Every few years Formula E rolls out a new car and the promotional numbers get bigger: more power, more speed, more drama. GEN4, arriving with the 2026/27 season, checks that box with 600kW — a genuinely startling 815 horsepower — and a top speed north of 200 mph, according to the championship’s own technical breakdown. But the number worth sitting with isn’t the horsepower. It’s that GEN4 is, by Formula E’s own description, the only single-seater world championship car built with permanent all-wheel drive. Every single-seater series that matters, Formula 1 included, still sends power to two wheels. Formula E just decided that rule doesn’t apply to it anymore.
Real AWD, Not a Sometimes Mode
That’s a bigger swing than it sounds. The outgoing GEN3 Evo already used all-wheel drive, but only in bursts — during the Duels qualifying format, at race starts, and whenever a driver triggered Attack Mode. The rest of the time it ran rear-drive only, the same layout every open-wheel car on the planet uses. GEN4 sends power to the front axle permanently, which means Formula E’s engineers now have to manage traction, tire wear, and energy recovery across four contact patches at all times, not just for a few seconds of a Duel. That’s the kind of change that reads as a bullet point in a press release and is genuinely difficult to execute without cooking a front tire or bleeding efficiency exactly when a driver needs it most.
Formula E’s pitch is that bigger numbers make the racing easier to parse for a casual viewer, and there’s something to that. A car that reaches 100 kph from a standstill in roughly 1.8 seconds and tops out around 335 kph isn’t subtle. But the championship’s actual watchability problem has never been about raw pace. It’s been about energy management dictating how hard drivers can actually race each other while a broadcast tries to explain regen targets and differential settings in real time. GEN4 doesn’t remove that layer of strategy, it just hands teams a bigger, more complex energy budget to manage across four wheels instead of two. Whether that produces more overtakes or just more sophisticated energy-saving driving is the real question, and no spec sheet is going to answer it before the lights go out in Jeddah.
The Business Bet Sitting Underneath the Chassis
The technical reset isn’t happening in isolation. GEN4’s arrival lines up with Formula E becoming a fixture on Disney+ and ESPN+ across 144 territories, replacing a patchwork of more than fifty regional broadcast deals with one global platform, starting this season. That is Formula E, majority-owned by Liberty Global, betting that a faster, stranger car and a single global streaming home can do together what neither could manage alone. Formula E CEO Jeff Dodds called the agreement “a landmark moment for Formula E,” and pairing it with a chassis this different is a clear signal the championship wants to be judged as appointment viewing rather than a curiosity lap around Monaco’s undercard.
What GEN4 Inherits, and What It Leaves Behind
GEN4 also closes the book on an era that just produced one of the stranger championship finishes in Formula E’s history. Pascal Wehrlein sealed his second Drivers’ title in London this past August without scoring a point in the finale, driving a Porsche 99X Electric that has since retired from the series as the most decorated car Porsche has ever fielded. Every manufacturer now has to build a genuinely new car against a rulebook that changes traction, aerodynamics, and energy strategy all at once, which means the pecking order that just got settled in London carries no guarantee once the series shows up on a different continent with a different car underneath everyone.
What to Watch at Jeddah
Season 13 opens with a doubleheader in Jeddah on December 18 and 19, 2026, the first of 21 races across 13 cities that also brings Formula E to Circuit of the Americas for the first time and adds Brands Hatch to the London weekend, alongside returns to Zandvoort, Monaco, Berlin, Madrid, Shanghai, and a season-closing Tokyo doubleheader next July. Watch that first Jeddah weekend less for who wins and more for who looks lost. A permanent all-wheel-drive car delivering 50 percent more race-mode power than teams were racing eight months earlier is exactly the kind of regulation change that separates the outfits with real simulation depth from the ones still working out where the extra torque wants to go.
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