Let’s say the infrastructure is there for this, and you don’t have to purchase the battery with a new EV…you just purchase a battery plan for like 100$ a month. It’d easily cut 10-20k off the cost of an EV up front.
Plus, quick charging isn’t quick. At best you’re looking at a 20 minute stop, and you’re praying a stall is open when you get there. This could solve that problem as well.
It’s an interesting idea.
Especially living in a city, this looks interesting to me. ‘Fast’ charging I’ve seen was in the range 30-60 min but then it’s like the phone, from about 20% up to 80%. So living in a city, I’d have to wait for half an hour for half the battery.
With a swap-station, it could be nearly as fast as a fossil fuel stop. About 2 minutes for a 0% to 100% stop.
This also allows for smaller batteries, for smaller cars, for lighter cars. You don’t need to carry a lot of overall range if you can swap/refill to 100% in 2 minutes.
I see comments like this about EVs all the time but it just isn’t my experience at all. I’ve never in my life charged for an hour at a DC fast charger. On most EVs, you’ll see a 15-30 minutes for 0-80% charge but you don’t have to charge above 60% where the charge rate usually slows significantly. For instance, a 10-60% charge on my car takes about 10 minutes and that gets me close to 150 miles of range. All of this assumes you don’t have access to level 2 or even level 1 charging. If you do, then you’d never need to go out of your way to charge.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Stellantis struck a deal with California-based EV battery swapping company Ample to power a fleet of shared Fiat 500e vehicles in Spain.
By becoming one of the first Western automakers to embrace battery swapping technology, Stellantis is betting that EV charging infrastructure in Europe and the US will remain a barrier to adoption in the near future, necessitating other solutions.
Stellantis will work with Ample to launch a battery swapping system for a fleet of Fiat 500e vehicles as part of a car-sharing service through its Free2move subsidiary.
“Our system knows how many batteries are in the Fiat 500e, knows how to extract each one of those modules, and put them back in the same arrangement,” Khaled Hassounah, CEO of Ample, said in a briefing with reporters.
If the company does decide to expand its partnership with Ample, the Fiat 500e will likely be the first vehicle to support the technology, said Ricardo Stamatti, senior VP for charging and energy at Stellantis.
Customers who buy cars that are compatible with Ample’s swapping system would then just subscribe to a battery, opening up a possible new line of revenue for Stellantis.
The original article contains 648 words, the summary contains 190 words. Saved 71%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
So countries are pouring investment into charging networks… it would be interesting to know the thinking behind that versus this approach. One thing is certain though: this can only work at scale if manufacturers agree on standards for battery modules so that they can be swapped out by the same machinery. Notice that this is only for one specific model - the machine which removes the battery knows where the battery modules are and how to remove them. There would also presumably be some tradeoff for battery form factors which are designed to cram more in at the cost of making them harder to remove.
Stellantis on it’s own is pretty big, they own Fiat, PSA (Peugeot & Citroen), Opel, Chrysler, Dodge, Jeep off top of my head. Some smaller brands too. They might be starting with Fiat 500e since 500 line is a budget one that could have price driven even lower by decoupling battery cost.
I’m all for trying new things, however there’s tradeoffs with this approach I think that people may not be grasping that may change their mind if they want this.
-
the conversion to the vehicle will mean less space for battery because the housing, latches, connectors, etc have to be added to support an easily removable battery. So a 200 mile range battery may mean dropping to 150 mile range or less just to have the option to swap batteries.
-
Good EVs batteries use liquid thermal management, including the Fiat 500e noted in this article. It looks like this company is removing the liquid battery and replacing it with their own battery module. From the end of the article.
Updated December 7th 11:55AM ET: Ample’s modular batteries are compatible with any EV, the company says. A previous version of this story misstated this.Without liquid thermal management the car is much more negatively affected by cold and hot days limiting range (and life of the battery which will increase costs of subscription).
-
I don’t see how battery swapping is a good bet. We’ve already got extremely fast charging, and the maintenance and capital investment for swapping stations would be enormous.
It has some benefits to both consumers and automotive industry.
I live in an apartament block, as do many people. Can’t really charge when parking by the street. If I could go into subscription like service with a charging network where I don’t own the battery outright and just swap it at gas stations that solves a lot of issues. It’s faster than charging and I don’t have to own a battery outright which lowers initial investment. That battery doesn’t even have to have that great of a range either. Car company / charging network or whoever does the battery leasing benefits long term because they can charge more overall.
Why can’t you charge on the street? You could have parking meter type slow chargers.
I’ve had an EV for three years now without my own charging station. It’s sometimes inconvenient but not a big issue.
Those need to get electricity from somewhere and in many countries overall infrastructure is woefully unprepared for large scale deployment of this type, not to mention being unprepared for how renewable energy is produced and stored. It’s also quite vulnerable to vandalism.
This is literally a huge pile of batteries that can charge at any rate at any time. It can soak the noon peak of solar, it can sip late night wind.
I’ve been saying this for years. It just seems to make so much sense.
Hope it works out.
