Sometimes the revolution is quiet.
That's certainly the case with Formula E.
Launched in 2014, it's an all-electric racing circuit
that wants to capture the excitement
around one of the most successful sports in the world:
Evans cuts across,
and the crunch of carbon fiber.
It's a plan that's at once obvious
and utterly audacious.
Sure, the world's accelerating toward a greener future
spurred by the devastating effects of climate change.
But success for Formula E means a tricky balance
of competing stakeholders.
We're talking about automakers eager for a new technology,
would-be customers for electric cars,
and of course, finicky fans.
And some of them are quite happy to keep watching faster,
louder cars speed through the world's greatest cities.
The main power of sports is the fact that it touches
the heart, the mind, the souls of its fans.
Definitely, transport sector is one of the big areas
where the world needs massively to improve.
If you think about the 25
most watched television programs ever,
24 were sport events.
If you can use the power of sport for a positive agenda,
that's really powerful.
I'm here in Monaco, which is known for lots of things,
especially things related to money.
It's also really known for its role
in the world of motorsports, fast cars.
In fact, the Monaco Grand Prix happens
on the streets just behind me.
Monaco is a tiny country,
the world's second smallest, in fact,
trailing only the Vatican.
It's tucked along the Riviera between France and Italy.
And when you think of Monaco,
the first things that come to mind
are probably James Bond movies or the fast beautiful car.
Its status as one of the world's premier motor racing stages
came after World War II,
when Formula One races began emerging through Europe.
The sport quickly attracted
both drivers willing to travel the world to race
and a rabid fan base hoping to witness the spectacle
in person or on TV.
While Formula One racers
could initially buy and race their own cars,
it also attracted major automakers
like Mercedes-Benz, Alfa Romeo, and Maserati
to showcase their latest and greatest motor tech.
Tech like active suspension and carbon brakes
that would eventually distill down to cars we see
on the road today,
F1 also created legends like Juan Manuel Fangio,
Lewis Hamilton, and of course, Michael Schumacher.
Michael Schumacher
leads the world championship.
Formula One's a huge sport in Europe and Asia,
averaging more than 900,000 viewers per race.
That's on par with some of the UFC fights
we see here in the States,
with the audience growing partly due to an unlikely source:
Netflix.
Formula One is the ultimate competition.
"Drive to Survive,"
a series that documents the drama on
and especially off the track
is one of the streamers' biggest hits
of the past several years.
It's drawn in a whole new generation of fans
tuning in and showing up to the races.
Netflix are a real bunch of [****] aren't they?
Every year, legendary racers
navigate the hairpin turns
in cities across the world
for throngs of fans perched on rooftops and balconies,
just trying to catch a glimpse.
And a few decades ago,
Alejandro Agag was a kid
watching from his parents' apartment right here in Monaco.
Oh yeah, that was the first time I saw a race,
from the terrace of our apartment
where my parents were living.
Previously, there was a Formula One driver living there.
No kidding.
So they were, in the drawers you would see some stickers
and some things
and it was great to have that memory.
Alejandro is the chairman of Formula E.
Politician turned businessman,
he found his way to motorsport
and ultimately ran a team in 2007
in the second division of Formula One.
He went on to recruit sponsors to the circuit
and there he saw an opportunity.
I was, at the time,
working around the Formula One business,
mainly with sponsors.
In every email,
it had some kind of concern about sustainability,
about carbon emissions.
So that's kind of when I thought,
we should create a green version of it.
Formula E is trying to ride and accelerate
a movement towards sustainability that has urgently risen
in the past several years,
driven by young activists like Greta Thunberg,
part of a generation speaking out loudly
about the climate crisis.
When I started my career 10 years ago,
sustainability was something that was kind of trendy,
but not exactly, you know,
like the central priorities.
Definitely, Formula E is much more
than a race that is putting cars on track,
but Formula E is really a platform that is here to showcase
that a sustainable lifestyle,
that we are going to be finding really cool,
really exciting.
This is Julia Pallé,
she's the head of sustainability for Formula E.
To make sure the race circuit and its teams
are living up to the big promise
of helping solve that global crisis.
My mission is to make Formula E
the most sustainable sport possible.
This has now been the first sport in the world
to achieve net zero carbon since inception,
phasing out of plastic onsite,
offering vegetarian options to our fans,
trying to use less planes
to fly over our freight and so on.
But how to go green
and who's leading the charge has become tricky.
