The minds behind battery-swap innovator Ample believe that the EV (electric vehicle) experience has asked too much of drivers with serious friction points and compromises that will not only hinder but be a deterrent to mass adoption. The company’s new stations and battery technology launched today are designed to address some of these limitations. Its product developers have invented a system to facilitate a lateral move from gasoline to being just as fast, simple, and cheap, all while being a “completely green” solution.

In February, the company received a nearly $15 million grant from the California Energy Commission (CEC), which it says represents a vote of confidence in EV battery swapping. In January, the Biden administration announced plans to install 500,000 EV charging stations across America, but the CEC grant points toward the importance of swapping as an additional pathway to electrification.

The move towards swapping in California has been a long time coming, according to a recent Ample blog post. Last year, the CEC’s Zero-Emission Vehicle Infrastructure Plan (ZIP) singled out battery swapping as an emerging technology that is “grid-friendly” and “allows rapid and convenient charging for the consumer.” However, it also pointed out that there weren’t many battery-swapping vehicles available in California.

The grant will help change that. It also shows that battery swapping is on California’s electrification agenda as a potent way to support communities that aren’t currently able to electrify.

The CEC funding will also allow Ample to remain in California as it scales up the production of modular batteries to better serve the needs of our current partners and expand the reach of battery swapping to new partners and communities.

 

New OEM support

One of those new partners was announced earlier this month, showing that OEMs are also getting behind the company’s efforts. The battery-swap developer announced a deal to deliver Ample-powered Fisker EVs. The partnership is important to Fisker’s long-term strategy to increase the scale and adoption of its EVs in the U.S. and Europe.

“Our partnership with Ample will enable us to broaden the vehicle use case for our customers,” said Henrik Fisker, Chairman and CEO of Fisker Inc. “We’re thrilled to offer Ample’s innovative battery-swapping system, which will bring a new level of affordability to the Fisker Ocean and potentially to the other vehicles we intend to bring to market in the future.”

The initial target customer for Fisker’s Ample-powered EVs will be fleet operators that are looking to ease the transition to electric mobility. Ample’s technology makes it possible to rapidly deploy EV infrastructure so that Fisker can make its vehicles available to larger markets on a faster timetable. Fisker and Ample will share revenue related to the battery-swapping mechanism.

“We’re incredibly excited about our relationship with Fisker,” said Khaled Hassounah, Co-founder and CEO of Ample. “They’ve developed best-in-class EVs that our team is proud to support. We’re looking forward to assisting with making the Fisker Ocean available to a wide segment of customers as a part of our goal to bring more EVs on the road.”

Battery swapping can offer drivers energy delivered as quickly as gasoline fueling and at a lower per-mile cost. For drivers looking to transition to electric, speed and cost are key, and more so for high-mileage drivers such as those in the ride-hailing industry.

Joint development between Ample and Fisker is already underway, with the goal of providing battery-swappable Fisker Ocean vehicles by Q1 2024.

 

Next-gen station

Since the company co-founded by CEO Hassounah and President John de Souza publicly debuted in 2021 after seven years in stealth (see Futurride’s coverage here), it has deployed its solution across the Bay Area. It has worked closely with fleet partners such as Uber and Sally to fully test the technology with real drivers so that its product developers could better understand the needs and the impact of battery swapping on their fleet business operations. In addition to its live deployments, the company worked with other types of fleets—specifically in the last-mile delivery space—to understand the impact of battery swapping on their use cases.

When working with these fleets, company developers continuously heard that, despite well-intentioned efforts to electrify fleets, drivers could spend upwards of 10-12 h, or 25% of a work week, at a charging station. They heard from cities that, in the race to electrify, there is a lack of reliable EV charging for city dwellers who don’t have access to garages and the option of overnight charging, and so the company’s new solution seeks to fix that.

As the company has scaled to bring more EVs to more drivers, streamlining and simplifying the experience has been crucial, especially as it supports consumers and fleets. The new station design allows for a swap time decrease from 10 to 5 min.

Thanks to modular battery swapping, Ample engineers have extended the technology to support both small passenger cars and large delivery trucks. Its new streamlined drive-through design is more user-friendly, safer, and “more delightful.” A whole platform that raises the car allows passengers to come in and out of the car as a swap is in progress.

The stations now need only three days to deploy, allowing the company to bring up a whole metropolitan area in a few weeks. It delivers a station in a few pre-built sections, and those are put together on-site, further simplifying the installation. Like its first-generation technology, deploying a station requires no digging. To support different demand levels, stations can be easily stacked so multiple vehicles can swap simultaneously at a location.

Ample product developers spent extensive time making the new stations more robust for different environments as they scale up deployments in different cities and climates. In parallel, they’ve continued to innovate on the shoe-box-sized modular batteries, making them safer and smarter with the ability to be integrated into any modern EV. Along with the station, every component can be remotely monitored and controlled to ensure proper and efficient functioning.