I love a good overland adventure. Packing my stuff for a couple of days out in the countryside, exploring campsites, crossing rivers, and just connecting to the great outdoors is something a lot of folks love to do. I’ve gone overlanding with all sorts of vehicles—from a buddy’s Suzuki Jimny to my decked-out Toyota Hilux.
Heck, I’ve even taken my MT-07 overlanding, carefully navigating rocky roads and gravel trails.
But two things I have yet to experience are to go overlanding in an electric vehicle and in a UTV. So when I came across the new E-Nomad Concept from British open-wheeler manufacturer Ariel, I had a lightbulb moment. You see, the Nomad 2 is Ariel’s interpretation of a go-anywhere off-roader. It markets it as if it’s some completely novel concept. But in reality, we really know what it is—a street-legal UTV, something Executive Editor Jonathon Klein went on about in this article.
But the E-Nomad adds a touch of futurism into the equation, and it’s a vehicle that just might hold the key to tons of adventure for folks who want to go anywhere all while feeling connected to the great outdoors.
The E-Nomad ditches the internal combustion model’s Ford-derived turbocharged engine in favor of a punchy electric motor. According to Ariel, the E-Nomad pumps out 281 horsepower and 361 pound-feet of torque, translating to real-world performance of zero to 60 miles per hour in 3.4 seconds.
Like the regular Nomad, the E-Nomad features jacked-up suspension and all-terrain rubber—the perfect recipe for a backroad-carving rally car. Heck, it’s essentially an oversized electric side-by-side, one that’s street-legal in most parts of the world. Pretty cool, right?
But it gets even cooler.
Beneath the surface, the E-Nomad is quite a bit more than just an electrified Nomad. It weighs in at 896 kilograms, which is 46 kilograms heavier than the internal combustion Nomad, but quite frankly, not that much heavier. And Ariel’s managed to do this by making use of so-called “natural fiber bio-composite bodywork.”
The body panels are constructed using flax fibers—something Yamaha has been experimenting with for quite some time now. In Ariel’s case, the use of flax fibers not only makes the E-Nomad’s bodywork lighter, but it gives it a smaller carbon footprint, too. Ariel says that the flax-infused composite offers a 73-percent reduction in CO2 during production compared to carbon fiber. To make things even better, flax-infused composites are much more easily recycled than their carbon counterparts.
Oh, and did I mention that the E-Nomad has a roof? Now, I’m not exactly sure whether the roof is detachable, but judging from the press images, I’m inclined to believe that it is. Nevertheless, if I were to deck this thing out as an electric overlander, I’d strap on a roof rack, a bunch of luggage, a rear rack to carry my mountain bike, and of course, a roof-top tent and awning.
So yeah, theoretically, the E-Nomad could very well be an all-electric overlander. But there’s a problem.
Ariel claims a single-charge range of 150 miles with this thing. And with fast-charging capabilities, you could get yourself quite a lot of juice in just 25 minutes. But let’s be real, 150 miles is way too short for any overlanding trip. And you’d be lucky to stumble across any EV charges venturing through backcountry roads, at least for now. As such, the E-Nomad maybe isn’t quite ready to be the ultimate overlander, at least not yet.
So what is it, then?
Well, it’s definitely not a real off-roader. Heck, neither is the ICE Nomad 2. It doesn’t get four-wheel drive, nor a locking differential. And it doesn’t have nearly as much suspension articulation to make up for any of this.
And so, for me at least, the Ariel E-Nomad Concept is exactly what its name suggests: a proof of concept. It’s proof that yes, we can make an all-electric, go-anywhere machine that seems hella fun to drive. And it’s proof that the fun and excitement of going both on and off-road will live on in the electric era.
