Decoding the ABB Nascar EV Prototype

This isn’t your typical Nascar racing machine. For 75 years, American stock-car competitions unfolded to the star-spangled tune of roaring, gas-guzzling V8 engines. When this prototype took to the course at Nascar’s Chicago Street Race for demonstration laps, it left the starting line in a cloud of tire smoke, scrambling for traction and rocketing down the straightaway—emitting no sound other than the distant, high-pitched whir of electric motors.

This is the ABB Nascar EV Prototype, shaped suspiciously like an SUV, and powered by nothing but batteries. Here’s how it could form the future of America’s most popular racing series.

It’s called stock-car racing because, back in the day, Nascar teams ran beefed-up versions of cars you could find in any American showroom. Compared to the unrecognizably complex machines at the Indianapolis 500 or any Formula 1 race, a winner that looks like your family sedan is a brilliantly simple marketing tool. But today, vanishingly few Americans drive the low-slung muscle coupes you see in Nascar’s marquee events. Our nation gets around in SUVs and crossovers, a growing portion of which are hybrid or all-electric.

So Nascar’s in-house research and development team built the experiment you see here. It has a bulkier silhouette than the Camaros, Mustangs, and Camrys that compete in the Cup Series, the top rung of Nascar’s three-tiered racing ladder. In a press release, Nascar describes the shape as “a generic Crossover Utility Vehicle (CUV) body made of sustainable flax-based composite.”

Underneath, a liquid-cooled 78-kWh battery sends power to three electric motors, one powering the front wheels, two at the rear—the same layout you’d find in high-performance EVs from Tesla, Rivian, and Lucid, among others.

More Power, Less Speed

In total, the Nascar EV makes 1,300 horsepower—nearly double the power of a Cup Series machine. It accelerates quicker than any gasoline-burning Nascar racer, but in test laps around Martinsville Speedway in Virginia, the EV prototype ran two-tenths of a second slower than the current cars, largely due to the added weight of all those batteries.