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Formula E's electric racing aims to showcase electric cars, increase adoption

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Tags: Electric Racing »»»» Formula E pre-2014

Fast, sexy looking, electric race cars, in city centers, shows off electric car capabilities.

An expressed goal is driving electric vehicle technology forward through motorsports. While motorsports has always sped up vehicle technology development, Formula E is imperfectly suited to this goal. Why? For the 2014-15 season all cars are made by the Renault-SPARK consortium, and the individual teams are not allowed to significantly change the cars.

In subsequent seasons Formula E may open the doors to multiple manufacturers. Doing so will foster the competition between manufacturers required to accelerate development of technology which will ultimately end up in the hands of regular people.

The other expressed goal is making fast electric race cars visible to lots of people. That will tend to burst the negative electric car stereotypes similarly to how the Tesla Roadster and Tesla Model S have done. That is - the slow-boring-ugly-golf-cart stereotype is exploded the more fast, beautiful, exciting electric car are on the road.

David Herron
David Herron is a writer and software engineer focusing on the wise use of technology. He is especially interested in clean energy technologies like solar power, wind power, and electric cars. David worked for nearly 30 years in Silicon Valley on software ranging from electronic mail systems, to video streaming, to the Java programming language, and has published several books on Node.js programming and electric vehicles.