Recently, big companies,
including those associated directly with fossil fuels
and their consumption,
have seen the commercial value
of moving toward being more sustainable.
Ford has pledged to invest $30 billion
in electric vehicles by 2025,
having just spent $11 billion this past September
on electric trucks and battery plants.
Volkswagen is more than doubling that,
with the goal of investing $83 billion
in the next four years.
And their involvement has made Alejandro's job trickier.
Some people will not get involved because,
maybe they say that we're doing this to look good.
I think so many companies, so many corporations,
would do more for the environment
if they were not scared of someone just coming
and calling them green washing.
You have to include everyone on the climate action.
If you don't include everybody,
including the big oil companies,
including the big energy companies, including everyone,
you will not succeed.
That's especially challenging
when at least part of Formula E's success
relies on the investment of the major car companies.
The relationships there have been important,
but thorny at times.
The car companies very much have a vested interest
in using the technologies of Formula E
and its teams are collectively developing their cars.
Motorsport is a sport where the driver puts helmets,
puts specific gloves,
so we can take more risks
and test very ambitious technologies.
This is Xavier Pinon,
he's the technical director for FIA,
the governing body that sits across
both Formula One and Formula E.
The voltage for the usual EV car in the street,
it's something between 200, 300, 400 volts.
In a Formula E car, it's close to 1000 volt.
For sure, we will not be able to take this apart
from the racecar to put it on the road car
but the technology inside will be the same.
Thanks to the motorsport,
the car manufacturer can take more risks,
can accelerate the research and development
with the supplier.
But keeping the manufacturers engaged via teams
has proven elusive.
Both BMW and Audi earlier this year
said they wouldn't field teams in the upcoming season
claiming they have what they need for now,
from a technical perspective,
to help with their EV push.
Alejandro?
He's unfazed.
He said it was a natural circle of life
he'd seen before in motorsports.
It happened in Formula One.
We had a few manufacturers, German manufacturers,
that came on board.
The budget go up, and then they say,
"Oh, it's too expensive."
And they leave.
For other car makers,
Formula E continues to be a valuable lab,
especially as EVs seek to make the jump
from selling to affluent customers in the west
to more emerging markets.
The latter is where Mahindra Group is focused.
When we got into Formula E
we were really thrilled
with the level of competition we got.
We were now, for the first,
time having a platform to show the quality of our product
against what was perceived the best in the world.
There's no reason why a Mercedes or a BMW
in the Indian market should command a 250% premium.
This is Dilbagh Gill, he runs Mahindra's racing team.
He's a veteran of that Indian conglomerate
and deeply tied to sports in general,
and motorsports in particular.
When the opportunity to run the Formula E team came up
at a dinner almost a decade ago, he volunteered.
We were evaluating motorsport platforms in 2012
after some amount of success with the motorcycle racing.
And when Formula E came to us,
it sort of segwayed really into what we were looking at
in the next 10 years in terms of our mobility solution.
So we took a call to participate.
I was with, I think Anand Mahindra
and a couple of other people
at a dinner in Delhi, I just raised my hand and said,
can I have the opportunity to run the team?
And yeah, sometimes you gotta be careful what you wish for
because it comes true.
And that came true that evening.
Mahindra has a different market
in scale and potentially in terms of difficulty.
India's power grid is notoriously underdeveloped
and unreliable.
And the vehicle fleets aren't just mid-sized sedans
and SUVs in many parts of that country,
but small vehicles called tuk-tuks.
Interestingly today,
the largest selling product which we have
is electric tuk-tuks.
We are selling, I think maybe 5 - 6,000 per month
and it's only increasing.
It's just that we can't keep up
with the demand at this point in time.
When you talk about pollution,
we are not only just talking about smog and smoke,
but we need to talk about noise pollution.
Think of that loud exhaust noise coming from a tuk-tuk,
which has started accelerating down the street,
and now you have silent tuk-tuks or a silent bus going by.
It tremendously improves the quality of life.
We did not join Formula E for technology.
We joined Formula E because we felt it was important for us
to be a partner in the sustainability effort.
So, Mahindra plays in 20 different industries.
Our biggest industries are auto, farm equipment,
we have a real estate business, and a logistics business.
We then have a solar business.
We've got a company that recycles automobiles,
and we've got a number of other businesses around
aerospace, defense, agriculture, and a few others.
They may have a huge slate of entities
in its roster, both Mahindra and Formula E recognize
the power of sport in cultures across the world
and its ability to influence change.
