Electric cars, Stellantis is looking for an alternative to charging stations?
Even Stellantis is starting to believe that the future of the electric car does not lie in charging stations: slow and still too few. The fourth largest automotive group in the world takes the battery swap route, abandoned by Tesla but pursued in China
Maybe in the future we will all really drive an electric car, to be charged at home or by connecting it to charging stations as fast as a stop at the petrol station today. Perhaps in the future the battery life will be doubled and the infrastructure expanded. But, while we wait for this future to materialize, Stellantis has also started to look beyond the charging stations: because they are still too few and often end up hostage to those who leave their cars parked there even after charging, especially if shared. In short, the problems are known to everyone (and listed in detail by Gian Luca Pellegrini , Editor in Chief of Quattroruote ) and the car manufacturers then try to remedy them.
CHANGE PERSPECTIVE AND BATTERY
At the moment, the only valid alternative seems to be the so-called Battery Swapping, that is, you show up at the refueling station with a dry battery and an automated procedure replaces it in five minutes with a freshly charged one.
The principle is the same as the post stations of the past, where the customer left his horse exhausted from the gallop and took a fresh and rested one in exchange. Battery swap , or swapping , has been talked about since the early 1900s, before internal combustion engines took hold. It seems that, over a century ago, the first to devise a similar system was General Motors, with post stations converted specifically for this purpose.
BATTERY SWAP, THE ALLIANCE BETWEEN STELLANTIS AND THE STARTUP
Stellantis has also started to move in this direction, signing a binding agreement to start a partnership with the Californian startup Ample of Khaled Hassounah, founder and current CEO.
The US reality follows another startup, now a scaleup also thanks to the funds received from the Beijing government: the Chinese Nio, which a few weeks ago announced that it had carried out over 30 million battery replacements since the service , in May 2018, was made available in the Asian country, reaching 1,937 battery swapping stations called Power Swap Stations, destined to rise to 2300 by the end of this year.
The fourth largest automotive group in the world intends to exploit Ample's technology for the modular replacement of batteries, so as to provide an alternative to classic charging stations. The pilot market will be Madrid and the experimentation will begin immediately, in 2024, focusing not on private cars but on the Fiat 500e fleet of Stellantis' Free2move car sharing service.
Naturally it is not an experiment without questions. Like the charging stations, this system requires a widespread infrastructure throughout the territory to function. Unlike the charging stations, which take up the space of a parking space, the replacement stations would be similar to car washes and, therefore, require many more square meters, comparable to those of today's fuel stations. However, the potential of the investment is clear: whoever starts placing stations here and there will have the market in their hands if battery swapping technology imposes itself on traditional charging.
TESLA TRIED AND GIVEN UP
In past years, the technique also intrigued another former startup that later became an undisputed mobility giant: Elon Musk 's Tesla, but he gave it up, preferring to try the path of super-fast charging with proprietary technologies.
Just recently, the South African tycoon's company has introduced a tax, nicknamed "congestion fee" which charges an extra dollar for each minute of parking after the car battery has reached 90% charge. In this way, Tesla tries to reduce the risk that the space in front of the columns is used as parking.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/smartcity/auto-elettriche-stellantis-cerca-una-via-alternativa-alle-colonnine/ on Mon, 11 Dec 2023 11:02:48 +0000.