- Steve O’Donnell explains how EV discussions in NASCAR have evolved since the start.
- One OEM has already dropped plans to bring EVs to the sport.
- NASCAR fans aren’t keen on trading engine roar for silent EVs.
Steve O’Donnell, CEO of NASCAR, has stepped in to clear the air around talk of electric vehicles in the sport. The debate has been simmering since 2023, when the sanctioning body presented its first EV prototype to show what a green-energy stock car might look like in the Cup Series. Back then, it was not very well received by the audience.
It flared up again when NASCAR Event Management president John Probst, then serving as Executive Vice President and Chief Racing Development Officer, spoke about the idea of using a CUV-bodied EV as the race car for the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series, saying the move could give that division a clearer identity.
The remark lit a fuse. NASCAR officials later walked it back, stressing that Probst was referring to body style, not a shift to an all-electric series, after pushback from fans and figures within the garage. Now, O’Donnell has laid out where things stand and how the conversation reached this point.
Steve O’Donnell states that one OEM has already backed off from having EVs in NASCAR
In a recent appearance on Kenny Wallace’s show, O’Donnell spoke about pressure from an OEM that first pushed NASCAR toward hybrid engines and then toward a full electric switch. According to O’Donnell, the same team later changed course when faced with the reality of that path.
“Let me say five years ago, one of our OEMs said, ‘If you are not hybrid within the next two years, we are out of NASCAR.’ Oh, okay, so we better start looking at that. Within a year, they said, ‘If you are not electric, we are out of NASCAR.’”
“So then we didn’t say we’re going all electric, but we said we’d put a car together. That same group, then when we presented the potential for an electric series, said, well, that seems really dumb. That’s not NASCAR. That’s not entertaining. We said we agree. So what we did was we put that technology in place just to showcase that we could, depending on where the world goes. You got to be ready for looking at things.”
For now, NASCAR’s research and development arm continues to explore the technology, but a switch to fuel engines does not appear to be on the horizon anytime soon.
The fan base has made its stance clear more than once. For many, the sound of an engine is part of the sport’s heartbeat. Some can even pick out details from that sound alone, from engine traits to the series or generation of the car. If NASCAR strips that away, the experience changes completely, and NASCAR will likely lose more of its fan following than in the last two decades. Cars gliding past in silence would not carry the same weight, and that is a line many are not ready to cross.
