Stellantis plans battery-swapping partnership with U.S. start-up Ample

PARIS -- Stellantis has signed a partnership agreement with Ample, a U.S. battery-swap company, to use its technology in the automaker’s vehicles, starting with a car-sharing fleet of Fiat New 500 EVs in Madrid next year.

Ample’s modular battery-swapping technology could later be used in other Stellantis vehicles or fleets, the companies said Thursday, starting with private versions of the Fiat New 500. Ample says its proprietary batteries can be exchanged in five minutes with a robotic system that removes discharged modules from below the car and replaces them with charged ones.

The companies would not give financial details of the partnership agreement.

Battery swapping has been proposed as a solution to so-called range anxiety and long waits at charging stations, and it could ease the strain on the electric grid during peak charging times. Industry analysts and executives expect it would only become feasible if batteries become more standardized, which Ample says is the company’s key advantage.

Stellantis said the partnership with Ample is part of its strategy to “explore all avenues” of electric mobility, as the automaker seeks to meet its goal of selling only zero-emission vehicles in Europe by 2030, and 50 percent EVs in the U.S. by that date.

“We see battery swaps as helping to fill the pie” of EV options, Ricardo Stamatti, senior vice president, charging and energy business unit at Stellantis, said Thursday in a conference call with journalists.

Ample now has 12 stations installed across the San Francisco Bay Area in California, and four stations installed in Madrid, with an additional nine planned or being built there.

Khaled Hassounah, the CEO of Ample, said his company’s modular system solves a number of problems associated with current brand-specific battery swapping in which an entire pack is exchanged. “Pack-level swapping solves the challenge of getting energy fast into a vehicle, but it introduces problems of compatibility,” he told journalists. 

“What sets us apart is the modularization of the battery,” he said, adding that it can be adapted to other platforms and simplifies the robotics at the swapping station.

“We can make our battery work in a vehicle exactly as-is,” Hassounah said. “It's essentially the same vehicle with the superpower of being able to receive a charge in five minutes or less.” 

One of the first commercial attempts at battery swapping, Better Place, failed to gain traction about a decade ago despite a partnership with the Renault-Nissan Alliance.

But the idea has continued to intrigue EV proponents. Among automakers, the most prominent backer of battery swapping has been the Chinese EV maker Nio, which has deployed a total of more than 2,200 stations in China and six other countries, including about 30 in Europe. Nio says its third-generation stations can perform more than 400 swaps per day.

Nio said last week that it had signed an agreement with Zhejiang Geely Holding Group – whose brands include Volvo, Polestar, Lynk & CO and Lotus -- on battery swapping that would see them work together on standards, technology and model development. Earlier last month, Nio and Changan Automobile announced a similar agreement.

Ample, which is based in San Francisco, this year signed a development agreement with the truck maker Mitsubishi Fuso.

Stamatti said Stellantis and Ample would use the fleet business – the automaker’s Free2Move ShareNow short-term rental program – as a “slingshot” to offer cars with swappable batteries as an option. 

Fiat 500s, for example, with Ample batteries could be charged with swaps or plugged in, depending on the owner’s needs. “When you need that additional range, you can swap. You have that added flexibility,” he said. 

The business model for private buyers would include a subscription to the battery. That would allow owners to receive the latest and most-efficient batteries over the lifetime of their car, potentially improving range, Stamatti said. 

He and Hassounah said that they did not see battery swapping as competition to charging stations, but rather as an option that would speed up mass adoption of EVs.

“We want anyone to be able to use and EV, and that means different solutions,” he said. “We believe our competition is gasoline.”