EVs now have more power than F1 cars! How is this even legal? | Electric cars such as the 2026 Tesla Model 3 Performance, Kia EV6 GT and Hyundai Ioniq 5 N may have gone too far with their power outputs | Opinion

High-powered cars used to either be the exotic with owners who had paid big dollars for big output or the affordable modified ones nurtured by enthusiasts handy with spanners. Both groups have copped their fair share of noise from both politicians, regulators and the community for possessing their overpowered beasts.

In the past five years Australia has been inundated with electric cars with horsepower so huge that it makes the output of even the most exotic or modified car seem cute. Yet they haven’t been met with the same backlash received by their loud combustion cousins.

You can probably blame Tesla for setting the power standard so high that it became the selling point for almost all electric vehicles. Tesla found the way to sell electric cars was to make them quick and sexy. If you paid more you could unlock software that made your Tesla faster — they named it Ludicrous mode and Plaid mode. So you could have a ridiculously fast car now without the super car price or the mechanical desire to do it yourself.

Tesla’s Model 3 Performance has 461kW and a 0-100km/h time of 3.1 seconds. And it’s a regular car you’d walk past in a supermarket car park without even noticing.

Other brands paid close attention and copied, and now family favourite brands have their own super powered EVs.

Kia’s EV6 GT has 485kW and has a 0-100km/h time of 3.5 seconds, Hyundai has the 478kW Ioniq 5 N and can reach 100km/h in 3.4 seconds. Newer brands are pushing those limits even further with the coming Polestar 5 four door sedan packing 650kW.

And these aren’t even really considered high performance or exotic by EV standards.

Just to put that in perspective the most powerful HSV GTS with a 6.2-litre supercharged V8 made 430kW when Holden stopped manufacturing in Australia 10 years ago.

If you want exotic or high performance in an EV then look no further than Porsche’s Cayenne Turbo Electric, a large luxury family SUV with 850kW. If that means nothing to you, then look at it this way, Formula 1 cars in the 2026 Championship produce 750kW.

So why do electric cars have so much power? It’s easy for electric motors to produce enormous power and torque compared to petrol and diesel counterparts. In its simplest terms a motor consists of a magnetic field within a cylinder that contains a rotor, which when supplied with an electric current spins creating mechanical energy.

You can place an electric motor on a car’s axle and the drive is direct and acceleration instantaneous because there’s no gearing required as revs increase. 

Think of an electric drill, you pull the trigger and its spinning instantly. Same with the motor in an electric car, and that’s why acceleration can be so rapid in even a garden variety model.

This segues us to electric hypercars with outputs that are almost unfathomable. Yangwang is BYD’s high-performance luxury brand and its U9 has four electric motors each making 550kW, which gives the thing a 0-100km/h time of less than 2.4 seconds. That’s painfully quick, I mean it takes 2.4 seconds to read this sentence.

And at 100km/h you are covering 28 metres per second — a basketball court a second.

So how is this even legal? Well currently in Australia there are no restrictions on the power output of a vehicle, just restrictions on who can drive them, as in those on their P-plates. New drivers are restricted to vehicles that don’t exceed a power-to-weight ratio.

And that raises a good point about power-to-weight ratios because EVs are heavy due to their dense batteries and that’s also another reason why the higher output is required. Still with how easy it is for a motor to make big power, overcoming the weight is easy.

But that weight does cause problems when it comes to dynamic ability, and while many regular EVs have high outputs, their handling is affected. The car may be small, but it has the weight of a large SUV.

So while I love the quick acceleration unless it’s a high performance EV such as the Cayenne it’s only going to be fun in a straight line and I’m here for it although that novelty wears off quicker than the new car smell.

There are benefits to good acceleration that don’t involve showing off. Being able to move quickly and decisively can be good for intersections without traffic lights, merging on motorways and overtaking, all without breaking the speed limit of course. The all-wheel drive offered by dual motor EVs often mean excellent traction for even more stability.

That said, being able to move quickly doesn't leave much time to make decisions such as a braking to avoid a collision with the car in front or stopping for a pedestrian that's stepped out onto the road.

Until now the ever increasing power of EVs feels like it's gone unnoticed, but it's not hard to imagine a time in the future when regulators put limits on how much power an EV can make. And that, probably a very good thing.