The goal is powertrain innovation, without making teams divert their funds to developing new chassis and aero parts. The powertrain, beyond the battery, is free for manufacturers to compete on. Only the first season (2014–15) had completely identical cars.

Isn't battery where innovation is most needed?

Most of the concern with battery innovation is you can burn a lot of money very fast, as far as I'm aware, and I believe the manufacturers believe the powertrain to be more useful to invest in.

It's also where innovation would require funding a whole science lab with years long return times. There's already a huge amount of funding going into battery tech already as well.

Yes!

For one, motorsport have actual spec series with nearly identical cars that highlight driver skill. They're used as feeder series to test and promote talented drivers.

More to the point of Fomula E, the degree of standardization is changing as the series progresses, with increasingly more aspects of the chassis and powertrain open to development.

Having a standard platform at the start made sense to minimize cost and bring in new competitors who don't want to spend the $200+ million a year like Formula 1 or WEC, where only 2 or 3 factory teams dominate and make for boring racing. Even a big company with a racing pedigree like Honda hasn't been able to field a competitive engine in F1.

As the formula matures they can start focusing on more areas of technical innovation.

The cars aren't standardized, the chassis is. The electric motor, inverter, gearbox and cooling system are all developed by the teams. This just prevents teams from having to waste funds on developing aero.

Same as A1GP - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A1_Grand_Prix#Chassis_and_engi...

> This regulation provided a level playing field in which driver skill and team effort should become the primary factor for success.

Compared with F1 now where some teams can (effectively) "pay to win".

To be fair, the F1 teams pay to win by paying for some stunning engineering. The way the F1 rules are set up means that F1 is basically an engineering contest first and a racing series second. It's part of the reason that it is so great to watch.

.. and I say this as a McLaren fan (which, for those that don't follow F1, is a traditionally top F1 team that has had an absolutely woeful couple of years).

True. For example, Force India, one of the teams with the least amount of funding of all of them on circuit. They are competing way above their way class, in terms of money, and doing very well. It's actually pretty amazing how often they are in the points (top 10 race finish) for the resources they have. Talk about amazing engineering and process they must use to compete against Ferrari/Mercedes/Red bull.

Yep - one of the things Eddie Jordan did right, setting the environment up to really optimise for one condition (top speed). When you have limited resources, focus on the most important thing and then make up for other shortcomings with talent.

You mean differentiate on the driving skill and not who has the most cubic money?

Besides, it’s not the first race series to do that. Not much of an auto racing fan myself (MotoGP, please), but IROC comes to mind (Cameros for everyone!). Motorcycle Super Sport comes close, you can choose different manufacturers, but the bike has to be pretty close to stock. I’m sure bigger race fans can come up with other examples.

There's currently a big discussion about the future of LMP2 due to that sort of restrictive innovation, taking it closer to spec. Then there's the multitude of one-make series further down the ladder - certainly isn't a new phenomenon to have arbitrarily close cars from one or more manufacturers.