When Formula E launched, it was ahead of its time. Not in the visionary sense—though it was racing EVs before owning one was cool—but literally: electrification was barely capable of supporting a high-end motorsport.
In 2014 Formula E cars were 100 mph slower than those in IndyCar and Formula One, and their batteries lasted only half a race. “You had this crazy kind of triathlon transition, where the drivers jumped out halfway and got into another racing car,” says Jeff Dodds, Formula E’s CEO.
But a lot can happen in 10 seasons. Today the cars are faster, lighter, and more powerful, hitting top speeds of 200 mph and doing 0 to 60 in under 2 seconds. Crucially, they can complete a race on a single charge. Most importantly, they and their drivers offer up good racing, and the fans keep coming back. “Ten years ago, there wasn’t a single fan of Formula E, because we didn’t exist—so we’ve come a long way to just under 400 million,” says Dodds.
What hasn’t changed is the sport’s desire to showcase sustainability and make the case for adopting EVs. Ahead of speaking at the WIRED x Octopus Energy Tech Summit in Berlin on October 10, Dodds sat down with WIRED to explain what’s next for Formula E, what it’s achieved in its first 10 years, and how its mission has evolved.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
WIRED: Formula E has changed a lot since it started in 2014. What can we expect from the sport over the next decade?
Jeff Dodds: The internal combustion engine is 130 years old, whereas EV technology has only really been produced at market level for probably the last 15 years. For me, this means over the next 10 years the cars will get materially faster, more efficient.
It’s really the battery technology I get most excited about. Today, we have these lithium-ion accumulator batteries, but there’s no question in the coming years the battery technology will probably shift to solid-state batteries, which means we’re able to generate similar power in a much smaller battery unit. And that will create less weight in the car, which is a fundamental shift in how a racing car behaves and develops. So we’re going to see much quicker, much more powerful, much lighter cars.
What’s the performance limit of Formula E cars? Is Formula One-type performance the benchmark?
In terms of comparables with Formula One, our Gen 3 Evo car—the car that will race next season, season 11—will already be faster-accelerating. A current Formula One car will get to 60 miles an hour in about 2.6 seconds; we’ll get to it in about 1.8 seconds.
But obviously, in other areas of performance we’re constrained by the parameters of the series. We choose to race largely in urban environments. In cities, you can’t build a 5-mile, 50-meter-wide circuit and race like Formula One. We have to have cars that can perform in a street-circuit environment.
Also I think it would be fairly crude in the current economic environment to say there’s no money limit, you can do what you want. If you said to me, “Money’s no limit, and we’re giving you an endless road that never has a corner and doesn’t have to be near a city center”—we’d do something spectacular. But that’s not the world that we live in.
We’re focused on the environment and creating absolutely compelling competitive racing. As we went to the last race in season 10, there were still seven drivers I think who could conceivably still win the championship, there were still three teams that conceivably could still win the championship. I would never give up that exciting competitive racing just simply to be able to say: Oh, look at us, we’re faster than a Formula One car.
What’s the motivation for racing in urban environments?
It was unlikely when we created a racing series that people were going to drive to the middle of nowhere to watch. So by going to a city center, you already have a predetermined audience. There’s people there.
The second thing is the spectacle. You’ve got this incredible backdrop of racing in Tokyo. When we raced in London, you’ve got this incredible backdrop of the city.
Then in terms of relevance, it’s often large urban developments that are focused on sustainability, because that’s where all the road traffic is. Taking a net-zero racing series to a city center allows us to educate and to open the conversation up about sustainability in a more meaningful way.
And the final reason from a sustainability point of view is public transportation. Public transport networks are much better around city centers.
You touched on Formula E being net-zero. How does the sport achieve that?
We run the entire racing season on about 33,000 tons of carbon. All of that carbon is fully offset using grade A carbon removal schemes in the countries in which we race, fully audited by best-in-class auditors. To give you a comparison, Formula One is between 200,000 and 250,000 tons to run their racing series.
I think people logically go: Well, of course, one one’s got a hybrid petrol engine, the other has an EV power plant, so it’s obvious, but that’s a tiny part of the carbon production. The big part is the traveling circus. It’s moving those components around the world to different locations, by air or by sea. It’s all of the fans going to watch the races. But the big difference for us is, in every part of our business model, we obsess about how we can remove and reduce carbon from it.
We set ourselves the challenge from the end of season 5 to the end of season 15 to reduce our underlying carbon production by 45 percent. To my knowledge, we’re the only sport in the world that signed up to science-based targets to audit that.
Priority one is to produce as little carbon as possible; then, with whatever is still produced, priority number two is to offset it in a way that creates the best benefits for the planet.
What sorts of offsets do you focus on? People have different opinions as to what is good enough, and they’re not all equal.
We primarily focus on the creation of renewable energy, since that’s what gives the best positive impact to using electric vehicles. Where we can, it’s technology in the countries in which we race—so solar and wind farms in Mexico City, to give one example.
We’re investing in carbon capture and removal technology as well, and we look at ways of supporting the development of that technology. It’s developing pretty quickly, but it’s still a very emerging technology.
What makes you an order of magnitude less carbon-intensive than Formula One?
The amount of product that we allow ourselves to take on the road. The number of cars, tires, spare parts, people that travel, we do that with the absolute bare number minimum to get it into the minimum number of crates to transport. And where possible we transport via road or sea freight. We only fly when we have to fly our entire racing series, and we can fit everything into three airplanes. We’re looking at how to bring that down to two.
And where we do take planes, we’re looking at technologies like sustainable aviation fuel. We actually trialed that at one of the races last year—moving from Berlin onto the next race.
Has tech from the sport has trickled down into consumer vehicles since the first race back in 2014?
Well, it works both ways. We’ve benefited from motor manufacturers around the world investing in EV technology, having some of the brightest minds in the original equipment manufacturers working on battery development and EV powertrains. They’ve benefited from being part of a racing series where we are pushing the boundaries on technology every single race.
A good example is Jaguar Land Rover. The Jaguar Formula E team learned something on the racing track about efficiency between the battery and the powertrain. They were able to take that learning, and update over the air the software on the I-PACE range, which is their range of electric cars on the road. That delivered somewhere near 25 to 30 kilometers more battery range into those cars overnight.
If you look at someone like Porsche, they’ve used other things. So we have things in the car like attack mode, an additional level of power: 50 extra kilowatts during a particular part of the race. They now have that button in their car, where you can push the car on the new Taycan, and it unlocks additional power in the car.
Back when Formula E started, there weren’t that many EVs on the road. Now they’re everywhere and seen as high-performance and desirable. A lot of arguments about electrification have been won. Does this change the future goals of Formula E?
You’re right, you can’t compare the vision of the sport in 2014 to its vision now. I think in 2014, when the sport started, there were 800,000 EVs sold in the world that year. In the last 12 months, it’s probably somewhere between 15 and 20 million.
It’s not like 2014 when we were saying, please consider buying an electric vehicle. Now the aim is to get the current 50 percent rate of EV take-up to 100 percent, and to assist doing that by making the technology even better. We’re absolutely obsessed with that—whether through improving the technology for longer range, faster charging times, better performance. Everything we focus on around battery tech, fast charging, efficiency, it’s all ultimately to speed the take-up of EVs.
Hear Jeff Dodds speak at the WIRED x Octopus Energy Tech Summit at Kraftwerk in Berlin on October 10. Get tickets at energy-tech-summit.wired.com
