The fastest electric vehicle charging stations currently get an empty battery to 80 percent full in about 30 minutes. But a new company is working on swapping out empty battery packs for fully charged ones. That would get an electric vehicle to 100 percent full in about 10 minutes.
Ample, which officially launched this week at two sites in San Francisco and another Oakland, builds and operates battery-swapping stations that use a robot to pluck out dead battery packs from under the car and replace them with packs fully charged and ready to go.
The Ample bots replace the battery units in about 10 minutes, but eventually the company anticipates speeding it up to five minutes. Pricing for the everyday EV driver is still being worked out, but it will be comparable to gasoline fill-ups.
Quite interesting, but a lot may depend on how different vehicles are configured and how many of what type of batteries will be stocked at each station (because right now no standard battery pack fits multiple vehicles).
See How battery swapping could reduce EV charge time to just 10 minutes
Why plug in when you can switch out?