These little robots are actually charging this electric car. They
remove the depleted batteries and replace them with new fully
charged ones. The whole process takes about 10 minutes. It's
called battery swapping. San Francisco-based Ample is
bringing the idea to the U.S. The company was in stealth mode
for seven years before launching recently with five swapping
stations in the Bay Area.
The plan is to be available wherever people need a fast
charge that's as cheap as gas.
The benefits of swapping over charging are numerous. When
you're fast charging, you are degrading the battery at a much
faster rate than if you slowly trickle charge a battery.
The concept is not new. Better Place launched an EV and battery
swapping company in Israel, but the company went bankrupt in
2013, even though it had almost $1 billion in funding. And Tesla
gave it a try in 2013.
Took 90, sort of 90 seconds for a pack swap. So hopefully this
is what convinces people finally that electric cars are the
future.
Battery swapping is already common in China. Electric
Vehicle maker Nio plans to double its network of swapping
stations to 500 this year, and plans to open battery swapping
stations in Norway as part of its expansion into Europe.
Geely, another Chinese automaker plans to build 200 swapping
stations in China by 2023.
Almost every taxi in Beijing that moved to electric is being
swapped. So there is a significant swapping happening
in China. We just don't know about it here because we haven't
yet had the problem of moving a very, very large fleet into
electric.
But these swapping stations are expensive, and it's unclear
whether American car owners would be willing to swap out
their EV battery.
In America, if we're buying a car dammit, we want to buy the
battery that runs it.
But Ample has a different approach.
We've really taken the EV battery pack and broken it down
into much more manageable batteries.
But why now? And can battery swapping be a good charging
solution here in the U.S.?
Nio, Tesla and Better Place all use the same technique. That is
removing the entire battery pack and swapping in a new one. The
batteries are usually then charged off site, but EV
batteries are massive. And this is part of the reason why
swapping stations have historically been so expensive.
You have challenges there. If you're connecting a 900 pound
thing, then you have to have really really robust electrical
connectors that can handle a few 100 volts and have some dropped
in and out dozens hundreds of times over the lifetime.
But Ample is trying a new technique. It is building its
own batteries designed in these Lego-like modules that charge
right inside the battery swapping station.
The main thing that sets Ample apart is that we have a modular
battery. With our modular batteries, we can take them out
a few at a time and they're very light, they're very easy to
maneuver, the station is the size of two parking spots, so it
doesn't require a lot of square footage since the batteries can
be individually put on a much smaller rack to charge.
I think part of thing about the modular batteries is it is
largely the ability to fit into different sizes. If it's a big
car, you can put in more a small car has less. So it solves a lot
more problems than we initially thought about by going through
and doing it.
We were not allowed to film the proprietary tech inside of the
charging station, but we were able to take a peek. Behind this
wall there are robots zooming around taking fully charged
battery modules off of shelves and then replacing them with
depleted batteries from the car. The new batteries are then
quickly but carefully screwed back into the car. And within
minutes the fully charged card drives out at the station. The
station is fully autonomous and the payment is done through the
app. Ample's Bay Area stations cost the driver about 10 cents
per mile for a swap which is less than gas in the area, but a
bit more than traditional charging.
The car isn't, you know, perfectly centered where it
needs to be, the robots will move it to the right spot. So
there's it's very easy for anyone to just drive up and park
on the platform.
Ample battery stations are designed to be installed quickly
along high traffic routes. Former Tesla manager Lindsay
Stone is in charge of deployment.
We build in our office here, what we call sub assemblies, we
build chunks, take them to the site, we create them up, ship
them over and then assemble on site so there's no construction,
there's no digging.
How much does it cost to build one of these.
We can't give the exact number but I would say in a tens of
thousands of dollars. So effectively the equivalent of
maybe a slightly expensive level two charger.
One of the major benefits to ample swapping station is that
it does require a lot less power than our traditional plug in
charging station.
This is because ample slowly charges the batteries and can
control when they are charging. This also helps ensure the
batteries are being charged with renewable sources, not fossil
fuels.
The benefits of swapping over fast charging or that you can
charge when it makes sense for the grid. So when someone pulls
up to charge, they need to pull that energy from maybe not
always sustainable resources versus with swapping stations,
we're constantly slowly charging these batteries. And so we can
really plan around when we can use solar energy or wind energy
to make that charge happen.
Plus an ample station could eventually also provide power to
the grid.
That stock of batteries that's being charged, can actually also
be used as stationary storage. When the utilities are hitting
peak loads, there's a known set of batteries that are going to
be sitting there, they can draw off those batteries to help do
some load balancing on the on the grid.
