like logging, construction, and snow removal, where standard EV solutions currently fall short.

“Most electrification so far has focused on light-duty or highway vehicles,” says Jacob Lafond, Mechanical Design Lead at Edison Motors. “We’re focused on the harder stuff — the logging trucks, the snowplows, the off-road haulers — where electric power can actually have more impact.”

Instead of waiting for large OEMs to adapt to market needs, Edison set out to design their own powertrain, chassis, and cab from the ground up, combining electric motors with an onboard diesel generator to form a series-hybrid drivetrain. The result is a truck that can handle demanding job sites with high torque, low emissions, and minimal downtime.

Edison Motor’s Emcon Truck, designed in cloud-native Onshape CAD and PDM.

“You can drive to the job site, charge your batteries on the way, and then run fully electric all day,” says Lafond. “There’s no need to stop at a charger. As long as you have diesel, you’re operational.”

From Startup Headaches to Scalable Growth: Why Edison Switched to PTC Onshape

When Lafond joined Edison in 2024, its small team was designing early prototypes in SOLIDWORKS. But even with only three engineers, file-based CAD quickly became a bottleneck.

“We started running into issues right away,” Lafond recalls. “Sharing files, managing versions, working remotely; everything slowed us down. We could tell it would only get worse as we grew.”

After testing out cloud-native Onshape, the team quickly made the switch.

Edison Motors’ cloud-native Onshape model for the Emcon Truck shows the design’s version history, configurations, and assembly data at the click of a button.

“Now, our whole workflow lives in the cloud,” says Lafond. “We can design anywhere, review with mechanics in real time, and never worry about file management again.”

Edison’s mechanical team has since scaled to include six designers, with another four on the electrical side. Whether in the office, at a job site, or in class (for co-op students), everyone works from the same version-controlled environment in Onshape.

Modern CAD & PDM Tools for Designing Cutting-Edge Solutions

Edison’s trucks combine mechanical, electrical, and software systems all designed with Onshape’s robust automation and customization tools.

“Our electrical designers use Onshape’s wire harness custom feature to route wiring in 3D spaces,” Lafond explains. “They import an Excel-based schematic, connect the components, and Onshape automatically calculates wire lengths for manufacturing.”

That automation saves hours compared to their previous workflow and keeps the process integrated.

“If we had to export the model to another software for wiring, it would slow everything down. Instead, we do it all in one place,” he says.

Edison Motors’ first truck, Topsy, hauls logs on a jobsite. Designed in Onshape, it features a fully integrated powertrain with e-axles and a large battery bank.

On the mechanical side, the team relies heavily on Onshape’s sheet metal modeling to design battery boxes, brackets, and crossmembers for each vehicle.

“Most of our parts are laser-cut, bent, and welded assemblies,” Lafond says. “We can go from model to DXF export to fabrication in a day.”

The team also leverages Onshape’s built-in PDM to manage versioning changes as they scale.

“At first, we were hesitant to use branching because we weren’t familiar with it,” Lafond admits. “But now that our team’s bigger, it’s essential. Someone can work on a subsystem for a week, test it, and merge it without disrupting anyone else’s work.”

Zero IT, Maximum Collaboration

Because Onshape is cloud-native, Edison’s entire workflow runs without the IT burden of local installs or servers. “All we need are laptops and Wi-Fi,” Lafond says. “There’s no PDM setup, no VPN, no administrator needed.”

This allows for faster, clearer communication — closing the gap between engineers and the shop floor.

“Even our mechanics can pull up the 3D models on their phones to check parts or assemblies,” Lafond says. “That’s huge for communication.”

They hope to extend that agility to their growing supplier network.

A view of Edison Motors’ Topsy design in Onshape. They document the entire building and testing process on their YouTube channel, @EdisonMotors.

“Our goal is to have suppliers viewing our models directly in Onshape,” Lafond says. “Even if they don’t have a license, they can create a free account [with Onshape] and review designs before fabrication. That’ll be a big step forward.”

How Onshape Helps Scale Growth for a Cloud-Native Future

In addition to maintaining fiscal responsibility, the cost savings Onshape affords Edison are helping them scale sustainably.

“Onshape was significantly cheaper than SOLIDWORKS,” Lafond says. “Even as we add more people, the overall cost per user stays low. That makes it easier to scale.”

Edison Motors’ Topsy truck features a fully integrated powertrain with 280 KWh batteries and 500 KW of power. Topsy can handle demanding jobsites with high torque and low emissions.

He adds that new hires pick up Onshape “almost immediately.” Most of Edison’s designers are recent graduates, and many are familiar with cloud-native tools from day one. “It’s intuitive, like the Google Docs of CAD,” Lafond says. “There’s no downtime. You just share a folder, and they’re ready to go.”

Electrifying What Others Won’t

Edison Motors’ mission goes beyond building hybrid trucks. It’s about rethinking the economics and engineering of heavy-duty vehicles for the future. And for Lafond, tools like Onshape are key to making that mission a reality.

“We’re designing trucks that the big manufacturers aren’t touching,” he says. “To do that, we need to move fast, collaborate easily, and stay lean. Onshape helps us do all of that.”

With production expanding and new prototypes underway, Edison is proving that the future of electrification isn’t just on the highway; it’s on the job site.