Motor Sports Take on the Future

Extreme EVs offer a bold proposition: Racing can co-exist with sustainability targets.

- By Bengt Halvorson

OFF-ROAD rally racers whine wheel-to-wheel in clouds of desert dust, scrambling past rocky outcroppings, catching air over the peaks of windswept dunes and, at times, colliding and crashing. The scene might sound otherworldly-like Star Wars podracing-but the event in Al-'Ula, Saudi Arabia, in April 2021, was the inaugural race for a new series called Extreme E, which bills itself as “a radical new concept of electric racing, in the most remote corners of the planet.”