Ample, a battery switch firm, teamed up with Stellantis, Fiat’s parent company, to install 100 EVs with modular swappable packs.
Stellantis and the San Francisco-based business Ample have made the electric car sharing landscape in Spain a bit more intriguing. At least 100 Fiat 500e EVs will be able to receive a full charge in five minutes thanks to Ample’s modular battery switching technology.
Last year in Madrid, Spain, Free2move, Stellantis’ mobility solutions company, began with a test fleet of 40 cars. The fleet is expected to grow to 100 vehicles by the middle of 2025 after the cars were successfully homologated a year later and have been operating flawlessly ever since.
- A fleet of 100 Fiat 500e EVs will get Ample’s battery swap tech.
- The fleet will be part of Stellantis’ Free2move mobility provider.
- Ample’s swap stations can put a freshly charged battery in an EV in just five minutes.
There is one significant distinction between Ample’s battery swap technology and China’s Nio. Ample’s strategy was to make the swappable packs modular rather than having different pack designs for the wide variety of EVs available. Different packs may have varying capacity for the same kind of vehicle because each module is about the size of a carry-on luggage.
Therefore, you may purchase a single-module pack if you just need to go 100 miles between charges. You could upgrade to a four-module pack merely once a month if you had to drive a longer journey.
Furthermore, according to Ample, their modular batteries were made to be drop-in replacements for the original EV batteries, opening the door to a vast array of EVs. Nevertheless, range anxiety is no longer an issue because contemporary EVs are providing ever-increasing charging speeds. Additionally, changing the battery is pointless for EV users who charge their vehicles overnight at home. However, long charging pauses result in lost revenue for a company that has to keep its rental cars on the road for as long as possible, so battery swaps make a lot of sense.
“Every minute off the road is lost revenue for car-sharing fleets,” stated Ample CEO Khaled Hassounah. “We have a strong commitment to ensuring that Free2move’s switch to electricity runs smoothly, both in principle and in day-to-day operations. By completely eliminating charging downtime with our five-minute battery swaps, Free2move is able to maintain vehicle availability, client mobility, and full-speed operations.”
The first stations of Ample’s battery swap technology appeared in California in 2021. All of the retrofitting modules could be changed by these first-generation stations in around ten minutes. In 2023, the second-generation station was delivered. It allowed the driver and passenger to get in and out of the automobile in the middle of the switch, cutting the time in half.