Formula E’s current machinery on a street circuit. The Gen4 replaces it for Season 13, opening in Jeddah in December 2026. Photo by Rico Reynaldi via Unsplash.
Every generational reset in Formula E arrives attached to one number, and Gen4’s is 600. That is kilowatts of peak power, somewhere around 800 horsepower, and it will lead every headline written between now and the season opener in Jeddah on 18 December. It is also the least interesting figure on the FIA’s spec sheet.
The number worth your attention is 700. That is the Gen4’s maximum regenerative braking capacity, also in kilowatts, and it sits 250 kW above the 450 kW the car is allowed to deploy in normal race running. Formula E has homologated a single-seater that can pull energy out of a braking zone faster than it is permitted to spend it down a straight. Permanent all-wheel drive, a new tyre supplier, a split race format — nearly everything else about this car falls out of that one inversion.
What the FIA actually signed off on
Race power is 450 kW, up 50 percent on the Gen3 Evo’s 300 kW. Qualifying and Attack Mode unlock 600 kW, a 71 percent jump on the Gen3 Evo’s 350 kW. Regeneration rises from 600 kW to 700 kW. Usable race energy grows 43 percent to 55 kWh. Vincent Gaillardot, the FIA’s Formula E technical manager, calls it “motorsport’s fastest and most powerful electric racing car” — a claim nobody in the paddock is in a position to dispute, since nothing else in single-seater racing is trying.
Physically: 954 kg without a driver aboard, 5,540 mm long, 1,790 mm wide, 1,113 mm tall, on a 3,080 mm wheelbase. Top speed 335 km/h, or 208 mph. Formula E quotes roughly 1.8 seconds to 100 km/h, 4.4 seconds to 200 km/h, and about ten seconds a lap quicker than a Gen3 in qualifying trim.
Treat that last one as a ceiling rather than a promise. Ten seconds assumes a lap with enough room to use 600 kW and enough braking events to justify the extra mass, which describes Circuit of The Americas far better than it describes a concrete chicane in Monaco. On the tightest street layouts the gap will shrink to something far less quotable. That is not a knock on the car; it is a reminder that headline deltas in this series have always been circuit-dependent.
The front axle is a generator that occasionally drives the car
The Gen3 Evo had all-wheel drive in bursts — launches, Attack Mode, a party trick with a stopwatch attached. Gen4’s is permanent and active, with motors at both ends and an active differential working through every phase of the lap. Read as marketing, that is a traction story. Read as engineering, it is a harvesting story.
Try to push 700 kW of retardation through the rear axle alone and the rear tyres surrender long before the motor does. Braking transfers load forward, which is precisely where the grip goes and precisely where a rear-drive car has no machine to collect it. Put a motor on the front axle and the car can harvest against the loaded end. The all-wheel drive is not there so the Gen4 launches better. It is there so the Gen4 can bank what it just spent.
Which reframes what a braking zone is. With more than 40 percent of race energy recovered on track — Formula E’s own material puts the practical figure nearer half — a Gen4 driver arriving at a hairpin is not merely slowing down. He is performing the highest-power single act the car commits all lap, and he is refuelling while he does it. Energy management in this series was already a sport of its own; now the recovery side of the ledger outweighs the deployment side. If you have never understood why Formula E drivers appear to be driving slowly on purpose, the strategic logic behind electric racing is the place to start.
Spare a thought for the brake engineers. The friction brakes on a Gen4 are effectively a backup system with a very demanding consistency requirement: the pedal has to feel identical whether the motors are harvesting at 700 kW or the battery has gone too full, too hot, or too close to a cell limit to accept anything at all. Blending that handover is brake-by-wire calibration work, and it is where drivers will win and lose confidence. The friction hardware still matters when it is called on — carbon-ceramic discs behave very differently cold, and a disc that spends most of a race barely working is a disc that is rarely at temperature when it is finally needed.
A 150-kilowatt cliff between race mode and Attack Mode
Gen3 Evo drivers gained 50 kW when they took Attack Mode. Gen4 drivers gain 150. Tripling that swing changes the tactical value of the thing entirely: a 50 kW advantage was a nudge that needed a couple of laps and a cooperative corner exit to convert. A 150 kW advantage is a weapon with a fuse on it.
