- A fleet of 100 Fiat 500e EVs will get Ample’s battery swap tech.
- The fleet will be part of Stellantis’ Free2move mobility provider.
- Ample’s swap stations can put a freshly charged battery in an EV in just five minutes.
Spain’s electric car sharing scene just got a little more interesting thanks to Stellantis and San Francisco-based startup Ample. Using Ample’s modular battery swapping technology, no fewer than 100 Fiat 500e EVs will be able to get a full charge in just five minutes.
Free2move, Stellantis’ mobility solutions company, started with a test fleet of 40 vehicles last year in Madrid, Spain. Now, a year later, the cars were successfully homologated and have been working just fine, so the fleet is set to expand to 100 cars by the middle of 2025.
Fiat 500e on Ample battery swap station
Ample’s battery swap tech is similar to China’s Nio, but with one big difference. Instead of having multiple pack configurations for the myriad of EVs out there, Ample’s approach was to make the swappable packs modular. With each module being roughly the size of a carry-on suitcase, different packs can have different capacities for the same type of vehicle.
So, if you only need to drive 100 miles per charge, you could pay for a single-module pack. If you have to drive a longer route once every month, you could upgrade to a four-module pack just for one time.
What’s more, Ample says its modular batteries were designed as drop-in replacements for original EV batteries, which opens the door to a huge selection of EVs. That said, modern EVs are offering higher and higher charging speeds, which makes range anxiety a thing of the past. Plus, for EV owners who charge at home overnight, battery swapping doesn’t make any sense. But for a company that needs to have its rental cars on the streets as many hours as possible, lengthy charging stops mean lost money, so battery swaps make a lot of sense.
“For car-sharing fleets, every minute spent off the road is lost revenue,” said Khaled Hassounah, CEO of Ample. “We’re deeply committed to making Free2move’s transition to electric seamless—not just in theory, but in daily operations. Our five-minute battery swaps eliminate charging downtime entirely, helping Free2move keep vehicles available, customers moving, and operations running at full speed.”
Ample’s battery swap tech hit the streets in 2021, with the first stations popping up in California. These first-generation stations could change all the retrofitted modules in roughly ten minutes. The second-generation station arrived in 2023. It cut the swap time in half and allowed the driver and passenger to get in and out of the car mid-swap.