A Citroen Racing System E automobile throughout pre-season testing forward of the 2025-26 ABB FIA System E World Championship
Impartial Photograph Company/Alamy
With their smooth traces, smoking tyres and thunderous engines, System 1 vehicles have been the quickest highway automobiles for the previous 50 years. However electrical automobiles might quickly change into the quickest on Earth, because the battery-powered vehicles of the upstart System E racing championship are making large technological strides.
System E has simply unveiled its era 4 automobile, which might generate as much as 600 kilowatts of energy, equal to 815 horsepower. This may propel the automobile to achieve speeds above 350 kilometres per hour, up from 320 km/h now.
System 1 nonetheless has a slight edge with prime speeds exceeding 370 km/h. However System E vehicles already speed up 30 per cent sooner than System 1, with the present era 3 going from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 1.82 seconds. And as their energy and vitality storage proceed to enhance, the day will quickly come when System E will likely be sooner round a observe like Silverstone or Monte Carlo, based on System E CEO Jeff Dodds.
“Over the approaching years, the automobile could have the potential to lap at an equal tempo to a System 1 automobile or exceed it,” Dodds says. “It’s quite a operate of physics versus a operate of our experience.”
One main benefit is that electrical motors are extra environment friendly. Even in client EVs like Tesla, Kona or Ioniq, as much as 90 per cent of the vitality the engine consumes goes into propelling the automobile. Combustion engines can solely convert about 25 per cent of their vitality into movement, with many of the relaxation misplaced as warmth. System 1 has boosted this to about 50 per cent – by adopting a hybrid engine powered by each petrol and a battery that’s charged when the automobile brakes. However a System E automobile has an vitality effectivity of 96 per cent, and virtually half the vitality it consumes comes from charging throughout braking.
Electrical engines can generate most torque from a standstill, with no time misplaced to switching gears to speed up. The era 4 automobile has everlasting all-wheel drive, with a separate motor supplying energy to every axle. This might doubtlessly unlock even higher acceleration, though it additionally is dependent upon the grip of the era 4 tyres, that are nonetheless in improvement.
System E’s weak spot is the battery. When it began in 2014, drivers needed to swap vehicles halfway simply to complete the race. Sylvain Filippi, director of the Envision Racing workforce, says System E might construct a 1000-horsepower automobile as we speak that may beat System 1 over one lap. However the battery would die over the handfuls of laps that comprise every race.
“We nonetheless haven’t managed to place the equal of 80 litres of gas into one battery. It doesn’t exist but,” Filippi says. “The fantastic thing about fuels is that they’re so vitality dense.”
The System E Gen 4 automobile can attain prime speeds above 350 kilometres per hour
System E
System E plans to change from a liquid lithium-ion battery to a solid-state battery within the era 5 automobile, giving it higher vitality storage at a lighter weight. A System E automobile might then theoretically beat a System 1 in a head-to-head race, Dodds says.
However even solid-state batteries won’t ever beat liquid fuels in vitality density, and System 1 might most likely win over extra laps, based on Daniel Auger of Cranfield College, UK.
“I’m certain they might make an awesome race,” he says. “However I believe we’d nonetheless see the case that the batteries could be a limiting issue.”
The query will most likely by no means be put to the check, for the reason that two sequence race below totally different guidelines. System E, for example, doesn’t swap tyres in pit stops and has an “assault mode” impressed by the velocity increase stars within the Mario Kart online game.
Producers corresponding to Porsche, Jaguar and Nissan will now start bettering the ability prepare and vitality administration of their workforce’s era 4 automobile to make it as quick as potential earlier than its racing debut in December 2026.
A few of these enhancements might trickle right down to the EVs you see on the road. For instance, Porsche is now together with the direct oil cooling it developed for System E in its Cayenne Electrical.
System E’s velocity and efficiency “proves that electrical automobiles can do the identical, if no more than what a combustion engine automobile can do,” says Graham Evans on the enterprise data agency S&P International, “and but, on the identical time, it may possibly do that in a approach that’s rather more environmentally sustainable.”
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