Expect the consequences to cut both ways. Attacking cars will close gaps that were previously uncloseable, and defending cars will have an equally violent tool available the moment they activate. The more interesting second-order effect is thermal. Pushing 600 kW through a powertrain generates heat that has to be rejected somewhere, and a team that can hold peak power for the full activation window while a rival derates two-thirds of the way through has found a genuine performance advantage that will never appear on a spec sheet. Cooling package development is about to become a Formula E storyline.
Two formats, one car, one weekend
The Gen4 arrives alongside a second race format, and this is the part most previews will skip. On double-header weekends, Formula E runs an E-PrixUnleashed: 30 minutes, high-downforce aerodynamic configuration, six minutes of Attack Mode, no Pit Boost. The full E-Prix runs 45 minutes in the low-downforce configuration, with eight minutes of Attack Mode and a mandatory Pit Boost.
That is two distinct cars in the same garage inside 24 hours. High downforce and no mandatory stop produces a short, dense, grip-limited race where saving energy costs you track position immediately. Low downforce plus a compulsory Pit Boost produces the opposite: a longer race with a scheduled interruption to plan around and a slipstream that actually works. Teams will need two setup philosophies, two tyre plans and two energy models per weekend, and the engineers who can switch between them cleanly on Sunday morning will bank points that never show up in a qualifying analysis.
Permanent circuits are about to audit every one of these claims
Season 13 runs 21 races across 13 cities, opening with a Jeddah double-header on 18 and 19 December 2026 and closing in Tokyo on 24 and 25 July 2027. Circuit of The Americas, Zandvoort and Brands Hatch are new, and London’s round relocates to Brands Hatch.
A 335 km/h car needs somewhere to go fast, so the venue shift is not decoration. It is also a risk the series has decided to accept. Street circuits are flattering; nobody knows what a Formula E lap around a parking structure is supposed to look like. Put the Gen4 on COTA and Zandvoort and the comparison becomes concrete, public and unavoidable, because everybody has seen other cars lap those places. Formula E is betting the car is quick enough to survive the arithmetic — a bet it is making alongside a serious push into the American market.
Bridgestone supplies the rubber, returning to FIA World Championship competition after a 15-year absence, with two specifications: a primary high-performance tyre and a dedicated extreme wet. The tyres are built from 65 percent renewable and recycled materials, the car from materials that are entirely recyclable or reusable with a minimum 20 percent recycled content, and the battery contains no rare earth minerals. Sustainability claims in motorsport usually deserve a squint, but a single-supplier tyre with a genuine wet specification has a sporting consequence too: Formula E has spent years avoiding meaningful wet running, and it just bought the equipment to stop avoiding it.
Who is actually building these
The FIA’s announcement named five manufacturers committed to the Gen4 platform: Porsche, Nissan, Stellantis, Jaguar and Lola. Formula E’s own technical briefing lists the badges rather than the parent companies — Jaguar, Porsche, Nissan, Citroën, Mahindra, Lola and Opel — with Citroën and Opel both flying Stellantis colours.
That is a healthy-looking grid on paper, and it deserves the usual caveat: manufacturer commitments in this series have historically been written in pencil. What makes Gen4 different is the road relevance of what is being developed. A front-axle motor doing high-power regeneration into a rare-earth-free battery is not a racing curiosity; it is the exact problem every performance EV programme on the planet is currently solving. That is a far easier budget to defend internally than an aero package nobody can sell. It is worth remembering what the previous era produced on that front: Porsche’s 99X Electric left Formula E as the most decorated race car the company has ever built.
What to watch in Jeddah
Ignore the top speed trap. The first Gen4 race weekend will be decided by three things, none of them glamorous. Watch which teams can hold 600 kW through a full Attack Mode window without derating. Watch how drivers cope with a brake pedal whose feel depends on battery state. And watch the first E-PrixUnleashed closely, because a 30-minute race with no mandatory stop is the format most likely to expose a team that has built its entire energy model around the old assumptions.
Formula E has finally built a car whose performance is obvious from the grandstand. Whether it has built a car that produces better racing is a question 21 rounds are about to answer.
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