NASCAR Unveiled Its First Electric Race Car

One day, the deafening engines of NASCAR could be silenced, replaced with the high-pitched whine of electric engines. We probably will see that happen someday in the distant future, but NASCAR is giving the world a glimpse at that future by showing off an all-electric stock-car prototype.

It’s called…well, it doesn’t really have a name. It’s made by an engineering company called ABB, so for now, it’s just been called the ABB NASCAR EV prototype. No, my caps lock key is not stuck.

Is NASCAR Going Electric?

ABB teamed up with NASCAR to build a vision of the sport’s future, and that future is sleek, it’s silent, and may one day make gas-guzzling racecars as dead as the fossilized dinosaurs they run on.

ABB didn’t build this prototype on its own. It got some help from automotive heavyweights Ford, Chevy, and Toyota. It’s outfitted with a 78-kilowatt-hour battery, and it can generate up to 1000 kilowatts of peak power, which would

The EV prototype, built with help from Ford, Chevy, and Toyota, packs a 78-kilowatt-hour battery, punches out up to 1,000 kilowatts of peak power. It also has a technology called regenerative braking, which is a system that captures kinetic energy as a car decelerates and turns it into electrical energy that it stores in the battery.

It’s not quite a perpetual motion machine, but it’s close.

While NASCAR has long been associated with beer-soaked tailgates, the smell of burning rubber, and the unrelenting war cry of internal combustion, the sport now finds itself awkwardly trying to date “environmental sustainability.” As long as there is effort applied, people can change. Can a multibillion-dollar sports organization radically alter the literal fuel on which the sport is based?

Probably not! At least not anytime soon. The official word is that while EVs look cool in ads and maybe appeal to the handful of folks in the middle of the Venn diagram of stock-car racing fans and die-hard environmentalists, the internal combustion engine still rules, regardless of how much it’s doing its part to choke the planet.

The switch to electric engines does seem inevitable, even if that inevitability is far down the line. So while the fate of the electric NASCAR engine is still up in the air, one thing is for certain—if they ever do make the switch, it’s going to be a much quieter sport, and the eardrums of millions will be better off for it.