Is Battery Swapping The Future of EVs? Spotlight on Ample

hello John Welcome to our Spotlight series oh thank you for having me can you give our audience a brief overview of your Tech so we actually doing something that's pretty different in the electrification space we came up with a technology that allows you to swap batteries an electric vehicle in 5 minutes uh so think about it as a gas station for electric cars you drive in you spend 5 minutes we replace the empty batteries with fully charged batteries and you drive off so when we we started this we believe that the the biggest challenge to electrification is finding a convenient way to get energy into the vehicles and so what we decided is what works really well with gas is you stop and you spend a few minutes physically moving the gas into the car and we decided to do the same thing for electric vehicles and can you share a case study where your Tech has made an impact on EV adoption or usage so I'll give you two two quick examples one is for uh when you think about ride sharing we a partnership with Uber if you are a driver who drives a ride sharing vehicle if you switch to electrification there's a high probability that you don't have a home with a garage where you're going to go and charge a car overnight so what happens is you spend a significant amount of time you could be spending 10 to 12 hours a week at a charger charging your vehicle when you do that that's significally decreases the amount of money you can make and you end up spending a lot more time doing it by allowing people to go through and battery swap what happens is they can use their vehicle for work whenever they need a charge very similar to gas they stop for a few minutes get a charge and go through this gives them two big benefits one is from the amount of time they spend working it's identical to gas but when you look at it from a a revenue perspective you actually can make more money with electric vehicles from two perspectives one is they actually pay a lot less for gas by using electricity uh and the second is Uber and provides a lot of incentives for people to go through and and drive electric vehicles so in end they don't change amount of time they work they and they end up taking home a larger paycheck one other example I'll quickly give you is uh in last M delivery uh we all see the trucks that come and deliver the goods when you try and move those trucks over to Electric what ends up happening is you end up having these very large batteries in them they could weigh you know 500 kgs or th000 pounds uh and these trucks are there to deliver packages not carry batteries around so with our technology they're able to choose how much battery they put in the vehicle and that way they can optimize uh the the truck to carry the packages and carry a lot less battery makes the car more efficient it also with our technology it's easy to use renewable energy when they go back to the depot we quickly swap batteries but those batteries we can charge them with renewable energy it's hard to do that with charging uh because of the power requirements so the combination of allowing them to swap every time they get back to the depot very quickly uh carry a lot more package at the back uh and then use renewable energy makes a lot of advantages for them and did you get any feedback from your partners or the consumers the the users the EV users actually give you a good example we we are live right now in Kyoto Japan uh with the largest taxi company out there called MK taxi and a couple of weeks ago we were there and I was speaking to a driver who came in for a swap and the way it works for the drivers is they make a percentage of the revenue they bring in so as soon as they started doing electric all the drivers preferred electric to to gas because they were paying a lot less for the energy but then when they introduced swapping the drivers all preferred swapping to Electric because they spending a lot less time uh waiting for the charge so I think it was a very good use case you know the driver said my first preference is if I can get it I'll take a swapple vehicle I you know I make more money and I spend less time doing it and what upcoming developments and Innovations are you most excited about with the ample of course right now for us is going through do to expanding in terms of geographies we'll be going into new areas Europe is something that I think there's a big push towards it we're currently going to be deploying in Madrid we're looking at other places out there so I think Geographic expansion is going to be very important the second is just going to be the range of vehicles we have a certain range of vehicles right now um it's easy it's easy for us to work with oems to uh to ad to adapt to new vehicles we don't require them to change anything so I'm excited about getting a larger range of vehicles uh we have some interesting ones like the Fiat 500e we have delivery vehicles but you'll see a much larger range and more Jo graphies that we go through and cover my last question for you is where can people explore your company and find out more about you what's you're doing we're at ample.com so there's a lot out there but the three geographies that we're in right now if you're in the Bay Area we have 12 stations deployed there if you're in Madrid um we have stations deployed and we're currently in Kyoto we choose our places with the wonderful cities we in so we like all those cities so you you'll hopefully see us in a lot more wonderful cities but uh the one thing I just say as as people think about it is I think a lot of people look at electrification and they assume going to an electric car is green it it electric car can often have a larger footprint than a gas car because of the battery so the only way for that to be green is for you to use it on renewable energy and I think that's an important one to remember is uh you need to combine the two go go green and use renewable energy to have the benefit and so I think it's important one to keep in and and if you're any CI stop by but we will be expanding and hopefully going to to sit near your your view soon well thank you John this has been wonderful thank you so much thank you for watching New Perspective Spotlight series if you like our content please consider subscribing to our social media channel and follow our podcast on your favorite streaming platform thanks