And so what?
And so what?
It is eligible for WR2C, a rally championship. You said you've seen it there.
Oh right?
(All rhetorical)
Rally is rally; maybe you forget WRC is partly regularity rally in classification; time cards, controls and penalties are part of it. There's different ways to classify competitors in rally. You can have rallies where the prettiest car wins or where whoever takes photos of things along the route wins. You could have a Puma Rally1 in a regularity rally or an Ioniq in a speed rally; they both being road cars... in road rallies. Reminder that the context of ecoRally coming up in conversation was road relevance, or in my terms, 'consumer production car relevance'. No amount of mental gymnastics should be necessary.
The Alternative Energies Cup had other disciplines back in the day besides the rally 'class' that ecoRally Cup was born from. It was circuit racing and speed trials IIRC and they weren't all contested by the same cars and teams. So no, that does not mean they were all rally cars in AEC.
There used to be open cars with platforms built in for politicians to speak to crowds at rallies, back in the day in USA at least. Maybe they were called rally cars.
Try it, you might learn something.