The Formula E Struggle: Why Electric Racing is Bleeding Money Despite Surging Global EV Adoption

Watching a Formula E race has a subtly weird quality. Compared to those bulky, lumbering prototypes from 2014, the cars are now truly fast. The circuits pass through some of the most famous cities in the world, including Shanghai, São Paulo, and Monaco. The audience is youthful, attentive, and obviously not merely nostalgic for combustion engines. Despite all of that enthusiasm and aspirations, the show has spent more money than it has earned for the majority of its existence.

That is the main conflict that no one wants to state clearly. Electric cars are no longer a specialty. They are sold by almost all of the world’s major automakers in dozens of countries, parked outside supermarkets, and lined up at charging stations on highway rest stops. If there has ever been a time when a racing series based solely on electric vehicles should be profitable, culturally significant, and commercially successful, it is now. However, Formula E’s journey to steady profit has been, at best, sluggish. At worst, it’s been a warning story wrapped in eye-catching branding.

The British company that manages the series, Formula E Operations, accumulated net losses of about $155 million over the course of its first six years. By 2019, it had achieved its first-ever underlying profit, which was reportedly slightly more than $1 million on over $215 million in revenue. That isn’t a margin. It’s hardly a rounding error. And even that achievement was fueled by sponsorship agreements from businesses keen to project green credentials rather than race hosting fees or sold-out grandstands. This provides a crucial insight into what Formula E truly sells.

It sells both racing and optics. That’s a structural reality, not an insult. Formula 1, which makes hundreds of millions from the fees host cities pay to be on the schedule, has more pricing power than this series. In its early years, Formula E frequently had no hosting fees at all. It reportedly paid venues to hold the race in certain instances. It made sense to build the audience first, then make money. Ten years later, the difference in hosting fees between Formula E and Formula 1 is still astounding; the average F1 race hosting fee is estimated to be about forty times higher than the equivalent for Formula E.

Additionally, there is an audience conundrum that hasn’t been completely solved. Approximately 500 million people watch the show worldwide, a figure that is regularly and enthusiastically cited. However, the picture becomes more hazy as you dig a little deeper. Some championship-deciding events drew only a small portion of the viewership those figures would imply, at least in terms of live, engaged audiences, according to observers keeping track of individual races.

Formula E’s social media reach still lags behind that of Formula 2, a feeder series with much smaller budgets, no manufacturer support, and no city center glitz. It’s possible that the total number of viewers includes informal digital exposure that doesn’t result in the kind of intense fan loyalty that propels merchandise sales, premium broadcast deals, and the kind of cultural gravity that makes a sport truly essential.

Relationships with manufacturers are also more brittle than they seem. It is true and noteworthy that Jaguar, Porsche, and other companies found race-day data helpful for their road car development programs. According to early reports, Jaguar’s I-PACE benefited from range improvements linked to Formula E engineering. However, manufacturers are not motivated by sentiment to continue racing. As recently as 2025, McLaren’s future in the series appeared uncertain, and concerns have been raised about whether the grid as a whole might contract rather than expand. The same cost controls that prevented Formula E from going into the kind of spending spiral that ended Le Mans prototype racing also restrict how far the sport can advance.

What Formula E has truly excelled at is surviving. In motorsport, eleven seasons is a long time. The majority of gimmick-driven series, such as Grand Prix Masters, A1 Grand Prix, and Superleague Formula, only lasted a few years before failing due to their own flaws. Tight racing, urban settings, and a format appropriate for shorter attention spans and streaming habits are what Formula E discovered to be genuine. Even doubtful fans agree that the racing has improved, and the cars are significantly faster and more capable than the Gen 1 machines. The Monaco ePrix, which produced almost 200 overtakes, was the kind of event that truly alters a conversation.

However, thriving is not the same as surviving. There is a version of the story of Formula E in which the global EV moment elevates everything, where broadcast rights become genuinely valuable, city governments compete to host races, and every new Tesla owner or Hyundai Ioniq driver becomes a natural Formula E convert. That version is still feasible. Simply put, that isn’t what has truly occurred yet. The Formula E profitability curve and the EV adoption curve are not converging as everyone had anticipated; instead, they are operating in parallel.

The cars may not have as much of an impact on their eventual meeting as the business plan. The audience story is part of the sport. It is culturally aligned. How to convert all of that into long-term, recurring revenue that doesn’t need shareholders to keep the lights on is still a mystery.