Andretti will switch from Porsche to Nissan as its manufacturer partner for the Gen4 era of Formula E beginning at the end of 2026.

A collaboration between the two companies has long since been mostly agreed and is set to be announced at the end of the present season, meaning that this campaign will be the last that Andretti competes in with Porsche - which is set to adjust its model and field four factory cars next season.

Nissan is racing without a customer this season after the demise of the NEOM McLaren team last year, meaning that any chance of a manufacturers' crown to go with its drivers’ title won by Oliver Rowland last season is a non-starter.

While Andretti team principal Roger Griffiths was reticent to specifically talk about Nissan, he did tell The Race last week that the team he leads is looking for “a closer relationship” with a manufacturer in Gen4.

“When we first got into conversations with Porsche [in 2021], it was always this strong desire to be an integral part in their path, to be an integral part of making the car faster, or making the car more efficient, developing the control strategies,” said Griffiths.

“We're certainly hoping, going forward in Season 13 [2026-27] that we can have a closer relationship [with a manufacturer].

"It really didn't work out [up until now] for a variety of reasons. But we're hopeful that with a reset on the manufacturer side of things, we can start afresh and that we can be more integrated, be more involved in the actual manufacturer testing, spend more time at the track working with their engineers, their engineers working with ours, developing IP together, too.

Andretti entered its era with Porsche still reasonably fresh from a bitter-sweet few seasons with BMW. Between 2016 and 2022 it raced in different forms with the German manufacturer, becoming essentially a service provider to BMW in the Gen2 era.

That was when it tasted spasmodic success- with Antonio Felix da Costa, Alexander Sims, Maximilian Guenther and Jake Dennis scoring wins for the team that was known as BMW i Andretti until 2021.

In the autumn of 2020, just days after Audi had announced its intention to quit Formula E, BMW followed suit, much to the concern of Andretti - which had no inkling the decision was being made until a day before it was announced.

That left the team in a precarious position and, largely unknown to the world at large, it came within weeks of exiting Formula E completely. But a saviour package was discovered and it continued into the 2022 season still with BMW powertrains before doing the deal with Porsche for the Gen3 era starting in 2023.

Andretti has proved to be a durable outfit in Formula E because in 2015 it had to back-track on a disastrous plan to run its own derived powertrain in the first season open to non-spec components. The ATEC-01, formed in partnership with Houston Mechatronics and TE Connectivity, was so unreliable that it barely got going in pre-season testing - and an embarrassing U-turn was forced for the 2015-16 season as Andretti reverted to a spec Spark-Renault season one package.

That triggered a quest to work with a more traditional manufacturer entity - and when BMW showed interest in Formula E, it was Andretti with whom BMW partnered in 2018. That manufacturer partnership model is something that is unlikely to change in the future, according to Griffiths.

“Honestly, at this point, I don't think we would ever be a manufacturer in our own right, just given the knowledge base that we would have to have to develop a powertrain to be successful,” he said.

“We like the ability to make our own decisions and not be told what to do, but we would like to be part of the process in developing the car, and maybe some of the things that we can bring to the table benefit our manufacturer partner as well.

“We really like it to be a little bit more of a two-way door that things come in and out, and not just being dictated to or told how we're going to run the programme.”

Andretti is likely to get that much more with Nissan, which had a generally harmonious relationship with McLaren from 2023 to 2025. It brought an E-Prix win for Sam Bird at Sao Paulo in 2024, although the closest McLaren ever finished to Nissan was in the first Gen3 season when it was just seven points behind its manufacturer supplier.

Nissan has had a reasonably strong start to its Gen4 testing with a good number of laps conducted in the initial group test at Monteblanco in November when Benoit Treluyer acted as an early development driver. He will be joined by reserve and test driver Bird at the second group test held at the Almeria track in southern Spain this week.