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• ABB’s integrated power, propulsion and control solution has been chosen for BC Ferries’ four new hybrid-electric major vessels
• The New Major Vessels have been designed to minimize emissions and underwater radiated noise (URN), with the goal of contributing to quieter and cleaner operations in the Strait of Georgia

ABB will supply a complete package of power, propulsion and control technology for four new double-ended passenger and car ferries operated by British Columbia Ferry Services (BC Ferries). One of the largest ferry operators in the world, BC Ferries provides year-round vehicle and passenger service on 25 routes to 47 terminals, carrying approximately 9.7 million vehicles and 22.7 million passengers annually ¹. Demand on the ferry system is expected to increase as the province’s population is forecast to grow 44 percent² by 2046.

The hybrid-electric ferries, which will replace four end-of-life vessels, are part of the BC Ferries’ New Major Vesselsprogram, aimed at delivering safe, environmentally sustainable and reliable operations in and around the Strait of Georgia, the body of water separating Vancouver Island from the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. The order was booked in the fourth quarter of 2025.

Scheduled for delivery beginning in 2029 from China Merchants Industry Weihai (CMI Weihai) Shipyard, the vessels will be equipped with ABB’s gearless, steerable Azipod® electric propulsion.The system offers proven reliability thanks to significantly fewer moving parts than mechanical thrusters, while the special propeller design helps reduce underwater radiated noise (URN). This helps safeguard at-risk species, such as the Southern Resident killer whale, and preserve one of the world’s most biologically rich marine ecosystems³.

ABB’s Onboard DC Grid™ power distribution system will serve as the backbone for efficient energy flow, minimizing conversion losses and enabling higher overall system efficiency and lower emissions than comparable propulsion arrangements.

Each ferry will be equipped to accommodate up to 70 megawatt-hours (MWh) of battery energy storage. This enables efficient hybrid operations today and supports a future shift to fully electric, zero-emission service. The hybrid configuration uses biofuel or renewable diesel and continuously balances energy between generators and batteries. Each vessel can also connect to a high-capacity shore charging system rated above 60 megawatts (MW) for full electric operation. This system is more than 100 times more powerful than the fastest public electric vehicle charging stations in North America, which typically deliver up to 500 kilowatts (kW) per plug. This high-capacity charging supports fast turnaround in port and enables the transition to zero-emission operations.

ABB’s digital solutions will give crews a clear overview of ship operations and support safe, efficient journeys. These digital technologies are intended to help BC Ferries deliver an improved travel experience for passengers while reducing environmental impact.

“BC Ferries’ New Major Vessels represent the largest capital investment in our history and are essential to renewing our fleet, increasing capacity on our busiest routes, and strengthening system resilience,” said Nicolas Jimenez, President & CEO, BC Ferries. “Their design reflects what our customers value most: comfort, accessibility and environmental stewardship. With diesel-battery hybrid technology that can operate on bio and renewable diesel today and transition to full electrification as infrastructure evolves, these ships are a critical part of building a cleaner, quieter, and more reliable ferry system for the future.”

“We proudly support BC Ferries’ goals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from their operations, striving to meet British Columbia’s 2030 greenhouse gas emissions reduction target for the transportation sector⁴ by at least 27 percent by 2030, from 2008 levels, in support of a cleaner future for British Columbia, and its ambitions to transition to all-electric operation,” said Rune Braastad, President, ABB’s Marine & Ports division. “ABB’s deep roots in Canada make it possible to support generational infrastructure projects like the New Major Vessels.”

“Winning the contract to deliver such a wide scope of solutions is highly significant for ABB’s marine business in North America,” said Timo Vesala, Head of Sales, Marine Systems, Americas, ABB’s Marine & Ports division. “As someone who lives and works in Vancouver, I recognize the importance of this initiative for British Columbia – not only in providing consistently reliable and resilient ferry services, but also in helping local communities experience cleaner air and quieter waterways.”

ABB is a global technology leader in electrification and automation, enabling a more sustainable and resource-efficient future. By connecting its engineering and digitalization expertise, ABB helps industries run at high performance, while becoming more efficient, productive and sustainable so they outperform. At ABB, we call this ‘Engineered to Outrun’. The company has over 140 years of history and around 110,000 employees worldwide. ABB’s shares are listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange (ABBN) and Nasdaq Stockholm (ABB). www.abb.com

[1] British Columbia Ferry Services Inc. Annual Report to the British Columbia Ferries Commission – Year ended March 31, 2025.

