The automotive industry is driving toward an electric future, and one Montreal-based company is determined to tow the recreational vehicle market along with it.
Taiga Motors has spent the last decade building out production capacity to deliver fully electric snowmobiles and Jet Ski-like personal watercraft that they believe can go toe-to-toe with gas-powered alternatives. As with electric cars, the ride is designed to feel smoother, faster, and whisper-quiet, filling an unaddressed niche in the motor sports vehicle category.
“If you’re on the water, all you hear is the wind and the waves. And if you’re on the snow, you hardly hear anything—just that track spinning through the snow at incredible speeds,” says Taiga Motors cofounder and CEO Sam Bruneau.
The company itself, however, has had anything but a smooth journey.
After riding the wave of the SPAC boom in 2021—when hundreds of companies went public by merging with publicly listed shell companies, bypassing the traditional IPO process—which put its value into the hundreds of millions of dollars, pandemic-related manufacturing delays pushed it to the cliff’s edge.
Taiga has been only able to traverse the many economic and technical rough patches it’s faced, according to Bruneau, because the market is so eager for a smoother, quieter, and cleaner alternative to the noisy, polluting, gas-guzzling recreational vehicles on the snow and water today.
Silent Engine, Invisible Barriers
By designing their snowmobiles and watercraft from scratch, the company is able to introduce a few game-changing features that make the ride not only smoother, but also safer and more accessible.
