Extreme E Announces New Hydrogen Racing Series Starting 2024

Extreme E, the offroad SUV racing championship, has announced that from 2024 there will be a partner series called Extreme H running alongside its all-electric competition. The Extreme H cars will use the same powertrain as the Odyssey 21 EVs of Extreme E, but the primary power source will be a hydrogen fuel cell rather than batteries. The question is how different will that make the racing compared to battery power?

The Extreme H series will operate in parallel to Extreme E, on the same days with the same sporting format. The hydrogen used to power the car will be from green sources, rather than derived from fossil fuels, although site transportation may involve the use of ammonia or methanol as a carrier. However, using hydrogen isn’t such a new thing for Extreme E. In partnership with AFC, Extreme E has been powering its race sites and EVs with hydrogen fuel cells since the first event in Saudi Arabia last year.

Announcing Extreme H at the first race in Extreme E Season 2 in Neom, Saudi Arabia, Alejandro Agag, chief executive and founder of Extreme E, said: “Extreme E was designed to be a testbed for innovation and solutions for mobility. It has become increasingly clear to us that creating a hydrogen racing series is a natural evolution of our mission to showcase the possibilities of new technologies in the race to fight climate issues. Sport is the fastest and most effective platform for driving innovation, and by using the existing Extreme E platform we can also utilize our transport, talent, and operations to ensure we are minimizing footprint in the process. This effectively means we can have double the race action, with marginal additional impact.”

Hydrogen and batteries often look like direct competitors – and if you witness some of the online discussions on the subject, it’s almost like a verbal war. But they should be seen more as complementary, with the two EV variants having strengths and weaknesses. Hydrogen isn’t well suited to personal transportation, thanks to its much lower energy efficiency compared to batteries, making those who still champion it as a solution in this area look somewhat misguided. However, it does potentially have a range advantage, and the Extreme E races are rather short, usually consisting of just one lap of the course each for the male and female drivers. It is also useful for transporting energy to remote locations, as Extreme E has already been doing with its AFC hydrogen fuel cell site generators.

Extreme E hasn’t published any of the specifications for the Extreme H car yet, beyond that it will be using the same powertrain, which in the Odyssey 21 produces 544hp, a 0-62mph sprint of just 4 seconds, and a 125mph top speed – all incredibly impressive figures from an offroad-focused SUV weighting 1,650kg. Another drawback with hydrogen fuel cell technology is the slight delay it experiences before delivering full electrical power, which will mean there will still need to be a small battery to help deliver peak power during hard acceleration. Agag claims it will be about 5kWh in the hydrogen Extreme H.

However, Agag is also still considering exactly how Extreme H will articulate with Extreme E. Although hydrogen could provide longer races, that would still present logistical problems transporting enough hydrogen to the remote event sites, alongside the fuel already used for the site power and to run the AFC generators that recharge the Extreme E cars. So Agag has said the Extreme H races will have the same format as the Extreme E ones – short, generally just a couple of laps. However, Agag is mulling over whether Extreme H will run independently in parallel, or lead to a “final final” where the winning Extreme E cars compete against the winning Extreme H cars. The cars may even totally interleave, so that teams have an Extreme E-H relay as they already do with their male and female drivers.

Either way, it’s another feather in Exreme E’s cap as the pioneering eco-friendly race series. Extreme E is already proving itself to be the most sustainable form of motor racing. Its sustainability report for Season 1 revealed that its carbon footprint is already net zero, where not even Formula E comes close and Formula 1 is far off, emitting the equivalent of 55,652 passenger cars every season. While the position of hydrogen in the decarbonization of global energy remains controversial, denying it has any role at all would be short-sighted. The new Extreme H series will help show what potential hydrogen might have, particularly in the remote areas where Extreme E races take place, which don’t tend to have their own reliable mains electricity supply.