[2] https://www.bcferries.com/in-the-community/projects/new-major-vessels

[3] https://georgiastrait.org/issues/about-the-strait-2/

[4] https://www.bcferries.com/web_image/hf0/hce/8910527397918.pdf

Long before the invention of writing, the very first detectable graphic productions of prehistoric humans were highly regular non-pictorial geometric signs such as parallel lines, zig-zags, triangular, or checkered patterns (Henshilwood et al., 2018; Waerden, 2012). Human cultures throughout the world compose complex figures using simple geometrical regularities such as parallelism and symmetry in their drawings, decorative arts, tools, buildings, graphics, and maps (Tversky, 2011). Cognitive anthropological studies suggest that, even in the absence of formal western education, humans possess intuitions of foundational geometric concepts such as points and lines and how they combine to form regular shapes (Dehaene et al., 2006; Izard et al., 2011). The scarce data available to date suggests that other primates, including chimpanzees, may not share the same ability to perceive and produce regular geometric shapes (Close and Call, 2015; Dehaene et al., 2022; Sablé-Meyer et al., 2021; Saito et al., 2014; Tanaka, 2007), though unintentional-but-regular mark-marking behavior has been reported in macaques (Sueur, 2025). Thus, studying the brain mechanisms that support the perception of geometric regularities may shed light on the origins of human compositionality and, ultimately, the mental language of mathematics. Here, we provide a first approach through the recording of functional MRI and magneto-encephalography signals evoked by simple geometric shapes such as triangles or squares. Our goal is to probe whether, over and above the pathways for processing the shapes of images such as faces, places, or objects, the regularities of geometric shapes evoke additional activity.

The present brain-imaging research capitalizes on a series of studies of how humans perceive quadrilaterals (Sablé-Meyer et al., 2021). In that study, we created 11 tightly matched stimuli that were all simple, non-figurative, textureless four-sided shapes, yet varied in their geometric regularity. The most regular was the square, with four parallel sides of equal length and four identical right angles. By progressively removing some of these features (parallelism, right angles, equality of length, and equality of angles), we created a hierarchy of quadrilaterals ranging from highly regular to completely irregular (Figure 1A). In a variety of tasks, geometric regularity had a large effect on human behavior. For instance, for equal objective amounts of deviation, human adults and children detected a deviant shape more easily among shapes of high regularity, such as squares or rectangles (<5% errors), than among irregular quadrilaterals (>40% errors). The effect appeared as a human universal, present in preschoolers, first-graders, and adults without access to formal western math education (the Himba from Namibia), and thus seemingly independent of education and of the existence of linguistic labels for regular shapes. Strikingly, when baboons were trained to perform the same task, they showed no such geometric regularity effect.

Baboon behavior was accounted for by convolutional neural network (CNN) models of object recognition, but human behavior could only be explained by appealing to a representation of discrete geometric properties of parallelism, right angle, and symmetry, in this and other tasks. We sometimes refer to this model as ‘symbolic’ because it relies on discrete, exact, rule-based features rather than continuous representations (Sablé-Meyer et al., 2022). In this representational format, geometric shapes are postulated to be represented by symbolic expressions in a ‘language-of-thought’, for example ‘a square is a four-sided figure with four equal sides and four right angles’ or equivalently by a computer-like program from drawing them in a Logo-like language (Sablé-Meyer et al., 2022).

We therefore formulated the hypothesis that, in the domain of geometry, humans deploy an additional cognitive process specifically attuned to geometric regularities. On top of the circuits for object recognition, which are largely homologous in human and non-human primates (Bao et al., 2020; Kriegeskorte et al., 2008b; Tsao et al., 2008), the human code for geometric shapes would involve a distinct ‘language of thought’, an encoding of discrete mathematical regularities and their combinations (Cavanagh, 2021; Dehaene et al., 2022; Fodor, 1975; Leeuwenberg, 1971; Quilty-Dunn et al., 2022; Sablé-Meyer et al., 2022; Sablé-Meyer et al., 2021).

This hypothesis predicts that the most elementary geometric shapes, such as a square, are not solely processed within the ventral and dorsal visual pathways, but may also evoke a later stage of geometrical feature encoding in brain areas that were previously shown to encode arithmetic, geometric, and other mathematical properties, that is the bilateral intraparietal, inferotemporal, and dorsal prefrontal areas (Amalric and Dehaene, 2016; Amalric and Dehaene, 2019). We hypothesized that (1) such cognitive processes encode shapes according to their discrete geometric properties including parallelism, right angles, equal lengths, and equal angles; (2) the brain compresses this information when those properties are more regularly organized, and thus exhibit activity proportional to minimal description length (Chater and Vitányi, 2003; Dehaene et al., 2022; Feldman, 2003); and (3) these computations occur downstream of other visual processes, since they rely on the initial output of visual processing pathways.

Here, we assessed these spatiotemporal predictions using two complementary neuroimaging techniques (functional MRI and magnetoencephalography [MEG]). We presented the same 11 quadrilaterals as in our previous research and used representational similarity analysis (Kriegeskorte et al., 2008a) to contrast two models for their cerebral encoding, based either on classical CNN models or on exact geometric features. In the fMRI experiment, we also collected simpler images contrasting the category of geometric shapes to other classical categories such as faces, places, or tools. Furthermore, to evaluate how early the brain networks for geometric shape perception arise, we collected those fMRI data in two age groups: adults and children in first grade (6 years old, this year was selected as it marks the first year French students receive formal instruction in mathematics). If geometric shape perception involves elementary intuitions of geometric regularity common to all humans, then the corresponding brain networks should be detectable early on.