STL pursues eco-commitment, with new ‘CLIC’ car service

The Société de Transport de Laval entered a new phase in its pursuit of environmental sustainability earlier this week, with the launch of an experimental car sharing service that will be making one of North America’s first mass marketed hybrid-electric vehicles, the Chevrolet Volt, accessible over the coming months to a few select residents.

On Oct. 17, officials with the STL, the City of Laval, the Agence métropolitaine de transport, the Quebec transport ministry, Hydro Quebec and GM Canada gathered at Laval’s Montmorency public transit terminal for the official unveiling of CLIC, which is billed as the first electrified car-share service in Quebec.
“This new kind of car-sharing allows Laval to increase the access to an attractive selection of transportation modes which respect the environment, and which complement initiatives already put into place to improve our strategy for dealing with greenhouse gas emissions,” said Laval city councillor Jean-Jacques Beldié, who chairs the STL board.
As part of the CLIC program, teams of four people each, all of whom live in the same neighbourhood and have similar work schedules, have been formed to test drive a total of 10 Chevrolet Volts. The cars are docked to special charging stations at the Montmorency and Cartier terminals, as well as at the AMT station in Ste-Dorothée.
The users, who are allowed to log up to 200 kilometres of personal driving per month in the cars, will be helping to determine the efficiency of the vehicles, compared to trips taken by other means of public transit powered by electricity, such as the Deux-Montagnes commuter train and the Metro. Given the Volt’s recent introduction on the car market, they don’t come cheap – $43,500 each – a hefty price when you consider they’re limited to a maximum range of 80 kilometres running only on electricity.
It takes 10 hours to recharge the car using 120V household current, or four hours with the special 240V docking stations. In its promotional brochure for the Volt, Chevrolet boasts that the car’s charging capability is an improvement over the seven hours it takes to re-charge Nissan’s hybrid-electric offering, the Leaf.
On the road, when the Volts run out of electric power, a conventional 1.4-litre gasoline engine kicks in. Cost for the entire project is $680,000, of which GM paid $100,000. Hydro Quebec paid more than half the $250,000 cost for the charging stations, and the STL and AMT kicked in $220,000 each.