Automotive and Mobility

A future-focused automotive and mobility ecosystem

Waterloo has a complete concept-to-commercialization autotech ecosystem with more than 80 companies working in additive manufacturing, prototyping/analytics, autonomous vehicles and more. 

Find a full list of local autotech companies and autotech-related research and commercialization support organizations here.

World-class research support for automotive and mobility innovators

Waterloo Centre for Automotive Research (WatCAR) is the largest university-based automotive research centre in Canada. OEMs like Honda and Toyota work with WatCAR to tap into the expertise of 125 researchers working in connected and autonomous vehicles, light weighting, fabrication, software, data and more.

A 10-bay research and development workspace, the Autonomous Vehicle Research and Intelligence Lab (AVRIL) is involved in creating mobility solutions in automated driving, vehicle connectivity and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

The Waterloo Artificial Intelligence Institute (Waterloo.AI) works closely with the private sector to apply cutting-edge AI for use in a wide variety of industries, including advanced manufacturing, robotics and medicine.

North America’s #1 emerging tech talent market

In 2021, CBRE’s annual Scoring Tech Talent report recognized Waterloo as North America’s top small tech talent market. In three consecutive years, CBRE has ranked Waterloo #1 in Canada for tech talent quality and quality-to-cost. 

The University of Waterloo–Canada’s top technology university– helps fill this outstanding tech talent pipeline and produces more engineering graduates – including in automotive-specific areas like mechatronics – than any other school in Canada. In 2021, the University of Waterloo’s computer science, engineering and mathematics programs were all ranked #1 in Canada.

Some automotive companies that are located here include: