Insider's Guide to Energy EV

24. Revolutionizing Electric Vehicle Charging: An In-Depth Look with Khaled Hassounah of Ample

• Chris Sass, Khaled Hassounah • Season 1 • Episode 24

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Dive into the electrifying world of electric vehicles (EVs) with our latest podcast episode from the "Insiders Guide to Energy EV Miniseries." This episode features a riveting discussion with Khaled Hassounah, CEO and Co-founder of AMPLE, a pioneering battery swapping company. As electric vehicles continue to surge in popularity, understanding the nuances of EV infrastructure becomes crucial. Khaled shares his expert insights on the future of battery swapping technology, a solution that promises to make electric mobility as convenient and rapid as refueling a gas car. The conversation explores how this innovative technology is being adopted in various markets, particularly in Asia, and its potential to revolutionize the energy landscape.

Throughout the episode, the dialogue delves deep into the technical and practical aspects of battery swapping systems. Khaled explains the concept of modular battery components, which could dramatically reduce the anxiety associated with electric vehicle charging by offering quick, efficient swaps instead of lengthy charge times. This technology not only enhances user convenience but also addresses significant infrastructure challenges such as grid demand and installation costs. With compelling anecdotes and comparisons to traditional fuel systems, this discussion illuminates the sophisticated mechanics behind AMPLE's approach and how it could alleviate many common concerns associated with EVs today.

Join us as we uncover the strides being made in electric vehicle technology and infrastructure, guided by one of the field's foremost innovators. Whether you're an EV enthusiast, an industry professional, or just curious about the future of transportation, this episode offers valuable insights into the evolving world of electric mobility. Discover how advancements like battery swapping are setting the stage for a more sustainable and accessible automotive future, and stay tuned to the "Insider's Guide to Energy" for more enlightening discussions on energy innovation.

Our Guest: https://www.linkedin.com/in/khassounah/ 

Transcript 
 

00:00:00 Khaled Hassounah 

Gas has worked effectively for 100 years because it's easy, it's convenience available, and our goal is to make electric mobility as fast, cheap and convenient as gas. 

00:00:12 Speaker 1 

Broadcasting from Washington, DC, This is Insider's Guide to Energy. 

00:00:27 Chris Sass 

This episode of Insiders Guide to Energy EV Miniseries is powered by Paua. Paua helps your business transition to electric vehicles by simplifying charging, managing payments, and optimizing your charging data. 

00:00:39 Niall Ridell 

Hey, Chris, how are things? 

00:00:41 Chris Sass 

Doing great today. Looking forward to a show another episode. These are always my favorite. 

00:00:46 Niall Ridell 

I I was on a stage yesterday and I was asked a rather challenging question about EV charging infrastructure. I was asked the question of what is the future of battery swapping, so I'm delighted that we've got Khalid Hasuna today with us to talk about that topic exactly. Khaled, when you introduce yourself? 

00:01:04 Khaled Hassounah 

Sure, it's a pleasure to be here and talk to you guys. I'm Khalid hasuna. I'm the CEO and Co founder of AMPLE, which as I think you give it away is a a battery swapping company in the electric mobility space. 

00:01:17 Niall Ridell 

And and if you had been me sat on that stage yesterday with a rather challenging audience of. 

00:01:24 Niall Ridell 

Electric vehicle experts in front of you. What would you have done to describe your business to them to help them understand where you think the future of this technology might? 

00:01:34 Khaled Hassounah 

Sure, sure. I mean the first thing I would say is that people are treating electric infrastructure or electric mobility infrastructure as if everybody's driving an electric car. And I think that's not true yet. We're barely scratching the surface. We have less than 1% of humanity driving electric cars. And every time you make that massive. 

00:01:54 Khaled Hassounah 

Of a shift, you're going to have to understand where the bottlenecks are. You can't assume we already know what the answer is, right? 

00:02:01 Khaled Hassounah 

You're going to. 

