by Gilles Guillaume
PARIS (Reuters) – Stellantis announced on Thursday a partnership with the American Ample to use its removable modular battery technology in its electric vehicles and thus complete its range of electrification solutions.
This technology, which avoids charging time since a robot replaces the empty battery with a full battery through the floor of the vehicle in less than five minutes, must be deployed in Europe in 2024 on a car-sharing fleet of 100 Fiat 500e operated by Free2move, Stellantis’ car-sharing brand, in Madrid.
The financial terms of the partnership have not been made public.
This technology can help respond to consumers’ anxiety about charging time, the range of their vehicle and battery wear, three of the obstacles to the growth of electric vehicles.
Stellantis and Ample are also discussing an extension of the use of replaceable batteries to other platforms and other geographic markets of the automotive group, whether fleets or individual customers.
This removable battery system has already been tested by Renault and the Israeli company Better Place around ten years ago, but without success. Better Place ceased operations in 2013, a year before Ample was founded.
“It is not enough to have an idea for it to work, you have to respond to the fundamental challenges that make it viable,” Khaled Hassounah, general manager of Ample, which operates around ten of battery stations in the San Francisco area and has already installed 4 in Madrid.
Unlike Better Place’s approach, Ample’s batteries, because they are modular, make it possible to adapt to many types of vehicles, use smaller robots and not have to build an infrastructure expensive, he explained.
“The partnership with Ample constitutes another example showing how Stellantis explores all the paths that allow freedom of movement for our electric customers,” said Ricardo Stamatti, senior vice-president of the Franco-Italian-American group in charge of the Charging and Energy activity, cited in a press release.
Stellantis plans to only sell battery electric cars in Europe by 2030, and this technology must represent 50% of its sales of new cars and pick-ups in the United States by the same horizon.
Khaled Hassounah does not see his technology as a competitor to electric charging. “It’s such a big market (…), our competitor is gasoline,” he said.
(Reporting by Gilles Guillaume, editing by Tangi Salaün)
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