Can Formula E drive electric mobility in road cars?

The National

2 days ago

In front of a crowd of thousands, a pack of high-powered electric racing cars tore through the Excel London exhibition centre last weekend in the final rounds of the Formula E World Championship.
At the two races in London that concluded the 2024-25 championship of this all-electric series, there was action aplenty, with crashes, daring overtakes and tensions over strategy between drivers and their teams.
While the drama of Formula E (FE) is beyond dispute, the series has grander ambitions than entertainment: it states that it wants to 'accelerate change towards an electric future'.
To achieve this, it states that it wants to alter perceptions and speed the switch to electric vehicles, by becoming to be a 'test bed' for low-carbon technologies. After concluding its 11th season, is FE realising its purpose?
Johnny Herbert, 61, a British driver who scored multiple victories in Formula One and who now acts as a global brand ambassador for Lola Cars, which is involved in FE through its Lola Yamaha ABT team, cautions that electrification is still in its 'early stages' both on the racetrack and in road transport.
Driven to the future
'It's not totally accepted [in road cars] but eventually it will be the norm and the same for FE, because the technology will only advance,' he said.
The series is 'pushing the boundaries' technologically by using more sustainable materials, Mr Herbert says as he points at a piece of bodywork made from the natural fibre hemp.
The short history of FE demonstrates of how electric mobility is improving. In the inaugural season, in 2014-15, and in the next three seasons, drivers had to swap cars mid-race because the batteries could not last for a whole race. Now a single car is enough.
'That [type of improvement] will feed down to road-car technology,' Mr Herbert said. 'Motorsport, it can advance the technology very, very quickly.'
Julia Pallé, Formula E's vice president for sustainability, describes the series as having a mission to support electrification and, beyond that, to support 'sustainable human progress' by highlighting what technology can do to solve problems.
'We're technology optimists,' she said. 'We want to inspire people to adopt. The technology revolves mostly around battery software and power train. The technology road map is centred around the barriers to adoption consumers can encounter.'
A key example of this is battery charging, which is well known as causing consumers to think twice about going electric.
To highlight improvements in fast-charging technology, last season FE introduced Pit Boost, in which cars stop for 30 seconds to receive an ultra-fast charge that adds 10 per cent to the battery's energy.
In another nod to consumers, Ms Pallé says that FE has a focus on street circuits rather than traditional race tracks to help make the series more relatable.
'We needed people to project that they would be driving electric vehicles,' she said. 'If they're driving racing cars in the heart of the city, [people think], 'I can do it myself.''
On the right track
The 2024/25 FE season saw 16 races at 10 circuits, including two races in February at Jeddah Corniche Circuit in Saudi Arabia. Among the other locations where the cars lined up were street circuits in Berlin, Tokyo and Monaco.
The cars themselves are blisteringly fast, accelerating from 0 to 60mph in as little as 1.82 seconds, compared to more than two seconds for Formula One cars, which, unlike the electric FE cars, are powered by a hybrid internal combustion engine. F1 cars have tyres with more grip and so tend to corner faster than their electric equivalents.
According to official figures, nearly half the energy that FE cars need during a race comes from regenerative braking, which captures the energy from slowing the car and turns it into electricity.
Central to FE's aim of advancing technology for electric mobility on the roads is attracting top car manufacturers to the sport, and in that respect it has had plenty of success.
Ms Pallé describes the series as having 'arguably the biggest line-up of car manufacturers in motorsport', with 'fantastic household names' including Jaguar, Stellantis (owner of the Maserati and DS Automobiles brands, which each has an FE team) and Porsche. Nissan too has its own team.
'It's testament that there's a need from OEMs [original equipment manufacturers or brands] to develop technology and take that and transfer [it] to passenger cars. That's important to us,' Ms Pallé said.
'We hope for the future we get some Chinese OEMs, because China is playing a key role in electric mobility.'
Make or brake?
Whether the series will prove commercially successful long term remains unclear. McLaren have pulled the plug on their FE team and Tom Rubython, editor-in-chief of BusinessF1 magazine, says that FE is 'making huge losses which are getting worse'.
In the financial year to September 30, the series' pre-tax losses were €78.3 million (Dh331.7 million), nearly 85 per cent up on the previous year's losses of €42.4 million (Dh178.6 million), and revenue fell, something attributed to a reduction in the number of race events.
'They would be all right if they could make money,' Mr Rubython said. 'They're doing quite well on sponsorship, but they've got to lower the costs.'
The series reports that the number of people viewing coverage is increasing and says that it will reach profitability as interest grows, while the championship's title sponsor, ABB, an electrification and automation company, recently announced that it was continuing its support.
Aside from FE's potential to accelerate electric vehicle technology and to encourage consumers to turn to electric vehicles, another key issue is how sustainable the series itself is.
At Change Accelerated Live, a sustainability-themed conference on the sidelines of the London event, FE became the first sport to be certified by the BSI (British Standards Institution) as being on the way to achieving its target of reaching net zero carbon emissions.
'BSI send in the auditors to check that the claims they're making are valid. We are living in a world of greenwashing – people want more confidence it's a valid claim,' Martin Townsend, the BSI's growth director, said.
Formula E has, he says, set targets to cut emissions and make events as sustainable as possible by, for example, cutting out single-use plastics and making transport to races greener.
Jeff Dodds, the CEO of Formula E, told the conference that the series had cut from three to two the number of aircraft needed to transport the series around the globe. It uses no more planes, he told delegates, than a single F1 team.
Sustainability auditing by BSI extends to considering how the electricity that powers the cars is generated. In the 10th season every race except the event in Tokyo used completely sustainable power, according to the series, although overall emissions that season went up from 32,569 tCO2e (tonnes of CO2 equivalent) to 33,529 tCO2e. The series states that it investments in climate projects offset its emissions.
Mr Townsend describes FE as 'already' being a trailblazer and, as well as developing technology that could be used in road cars, he suggests that it could influence industries outside motorsport.
'We're seeing more and more that sustainability is jumping across sectors,' he said. 'You used to find that, historically, industry was ring fenced, but now we're seeing more technology jumps.'
As an example, he cites the way that vehicle battery packs are used to power homes, often through the use of solar energy.
Willem Groenewald, Secretary General for car mobility, sustainability and tourism at the FIA, the organisation that governs world motorsport, says that 'all of our championships are firmly entrenched in net zero'.
'The climate action developments extend beyond the championship through to promoters and partners – everybody is making a contribution with sustainability goals,' he said.
'It's all contributing to a significant impact. FE is testament to that. Look around at what they've done: it's electrifying, it truly is.'