Nissan has found its GEN4 customer team, and it is one of Formula E’s most decorated operations. The Japanese manufacturer announced a multi-year agreement to supply its GEN4 powertrain to Andretti Formula E starting with Season 13, the first campaign of Formula E’s next technical chapter, which debuts at the end of 2026.
For Andretti, the move closes a difficult chapter. The team raced with BMW hardware before that manufacturer exited abruptly in autumn 2020, leaving Andretti with almost no notice and barely enough runway to stay in the championship. The team regrouped with Porsche for the GEN3 era starting in 2023, won the Drivers’ World Championship that same season with Jake Dennis, and then watched the relationship with Porsche cool considerably in the years that followed. Nissan is the next chapter.
For Nissan, the timing is useful. McLaren left Formula E before the 2025/26 season began, stripping the manufacturer of its customer arrangement. Adding Andretti restores that structure and doubles Nissan’s on-track presence. With four Nissan-powered cars competing, the GEN4 development loop gets more data points, more laps, and more engineering feedback from two distinct teams working the same hardware under different conditions.
The human element of the partnership is worth noting. Oliver Rowland, who drives for the Nissan Formula E Team and secured the Season 11 Drivers’ World Championship with four victories and three pole positions, brings current title-holder credibility to the technical collaboration. Andretti’s Dennis brings the 2023 championship perspective. Two drivers who know what it takes to win titles in this series will be feeding development data back through the GEN4 era simultaneously. That is a meaningful engineering asset, not just a marketing arrangement.
Nissan has been the most active manufacturer in committing to the GEN4 framework. The company signed up for the era, which runs until 2030, in March 2024, becoming the first manufacturer to do so. That early commitment gave Nissan’s engineering program a head start, and recent shakedown runs have reportedly shown early promise under the new technical regulations. GEN4 represents Formula E’s most significant technical step since the championship’s founding, and arriving at it with an established customer team already locked in gives Nissan a structural advantage heading into Season 13.
Nissan has competed in Formula E since Season 5 in 2018/19, making it the first and only Japanese manufacturer to enter the series. After acquiring full ownership of the e.dams team in April 2022, the manufacturer has run its own operation and, until McLaren’s exit, a customer team alongside it. The GEN3 era runs through the end of Season 12 in 2025/26, so the Andretti partnership picks up exactly where the current technical ruleset leaves off.
The announcement came in Tokyo during the buildup to the city’s first-ever night E-Prix, with the Nissan Formula E Team running a special one-off NISMO-inspired livery to mark the occasion. The pageantry is appropriate: Nissan is entering its final home race weekend of the GEN3 era, and the GEN4 roadmap is now in clearer shape than it was a week ago.
Andretti has survived manufacturer exits before and has the infrastructure to make new technical partnerships work quickly. Nissan has the championship pedigree and a GEN4 program that has been running longer than most. Two organizations that know how to win in Formula E, working the same hardware. The grid is going to be interesting.
Source: Nissan. Images courtesy of Nissan.
