A San Francisco company called Ample wants to make the electric vehicle battery switch work in the United States, accumulating a history of space failures.
When electric vehicles gained ground in the early 2010s, Tesla and a start-up called Better Space promised that all of their customers would have the convenient option of changing the battery.
“Hopefully this is what convinces people that electric cars are the future.” Musk said, gathering a crowd at a spectacular show in 2013, before sending them off to enjoy a party. In this demonstration, Musk had said that the battery of a Tesla Model S could be changed in about 90 seconds.
But both companies did not make the exchange commercially viable: Better Place closed in May 2013, despite raising $ 850 million in risk financing, and in June 2015, Musk claimed that customers did not they were only interested in changing the batteries.
Meanwhile, electric vehicle companies improved battery and charging station technology, so that their cars could drive more miles on a single charge and owners could spend less time plugged into charging stations when they weren’t. they were charging the night at home or in hotels.
Ample electric vehicle modular batteries.
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Why now?
But Ample believes it’s the right time to try again.
Ample now operates five battery exchange stations in the San Francisco Bay Area specifically for Uber drivers. Participating drivers with compatible electric vehicles can change a worn-out battery for a fully charged one in less than 10 minutes. At launch, Ample supports the Nissan Leaf, which is the main electric vehicle used by Uber drivers and some Kia electric vehicles, but does not support Teslas or many other popular EV models. Right now, the stations have a maximum capacity of 90 cars a day.
Finally, Ample hopes to make the exchange an option for all electric vehicles.
Although EV batteries have improved over the past decade, Ample believes the exchange will be popular with fleet managers, delivery, service and drivers. They record hundreds of miles a day and don’t want to wear out their batteries by charging them quickly every turn, explained Ample founder and CEO Khaled Hassounah.
Hassounah said his company’s approach is technically different from previous efforts.
The company spent about seven years developing robotics that could remove spent battery modules from a car’s battery and replace them with fully energized modules in less than 10 minutes. Amplitude can replace just a few modules in one package or all of them, depending on how much battery you’ve run out and how far you need to go before you get home for a nightly recharge. In the past, companies trying to change batteries only exchanged the entire package, not individual modules.
Drivers can sit in the car or get out and stretch their legs while the interchange is complete. The company strives to achieve the time for a swap of less than 5 minutes this year.
The extensive battery exchange stations are designed to be installed quickly along a route: they are manufactured and assembled wherever you want, but they do not require a complex construction or permit. They only occupy the space of about two parking spaces.
Like most companies in the emerging electric vehicle field, Ample also seeks to reduce the environmental impact of power generation by attacking electric vehicles in the United States and outside that country.
“With a kind of continuous battery upgrade, a ten-year-old car can drive up to the latest model to be launched this year,” he said.
Hassounah explained: “Electricity should not be a difficult decision … But it should be cheaper and simpler, because we are not yet competing with gas.”
By removing and charging depleted batteries at off-peak hours or using electricity from renewable energy sources to charge them before a change, Ample can help fleets achieve environmental goals and spend less on electricity.
The co-founders also said the exchange should allow used electric vehicles to stay on the road, running smoothly for longer, rather than becoming electronic waste.
To date, the company has raised $ 68 million in business financing led by the risk branch of a fossil fuel company, Shell Ventures, which is joined by Repsol Energy Ventures and ENEOS Innovation Partners, energy companies facing disruption as governments push for wider adoption of electric vehicles. Transportation and mobility investors Moore Strategic Investors and Hemi Ventures also invested in Ample.
Ample electric vehicle battery exchange station.
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Challenges
John Voelcker, a long-time electric vehicle researcher and car writer, says any battery exchange effort in North America will face guaranteed skepticism.
“Battery exchange has big challenges in terms of capital requirements,” he said. “Like the distribution of bicycles, it is not evenly distributed. It might make sense to have stations along a specific route, but demand may increase during travel, such as at the time of Thanksgiving. move heavy batteries from one place to another to do this.
Scott Case, CEO of Recurrent, a Seattle-based start-up that measures the health of an electric vehicle battery, said: “It’s definitely a professional that you can upgrade the battery over time without paying for it. “But there are some risks that are a kind of low technology if you want to remove batteries from your vehicle over and over again, such as dealing with dirt and road dirt that can get into your system.”
Ample says it has been designed around this, in part by including a battery control system in each switchable module that can alert the driver if there is a problem and can turn off only the affected module until the car can change.
Hassounah and de Souza know they face the doubters. But, the CEO said, “We’re making a major transition, a third of human energy consumption goes from one form to another. And every time we make that kind of change, we have to step back and rethink it. us things “. For Ample, that means revisiting a good idea that didn’t work, but that possibly should have.
The company is not entirely alone. A high-tech eV manufacturer, Nio, has managed to launch a battery exchange service for its customers in China. NIO shares traded at a tear more than 1,000% in the last twelve months, even after a recent recession amid broader market sales.