1 Old news and maybe not accurate, but:

The prototype vehicle developed by Formulec, a French maker of electric racing cars, is a two-gear machine that runs off lithium-iron batteries and weighs 780kg.

It has a maximum speed of 220km per hour, and an acceleration of 0 to 100km/h in three seconds. It can run for 25 minutes before needing charging, meaning drivers will have the use of a second car to complete the one-hour race.

F1 cars are capable of going from 0 to 100km/h in 1.7 seconds, and cars can reach speeds of more than 300km/h.

So about what you'd expect from an electric race car, I guess.  (And I dunno how 2 x 25 minutes = 60 minutes.  Maybe the driver runs the last 10, as a motorsport biathalon?)

2 I'm guessing that while the second car is on the track, the first one is getting recharged. All it needs is enough juice to do the final ten minutes. Plus, if there are some yellow-flag laps, the endurance time goes up and they might not need to switch twice.

There would be great pressure for the car designers to improve battery life. Getting to 30 minutes of endurance would mean only one car switch, not two, for a race with no cautions.

3 I bet there is only one car, and they switch the battery pack.

4

Yeah, I suppose.  The foot race would be funnier, though.

So since the article also talked about the green-ness of these cars... does producing an entire second electric vehicle really do less damage to the environment than the fuel burned in one normal one?  (Whether you believe in CO₂-caused AGW, or just worry about the other less-fun-to-breathe chemicals in automotive exhaust?)  I'm guessing "no", myself.

5 And I'm not sure I'd want easily-removable batteries in a race car like this.  That much energy density laying on the track due to a wreck (or a pit lane mistake) could be... exciting.

6 Joke? Perhaps if that's how you define it. But I'll take the joke, then, thanks.

F1 is supposed to be the pinnacle of the motorsport, but if we look at the track record of F1 drivers in NASCAR, it's not all that spectacular even for proven F1 winners such as Juan-Pablo Montoya. So, I don't really care for F1 technical superiority.

Lots of other series provide excellent racing. F1 only has the bling and glitz going for it. If they took all the cars and drivers away and swapped it for, say, Australian v8, I would be just as happy following it, and the racing would be probably improved.

BTW, I raced an electric kart at K-1 racing in San Francisco and it was quite nice. It's a racing application where endurance is not that important. And the throttle response of electric car is incomparable.

7 There are reasons I haven't written about Formula E at all over at The Pond, even though I've known about it for a couple of years.

They do make a sound, by the way.  If you've ever heard a battery-powered R/C car, it's like that.  A little deeper, maybe, but not all that much.  It's not pleasant.

8 Out of curiousity, why couldn't they use silver-oxide batteries?  Expense?

9 No Jetsons whine? Feh.

10 They are quite expensive but they also contain mercury. A wreck would be...bad.

11 Silver-oxide batteries aren't rechargeable.

12 Assuming the battery pack lasts 25 minutes at top speed, it would be a very interesting race to watch if (a) it lasts 60 minutes and (b) they allow only one battery change.

Might be difficult to ensure that all the battery packs are identical, though.

13 @Pete:

If F1 was Aussie V8 racing, it'd be more hilarious, at least.  (And more of the work would be done by the drivers than the tech crews)

Though I really think they could just do it like RC cars, but with real sized ones.  That would probably make the racing more fun than just betting how far the cars will make it, in a weird inversion of Le Mans style.

Though Top Gear kind of beat me to that idea.

14 Another question: do high performance electric vehicles exhibit more torque than gas powered ones? If so, would that change the style of racing to be more of an acceleration battle?

Or am I totally off base?

15 Electric engines may have different torque curves for some reason. I'm fairly ignorant about them, perhaps it has to do with the current DC vs AC and being synchronous or asynchronous. The common DC motor has most torque at  0 RPM, which linearly falls. So, they are awesome off the line. However, when common electric cars are put on the dyno, they always have a very flat plateu at the low RPM. It is so flat that I am certain that it's capped in software, perhaps to make sure wires do not melt.