Former F1 Champ Nico Rosberg Driving Now For Sustainability

Nico Rosberg once made a career out of burning up fossil fuels in his Formula 1 race car. But in 2016 at age 31 just days after securing his only F1 world championship in a punishing race in Abu Dhabi he walked away into a new life—a life that seemed to be the antithesis of the years he spent behind the wheel of high-powered internal combustion racing machines.

Indeed, while chasing the world championship for 11 years in the world’s most prestigious racing echelon, Rosberg’s mind started imagining his life on an entirely different track.

“I learned so much about human needs, about myself, and in turn I decided my career after racing was going to be a life of service in some form or another and at the same time,” he told Forbes.com in a wide-ranging web interview. “I needed to keep on having challenges and the perfect match for me was being a sustainability entrepreneur.”

He explained being a sustainability entrepreneur means not only acting as an ardent evangelist for green technologies, mainly through his Monaco-based company Legacy and Partners,  but also investing in such startups as Lilium, Volocopter, What3Words, Tier and Lyft

Rosberg is also a financial supporter for the all-electric Formula E racing circuit and it was through that association he founded the Greentech Festival which he compared to the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, featuring only green technologies. 

Last year’s inaugural festival in Berlin attracted 40,000 participants, Rosberg said. This year’s, planned for September, will be mainly a virtual affair due to the coronavirus pandemic. It’s all part of his goal of convincing consumers the world needs cleaner, more sustainable technologies. “You need to engage with people,” said Rosberg. “It’s not enough anymore to just showcase what technology you have. It’s important to shift consumer mindsense.” 

Among the many changes the Covid-19 pandemic has caused in the way we lead our lives, Rosberg believes the crisis will actually accelerate the public’s desire for cleaner, more sustainable methods and policies.

“People have had the opportunity to see and experience just more quieter cities, much cleaner cities, and also I’m certain people have now learned to think about more caring for each other, caring for our future, caring about society as a result of this pandemic, not only for future pandemics but also for our environment,” Rosberg said. 

As a tangible example of how the pandemic has sparked the type of change he supports, Rosberg points to the French government’s moves to help save Air France by making its financial support for the struggling airline conditional on a commitment to invest in what he terms “the greenest technologies” and giving up short distance flights, ceding those routes to railways. 

“This is a fantastic example of the government ensuring the direction we all must take,” Rosberg said. “In the end Air France is going to be on track to be one of the most sustainable airlines in the industry.” 

Rosberg firmly believes full autonomous vehicles will eventually rule the roads, not merely as a convenience, but as a means of vastly reducing the number of fatal vehicle accidents, calling them “a huge hope for the future for saving lives.” 

He also has faith electric vehicles will be more widely accepted once prices come down, predicting, “It’s a cat and mouse game because the more demand there will be the easier it will be to drop prices and once you get to the that equal price point compared to combustion engines, then it’s just gonna go through the roof.”

He’s a big supporter of EV-maker Tesla and its CEO and founder Elon Musk and through another company, is also an investor of Musk’s SpaceX that just became the first commercial company to launch American astronauts. 

With his futuristic eyes firmly to the skies, Rosberg is especially enthused about the eventful proliferation of vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, VTOLs, in the form of autonomous flying taxis that will pickup and drop off passengers from roof tops, while preserving the environment.

“It democratizes flying,” said Rosberg. “It’s gonna be so cheap per mile. VTOLs allow you to live outside cities. Smart cities will have a big, big traffic system for VTOLs because it allows people to commute seamlessly, and reduces traffic in the cities.” 

For this self-styled sustainability entrepreneur all of these ideas represent opportunities. He doesn’t just dream about them, he invests and lends his passionate voice to them.

It’s not about enriching himself, he explains. The green he’s after is a better world, explaining, “I don’t have the need to go anymore for money. I’ve made my money in my racing. I’m very, very lucky. Now I want to contribute positively. That’s really, really, really important.”

Ever the futurist, Rosberg also thinks of his two children in concluding, “I want to inspire them to a life of service, that is so important to me, and I want them to be proud of my legacy. I’m sure they will be proud of what I did in Formula 1 but maybe they will be even prouder of what I will achieve as a sustainability entrepreneur and what I’ve already achieved.”

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