00:02:02 Khaled Hassounah 

Try to understand what the challenges are, what's gonna make it difficult, or makes it expensive, but makes it hard to roll out. 

00:02:07 Khaled Hassounah 

And in a way, from a battery swapping perspective, it has a place in the sense that it works just as well as gas does. It's a way to move electricity physically and and that has a lot of advantages. I'm sure we can dig dig into here. But I would say it is a very effective way of delivering. 

00:02:28 Khaled Hassounah 

Energy the way people have envisioned it so far, maybe was the first attempt that did not really do it in a way addressed all the challenges that made it not work. It doesn't mean we should stop innovating, and I think that. 

00:02:40 Khaled Hassounah 

Well, what we'd like to think that we innovate enough to actually make it effective. So to go back to your question, I would say there are places in the world that where battery swapping is working really well. I mean, you look at kind of Asia in general and China in particular, and it's probably growing a lot faster than charging is just because it sold. 

00:03:01 Khaled Hassounah 

All fundamental change is charging has not solved. Now one thing that's important. 

00:03:06 Khaled Hassounah 

To disclaim when you talk about battery swapping is that no one is trying to create a solution that solves all of the problems right. There is an easy and five, the largest 10 companies in the world, all of them put gas in your cars because the problem is so massive. You need all kinds of solutions, so charging works makes sense, has certain use cases, but there is a lot that is not met by it. And that's where battery. 

00:03:25 Khaled Hassounah 

That's fine. 

00:03:27 Niall Ridell 

And you described some places in the world where battery swapping has started to catch on. What are the sort of criteria that are driving or incentivizing that swapping rather than plugging something in? What do you think it is that is driving those economies to adopt A swapping technology? 

00:03:44 Khaled Hassounah 

To be honest, I I don't think it's the nature of the problem as much as the scale of the problem. 

00:03:50 Khaled Hassounah 

Right. So if you look at China, our understanding of the problem and it's got a lot of time trying to understand and learn and look at what people are doing, I mean that's everybody's doing in electric mobility right now because everybody's in learning mode, right? Is that the reason China is adopting swapping is not necessarily because charting didn't work for them. I mean they have six times as many. 

00:04:11 Khaled Hassounah 

Charges in the US. 

00:04:13 Khaled Hassounah 

Right. They have people driving electric cars everywhere. So if you think you'd look at them and say, oh, they solved the problem, but because they scaled so much, they found the limits of that solution. They understand that it works really well for a big part of the use case in order to keep kind of breaking the barriers, you're going to have to find other solution that address other fundamental challenges that charging has not been able to address. So. 

00:04:35 Khaled Hassounah 

We believe that and and hopefully supported by evidence that the reason people are making those shifts, the reason that Chinese government incentivized swapping more than even those charging is because they understand you really need that other solution to address the other big chunk of of the challenge. 

00:04:52 Chris Sass 

But does that need? Is that really a need or is it, as you said in your opening, that we're early in the whole game, right? So when battery technology gets better and I can charge quicker? 

00:05:03 Chris Sass 

And the infrastructure is in place, is there still the need to swap? Is there still a value there? 

00:05:08 Khaled Hassounah 

There, there, there is we. We do strongly believe there is and and mostly because I I think the need is not what you would expect. Right. Like so often people think that challenge with chargers is installing. 

00:05:20 Khaled Hassounah 

Others and that could be further from the truth, right? Like that's the problem. If you have a garage and you want to put a charger, charge your car. You're you're at the last kind of step where all you need to do is to put that charger so you can actually plug it in. But if you step back and you look at it as an infrastructure problem, the challenge with Charger has nothing to do with charger. It has to do with the grid. 

00:05:42 Khaled Hassounah 

And getting the grid for again 100 years. I mean because that's really as long as we've been playing with the electric and playing with mobility and playing with cars. The reason grids have or the way we've been thinking about grids is more like a tree structure, right, you massive generation, you have massive trunks coming in the cities. Exactly. And you spread them out. So you you assume that. 

