Chace Barber turned a working-person problem into a real-world innovation story, starting with frustration, then building a movement around a practical solution. He grew up around trucking and became a trucker himself, but what pushed him into changemaking was seeing how hard it is to decarbonize heavy work when the options don’t fit the job.
After years in B.C.’s log-trucking world, Barber and co-founder Eric Little ordered a Tesla Semi, and after waiting years without a truck, they cancelled the order and decided to build their own diesel-electric approach, beginning in a backyard tent shop and raising seed money fast through community support.
Edison Motors has since hit visible milestones, the company built Canada’s first production electric hybrid truck in 2023, and by 2024 its heavy-truck prototype “Topsy” had been tested and licensed for Canadian public roads.
Instead of starting with a polished PR campaign, Chace and the Edison Motors team documented the messy, practical reality of building diesel-electric hybrid trucks in public posting frequent shop-floor videos about design decisions, failures, fixes, and field tests. Their YouTube channel has grown into a massive community about 561K subscribers, and Edison’s own site frames that openness as part of the project they document the entire building and testing process on YouTube.
That audience isn’t just for attention, it’s become a grassroots engine for momentum and funding. Edison has repeatedly emphasized they’re not bankrolled by government cleantech money (saying they’ve received no B.C. cleantech grant despite applying), and they’ve leaned instead on community-backed fundraising and small-investor rounds.
In one widely watched update, they raised $4.5 million in under three weeks, and they’ve opened investment rounds through public crowdfunding portals, essentially turning trust built on social media into capital to keep building.
Chace’s case shows a modern changemaking pathway, make the work legible, earn credibility by showing receipts, and let a community help carry an idea from “someone should build this” to “we’re building it together.”
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