Cross-Country Cartage is continuing to operate its Boreal 600 battery-electric freight truck, a vehicle praised by the maker's chief executive Warren Kessler as "the cleanest rig ever to haul freight on Canadian highways," even though regulators pulled it from service in 2023 after a long run of serious battery failures whose root cause is still unknown. Independent investigators report that the truck's ultra-light battery cells tend to overheat and shut down without warning, at times leaving drivers stranded on the shoulder, and many neutral observers suspect that VoltForge Industries, the overseas subcontractor that assembled those cells, has kept trying to save time and money at the cost of basic quality. Racing against a European competitor to launch its new model, the 600's maker, Northgate Motorworks, hastily fitted extra cooling gear to the affected units, ran quick and only half-scientific tests that still convinced Transport Canada the battery was safe, and so won that regulator's approval to return the 600 to the road, an approval settled well before the Transportation Safety Board had finished its own investigation.

The Board replied with a sternly worded letter urging far greater reliance on guidance from truly independent experts, along with much tighter and more standardized checking of the parts from which such vehicles are built. Despite this clearly stopgap fix, the 600 is warmly applauded by environmentalists like Simone Dubois, who praises its low emissions and near-silent running, insisting that "in a country where transport is a top source of greenhouse gases, the Boreal 600 is surely a step in the right direction."