You've seen this, as you say, from different perspectives,
both at Michelin, and now being part of the Formula E team,
what is it about sports and sport that influences us,
do you think?
I think the main power of sports
is the fact that it touches literally the heart,
the mind, the souls of its fans.
Whatever is your sport
you're like a kid in front of the athletes.
You're really gonna like inspired by what they do,
what they achieve.
It's a sport where you've got,
not only the focus on climate change,
but more importantly, it's a lot more fun
because the racing happens in city centers.
And that will also have people start looking at EVs
in a different light
and say that this is a great option for us.
If you look at a per capita basis,
India is the world's worst sporting nation.
1.3 billion people and we really don't have
much of record in sports so I think through Mahindra,
through our various initiatives,
what we're trying to do is help people
to move from viewership to participation.
And as a recovering politician,
Alejandro also sees Formula E as an engine for
political and social change.
I just came back from Saudi Arabia
where I was scouting locations near Neom.
And it used to be very closed,
very strict.
Very closed, yeah.
And of course, there's still a long way to go,
but I think they're making good progress,
especially with women.
You know, now a woman can drive, for example.
Actually, Formula E was really part of the change
in Saudi
because we were the first event ever
where women and men non-related
were allowed to just be together and dance.
I mean, we were really proud
to be able to be part of the change.
For Alejandro,
Formula E is part of a broader portfolio
of electrification in sports.
He also runs Extreme E,
that's an off-road racing series
that uses all electric vehicles.
And the week we met in Monaco,
he was in town to take advantage
of another quintessential piece of Monaco:
the boating industry.
The Monaco yacht show was set to kick off,
and one evening Alejandro and his team
took over the Monaco yacht clubs' deck
to unveil an electric speed boat
that will race around that harbor,
and several other famous waterfronts,
starting in 2023.
We launched the Racebird,
the electric power boat that is going to be
the boat that is going to race
on the E One world championship,
electric power boat world championship.
This project is starting now all around the world,
that's why it's the best moment to create a championship,
an electric power boat championship,
to serve as a platform for the industry to kind of
showcase what it's doing to decarbonize.
You have to basically move to electric mobility,
electric propulsion in every space.
You have to move on the cars,
you have to move on the roads,
and you have to move on the sea.
This is the boat.
You see the foils,
the propeller in the back,
the battery will be behind the pilot,
the pilot goes there.
And it's a design by the designer Sophie Horne,
our region designer.
It looks like a fighter jet.
It looks like a fighter jet
combined with the X wing from Star Wars,
combined with many.
It's science fiction in many ways.
How fast?
60 knots.
Yeah, they go fast.
Now the real work begins, right?
Yeah, now the real work begins.
Cities, sponsors, build the calendar,
and start making everything real so in two years,
or less than two years, a year and a half
we hit the ground running.
In the meantime,
there's the matter of the upcoming season of Formula E.
Alejandro will spend a lot of time
thinking about sponsors and teams
and across those teams,
they'll be thinking about the next generation of technology
in their cars, known as Gen 3.
There's a lot of excitement around what that could mean
on the course and back in our garages.
Gen 3, we will reduce the weight of the car,
something like, 60 kilo.
The biggest improvement is the fact
that in the very beginning of the Formula E car
we used two battery per race for 45 minutes.
Next a year, in the end of 2022,
we will use only one car, one battery.
A lighter car with one less battery
means the car overall will have a smaller carbon footprint.
The battery is also expected to have a faster charge time.
That means it won't require a battery swap mid-race.
It also means all of us
could spend less time charging EVs
and more time on the road.
Then of course came the big existential questions
around the future of cars, racecars,
and naturally Formula One and Formula E.
Alejandro's vision is crystal clear,
someday they will be one.
I see a convergence at some point
within Formula One and Formula E
because Formula One is gonna lose its industry.
There's not going to be more combustion cars
sold in the UK in 2030
so what's the point of a combustion race in the UK in 2030,
if you cannot buy combustion cars?
So eventually, Formula One
is going to have to do something electric.
And the only way to do it is with us,
cause we have an exclusive license
from the international federation until 2039.
For now, the circuits exist in something like parallel,
with the much younger Formula E gaining some ground,
if only because it's in tune
with the broader global move to sustainability
and the stated goal of most major automakers,
to ditch internal combustion engines.
People perceive motorsport really glamorous
and stuff out there, but reality, trust me is just,
we are cleaning up a lot of stuff.
I feel it's not a job, it's a mission
and I'm not yet close to even finishing it.