But in order to use an Ample station for swapping, the car
actually needs Ample's batteries in it. It builds custom plates
for each car manufacturer it works with and then fits the
batteries into the plate. The plan is for the car buyer to
choose whether they want Ample's batteries in their car, or the
manufacturers battery pack depending on their needs.
Almost every automaker in the world, build the car separate
than the battery, right so the battery is a device unit because
they know this is probably the weakest part of the car will
need to be replaced in service, etc. But if you build a drop in
replacement to that battery, then you don't need a
significant engineering effort from the automaker side. So the
way we build our system is you build an adapter plate, which is
defines how many modules you put in the car, how they're
distributed, how they interface with the car, so that the car
itself doesn't need to change the software or hardware in any
way whatsoever.
The company says it is already partnered with five EV
manufacturers, but it would not disclose which ones. But while
we were filming a Nissan LEAF pulled up to get a swap.
We're very easy to kind of stole our system takes 15 minutes to
get a car ready to be swappable. And then as we scale to 1000s of
cars, then we act just like another supplier.
Most OEMs have very similar setups on their batteries, they
have several main connectors. And then all we do is just
identify where the mounting points are of their battery pack
and make sure that our plate mounts to those same points on
the car. Straight from there, figure out what the packaging of
our battery modules can be within that geometry. There's
not really any limit on that, right? We can do that for a van,
we can do that for a truck.
I think a lot of people who kept on saying you'll never be able
to work with OEMs is very hard to work with. And I say we've
been very surprised with how willing they've been open to
they realize the problem.
The global electric vehicle battery swapping market was
valued at $100.1 million in 2020. And is projected to reach
$852.6 million by 2030. But some are skeptical this will take off
in the United States,
It's a 5050 you might get a newer fresher battery than the
one you've already put 52,000 miles on, but you might get
someone's 52,000 mile battery swapped into your six week old
car. In theory, they would have to keep them within some kind of
range. But especially in America, we'd like to buy stuff,
we like to own stuff, and that includes the battery.
This could be why the company is initially focusing on fleets
with sights set on individually owned EVs next.
It's a great option for a fleet that needs to have its cars on
the road for as much of the day as possible. And where quick
refueling is really vital to being able to have the fleet go
electric in the first place. It's also I think, a good option
for customers in cities who don't have a good place to
charge. They don't have a garage to plug in at home. Those are
kind of the two primary customers that we see right now.
Ample said it has a range of last mile delivery municipal
fleet and ride sharing partners including Uber. Uber drivers in
San Francisco can rent an EV equipped with Ample's battery
built in. That driver can charge using conventional methods or
had to one of Ample's five stations in the Bay Area to
recharge.
Ride sharing. In general, it's difficult for a driver, they
often don't have a charger at home. And you could be spending
10 hours a week charging your vehicle, which means you're just
making effectively making less money.
Where it actually does make the most sense is for commercial
fleet users. They're usually all the same kind of vehicle. So you
could have a swap station that, hey, you have a stock of
batteries that fits all of your vehicles in your fleet. And that
would make a lot more sense. And the nice thing about swapping is
it can be done very quickly it can be done in three, four or
five minutes.
One interesting thing with fleets as well, is a lot of the
fleets have are committed to electric but as soon as they
start deploying it, it starts falling apart for different
reasons. It might be that they have to upgrade the amount of
electricity in all the depots which should be costly or the
this logistics of figuring out when to get the cars and how to
go through and charge it falls apart. As we speak with fleets,
they've tried it. They know what the challenges are. So when we
present our solution, they can quickly see how it solves the
problems they have.
President Biden said he wants to transition the entire
presidential fleet to electric, which is about 645,000 vehicles.
But even Ample admits that the US may be slow to adopt the
technology. Do you see adoption happening faster outside of the
US?
Sadly, yes. You talk to a lot of fleets in the US that actually
do want to make the transition. You talked a lot municipalities
that are already making the transition. So the interest is
there. But the actual adoption has been happening more
elsewhere.
The next phase of the plan is likely some more deployments
internationally, there are a lot of customers interested in our
solution to the the AV infrastructure problem and in
Europe and Asia.
To move from fleets to individually owned EVs, Ample
would need to get automakers and car buyers on board to replace
the custom battery in their EV with an ample system. Automakers
pride themselves on their unique battery tech. So it's hard for
some analysts to imagine that this will take off.
If you're a car maker, the battery in your electric car is
a major, major structural element. It has structure going
through it lengthwise and crosswise that are major parts
of the cars crash protection, that are part of its overall
shell, you're not going to want to use a standardized battery
format. It's part of the structure. It's the heaviest
component in electric car. Manufacturers are just not going
to do that. Forklift manufacturers? Okay, fine. Not
carmakers.
