This startup has an interesting concept for EV batteries

Wednesday morning in San Francisco, a startup company called Ample unveiled its new battery-swap technology for electric vehicles. The company has designed an extremely small footprint for its exchange stations, which occupy just as much land as a few standard parking spaces and which do not require much electrical infrastructure. Instead of building one big place that can handle hundreds of cars a day, Ample’s plan is to build numerous small stations that can be deployed quickly. The first five of these are now in use in the Bay and operate a fleet of Uber EVs equipped with Ample’s modular battery system.

Faster than fast loading

Rightly or wrongly, charging times and charging infrastructure are probably the biggest obstacle to the large use of electric vehicles. Since the establishment of the first filling station in 1905, society has become accustomed to rapidly replenishing liquid hydrocarbons. As a result, no one can imagine whether their V12-powered large tourist can reach 200 miles before stopping, because they know they will only be quiet for a few minutes.

On the other hand, the battery EVs have to be sold with as many batteries as can be plugged under the cabin, and even the fastest charging TVs currently on sale take more than 20 minutes to recharge up to 80 percent – and even then only with 350 kW fast chargers which is still relatively uncommon.

The idea of ​​slowly charging EV batteries and then swapping used packets quickly for new ones is not exactly new. In 2007, Better Place tried to make the idea work, but the EVs were too much in their infancy, and Israel was too small a market to make it happen. Tesla also tried it with a single experimental station halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco that began testing in 2013. It was intended to swap a pack in 90 seconds, but lasted up to 15 minutes in practice and was made irrelevant by the success of the Supercharger network. And in China, Nio has 131 battery swap stations that completed more than half a million battery swaps by August last year.

Modular batteries

“The moment you break the battery into smaller modular pieces, a lot of things get easier,” said Khaled Hassounah, one of Ample’s co-founders. “One of them is that the station is becoming much simpler. So our station actually needs no construction, no digging in the ground. All we need is some parking spaces that are flat enough, and then within a few days – usually a week —We can get a station up and running, everything is sent literally, we assemble it on the premises, test it, switch it on and we have the exchange station.Therefore we can serve the whole Bay Area , for example, with several stations within a few weeks, ‘he told me this morning.

Each station charges a few batteries at a constant rate, so the large power requirement (or demand cost) that DC fast charging stations require is not necessary. And because there is no permanent structure, new stations should not be lifted with red tape and permits – again unlike DC fast charging stations.

By now, many of you are probably thinking the same as I thought when I first heard of the idea: wouldn’t that require a significant redevelopment of an EV?

“It’s a logical conclusion, or prediction, of how it would work. But we wanted to change it in two fundamental ways,” Hassounah explained. ‘One of them is, because our batteries are modular, we really do not have a format that the car manufacturers have to adapt to, or that has to fit in all the available systems. Instead, we build what we call an adequate adapter. plate. “

Ample obtains the specifications of an OEM battery pack and then designs a structural framework for the package that can accept the modules while still meeting the same engineering requirements as the OEM package. “It has the same shape, the same bolt mounts, the same connection as the original battery,” Hassounah said. Since the modules are already developed, Ample only needs to develop a new adapter plate for each new EV model that supports it.

Since the modules are always identical, this means that the stations can serve different brands of EV, and this simplifies the exchange process. “Usually you have the strong current connection, you have the big bolts that hold the most weight, and everything you need to take out. In our case, we only remove modules in protective buckets, but the large structural piece that connects to the cooling and the high power and everything that always stays in the car, ‘he told me.

‘The second thing we had to build was the [cell] chemistry changes slightly between vehicles, and the first two years of Ample were just focused on the problem before we even built any robots. We build a layer of power electronics in our battery modules; the key is that it is flexible enough but cheap enough that it does not change the economy of the battery in any meaningful way. This enables the battery to adapt to the vehicle now, but also to absorb the chemistry, ‘he explained.

Each new type of EV requires a bit of software to get Ample’s battery talking to the car, but Hassounah told me there are a lot of similarities, despite what the OEMs might say. “When you talk about the communication between the battery and the car, it’s very basic. There are five things that everyone communicates: voltage, current, maximum power and maximum power. And of course, the order to turn on and turn on. But as long as the OEMs work with you, it only takes a few weeks to update our software, “he said.

What if I get someone else’s weakened battery?

One of the most worrying concerns about battery swaps (usually in the context of Tesla’s failed experiment) was the problem of someone else’s battery. No one wants to show up at an exchange station to swap their brand new battery from 100 to 100 percent for someone else’s package which only goes up to 80 percent. Ample’s model is more similar to propane tanks that you can use with a grid – it owns the modules it rents out to customers. That way you never sit with someone else’s lemon.

“It actually reduces the cost for everyone because it allows us to spread the risk and say Ample makes sure it maintains the quality but also spreads the risk so that no one gets a $ 20,000 bill,” he said. Hassounah said.

There is also the seductive possibility of vehicles gaining more range over time, over the improvements that are possible with software updates. This is because Ample can update the chemistry or design of its modules and roll out to vehicles that are already on the road. What’s more, the modularity means that end users can have some flexibility with how many kilowatt hours – and therefore how much extra mass – they need for a given trip. Serial anxiety – whether it exists or not – means that most people want an EV with the largest possible battery and the largest theoretical range, even if they only perform once a year.

“So a lot of your energy is spent moving the battery around, even though you do not need it. With modulation, you can choose how many modules you will put in the car,” said John de Souza, Ample’s other person. . co-founders. Instead of buying a car with 300 miles of lithium-ion on board, a customer may prefer to carry about half as many modules for daily driving, and then add extra modules if necessary.

The customers will be fleet for the time being, not individual managers. Here in the US, Ample is working with Uber, which rents a fleet of adequately equipped EVs to Uber drivers in the Bay. And Hassounah and de Souza told me that there are pilot deployments in Europe and Japan.

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