Elle Cayabyab Gitlin
Venturi engineer Louis-Marie Blondel (left) talks to us about Venturi's Formula E program and the powertrain development process.
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When we last met up with Venturi, it was in the Buckeye state. We'd gone to meet VBB-3, the electric land speed record car it's built with the Ohio State University. Meanwhile, back at the company's Monegasque HQ, work has been underway on next season's Formula E electric race car. Since we were in that neck of the woods, we popped over to the company's home base to find out what it has in store.
These days it's better to think of Venturi as an engineering and design firm for electric powertrains, rather than a low volume sportscar producer. It will still make you a road-going (or maybe even off-road) EV sports car, but you'd have to ask nicely and you may have to wait a few months to take delivery. The company is now focused on ever-better electric powertrains, and it does this by testing them in some of the most extreme ways possible.
There's the Antarctica, an eight-wheel EV for transporting French scientists around the South Pole. At the opposite end of the temperature and speed dials is VBB-3, designed to eclipse the internal combustion engine's top speed on sun-baked salt flats. And then there's Formula E. The organizers want the sport to be directly relevant for road-going EV development, says Venturi's Thierry Apparu. "It's why the races are on the streets." The lessons learned in all these environments funnel back into know-how that can be applied to EV powertrains that people will drive in the future.
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