I think it's very unlikely that any automakers are going to
adopt it. Where you might see some adoption, again, is if you
have some particularly large fleets that are maybe converting
some existing vehicles to electric, and then you know,
they might want to, you know, have whatever company they're
working with to do the conversion, use an Ample-style
battery, that might make sense. But again, the manufacturers are
increasingly moving towards building their own cells in
house. So I think that the chances of a startup like Ample
or anybody else coming in and convincing manufacturers to go
that direction is very unlikely.
While it could be good for fleets, some experts think U.S.
car buyers will just not be interested.
For the average person, if they're going to go into a swap
station, they don't know what the history of the batteries are
getting is. Because batteries degrade over time. And so I
think for consumers, there is likely to be a little more of a
reluctance to adopt this.
That could be why Tesla didn't give it much of a chance back in
2013. It only opened one battery swapping station in between LA
and San Francisco and it closed shortly after. Elon Musk said
Tesla owners weren't interested in it.
And they did that mainly because of a loophole in California's
ZEV credit system that got them a whole bunch of extra credits
for EVs. They operated the station for about a year and got
almost no use. It was located in a very remote area.
But perhaps it would have been a different situation for Tesla in
a city.
I would say we're definitely targeting cities first, I think
it's the most applicable in a high traffic area.
But if Tesla, by far the US is largest EV company ops not to
work with Ample, that could prove challenging for the
company. Have you talked to Elon Musk? Is he interested in Ample?
We have not yet, he hasn't called us yet. I mean, I think
he's doing an amazing job. He really made us all open our eyes
and realize this can work. But one thing that we always
believed is that one person is not going to come up with all
the answers, it takes all of us. So we all need to solve our
parts of the problem. And even within the same problem, we need
a lot of solutions.
It's also unclear whether anyone would want to do a battery swap
when traditional charging keeps getting faster and faster.
Charging can take a couple of hours, but with DC fast charging
drivers can get an 80% charge in about 20 minutes. There are more
than 5000 DC fast chargers in the United States today, and
President Biden plans to spend billions to build 500,000 more
public chargers.
And the question becomes, if you can fast charge at that site,
how much benefit is there to the consumer of dropping out a pack
in seven minutes, let's say soup to nuts, versus 15, 20, 25
minutes where they can buy some of the use of facilities and
play with their phone? And that's an answer that only the
consumer market can answer.
We did spend a lot of time looking at charging, it's at
some point we'll have batteries in charge in five minutes. But
if you do that you then need these massive charges, maybe one
to two megawatt charges to charge it very quickly. They're
very expensive, the take a lot of construction to build. They
can be energy efficient. So this is a big global problem. You
need something that can work all the way from, you know, from
India to South America, and so went back and said battery
swapping can solve those problems.
Electric vehicles are expected to hit 10% of global passenger
vehicle sales by 2025 rising to 50% of sales by 2040, so more
charging will be needed especially because range anxiety
is still a concern for buyers.
We do an annual EV consumer survey, and in our 2020 survey,
the top three barriers to EV adoption were the cost of the
vehicles, access to charging, and the time it takes to charge.
Even Big Oil is getting involved. Neo partnered with
Chinese oil group Sinopec to build it, swapping stations, and
Ample is raised $60 million in funding led by Shell Ventures
and joined by Repsol and Eneos. These fossil fuel centric
businesses are slowly starting to green their portfolios as
government's push for an electric future.
One of the debates we had internally early on is do we
want to partner with an oil company? And I think it's
obvious right now that they do think themselves as energy
companies they're not oil and gas companies anymore. That's
the history but humanity is moving on and they're moving on
with it, and they're saying, listen, we're also want to be
part of that solution.
EV infrastructure is a huge problem. I don't think we should
just do one thing. The two don't need to compete. I think there
will be charging stations coming up, and that's great, and there
will be ample swapping stations coming out, and that's also
great. And they have kind of different applications and
people will be able to choose which one is right for them.
I do think that battery swapping will become part of the mix for
the US market but mostly for commercial fleet operations, not
so much for consumers.
Some of the funniest conversations we had when we're
trying to raise money was meeting with people who, and we
had one person who said, look, I don't see the problem. I have a
Tesla. I can charge it overnight at home, and then the day I have
no problems. I go, what do you do when you drive far. He says,
oh I just take the Porsche and I just take the Porsche and I go
as far as want. We did run into a lot of issues with people who
have the luxury of charging it at home, not driving that far
and probably having access to a gas car in case they need to and
lots of people just did not see the problem. And that was a
tough one to say, that's a very lucky situation to be in. That's
not the rest of the world.