Stellantis aims to innovate with a battery swap approach instead of charging

A fully electric car ranges in only five minutes. Sounds unbelievable, doesn't it? But this is what the future might hold, at least for vehicles from the Stellantis Group. This global corporation plans to invest in the development of a battery exchange system for electric cars, with the first results anticipated around 2024.

Stellantis has teamed up with the company Ample to create a battery-swapping system for electric vehicles. The concept is straightforward. Changing a battery takes a considerable amount of time, so they aim to replace this step. Instead, batteries would be swapped at designated stations. The entire process is expected to take just about five minutes, time-saving that even the fastest chargers can't match.

Ample's trial of the Modular Battery Swapping system is set to start in Madrid in 2024. The fleet of 100 Fiat 500e cars that will be available as part of the car-sharing service by Free2move, a Stellantis subsidiary, will be the testing vehicles. Interestingly, the battery swapping station is designed to be constructed within three days. This should facilitate rapid network expansion, but naturally, the prerequisite legal conditions would likely prolong the entire project.

As noted by Automotive News Europe, Ample currently operates four battery swapping stations in Madrid, but plans are underway to construct nine more in the Spanish capital. Meanwhile, Ample has 12 swap locations in San Francisco. While not a new concept, the battery-swapping approach is viewed as a companion method for those who find charging an electric car an excessively long process.

A couple of years ago, Renault and Nissan worked together to develop a battery-swapping system for electric vehicles, but this endeavor wasn't successful. Currently, China's Nio provides the most progressed battery swapping system for electric vehicles globally, with 2,200 stations, of which 30 are located in Europe.