00:06:03 Khaled Hassounah 

At the end, where you're plugging into the grid in a factory in a house? In an. 

00:06:07 Khaled Hassounah 

Office you have a small amount of power you're using for a very long period of time. That's the way it structures like. So. So the last, the last kind of branch is very thin, but it's it's sustained, and now we're going, I'm saying, well, mobility is exactly the opposite in mobility. You actually have a fight. 

00:06:27 Khaled Hassounah 

Between the time you're getting energy and the time you're using the car, every time you're charging the car, it's time you're actually not using it to do what it's supposed to be doing, which is mobility. So. 

00:06:37 Khaled Hassounah 

The way you solve that problem is you say, listen, I'm going to drive it for as long as I want, and the moment I want electricity, I want it all immediately, right? And that's not how grids are structured. So. So you're going to plug into the grid As for tons of power and then you're going to stop because now you're going to go drive. And that's the fundamental problem. So you look at across the city is everywhere that's funding. 

00:06:57 Khaled Hassounah 

That's why you look at New York and they're struggling to get fast chargers. You look at San fresco tech, capital of the world, we barely have any fast charges in the cities. 

00:07:05 Niall Ridell 

So I I describe exactly the same problem statement to my customers, but I describe it slightly differently. I always say that it's basic physics. You know, energy is power times time and the reality is that you just cannot move electricity as fast. The power isn't there to get it into the vehicles. And what you're doing is by basically taking the container out and replacing it with a refilled. 

00:07:26 Niall Ridell 

Energy container. You're removing that time barrier and that you know people have looked at this technology before, what led you to look at this? Where did the inception of ample come from? 

00:07:36 Khaled Hassounah 

Sure. And I'm going to start with something I usually like to say because I think a lot of people. 

00:07:43 Khaled Hassounah 

Who have been following technology will immediately agree, right, which is. 

00:07:48 Khaled Hassounah 

People who succeed in introducing solutions that work are not necessarily the first ones who thought of that solution right. Google was not the first search engine. Facebook was not the first social network. Tesla was not the first electric car, so really getting. 

00:08:06 Khaled Hassounah 

It's funny innovation and that's another kind of favorite thing, which is innovation is not really coming up with an idea. Innovation is figure out how to make it actually work at scale for a lot of people. You know, they're economically viable. So you're right, battery swapping has been tried before. That doesn't mean it's a bad idea. It just means people have not yet figured out how to make it work. 

00:08:25 Khaled Hassounah 

Effectively, and I think that's what we have been able to accomplish, that's we, we we step back and say OK, swapping good approach not necessarily there yet. 

00:08:37 Khaled Hassounah 

How do you make it work effectively and if I want to give you kind of the few second summary of what we've done that we think makes it actually viable, it's the modularization of the battery. We took the battery and we broke it into small modular pieces and a lot of things become easier. You can have the battery adapt to the vehicle, you reduce the amount of weight you're moving, you can have. 

00:08:57 Khaled Hassounah 

Works across a wide range of cars etcetera, etcetera and we can spend more time on that, but that's really the fundamental innovation. 

00:09:04 Chris Sass 

Well, let's do that because we've had a conversation. Our audience doesn't necessarily know we're we're alluding to battery swapping. 

00:09:11 Chris Sass 

But it's got a lot of challenges. There's a lot of different manufacturers, they they haven't really built their vehicles to necessarily design to swap batteries. From what I can tell yet, you're a proponent of your swapping technology, working on many different types of vehicles and that it's a very quick process and easy process. So maybe walk us through visually. 

00:09:32 Chris Sass 

As for our podcast, you might need to explain it that YouTube listeners maybe will watch some video on this if you share video on it, but explain what really happens. 

00:09:41 Khaled Hassounah 

Sure, sure. So let me, let me go back to where where I left my statements. Thank you for allowing me to take it forward. Right. So first swapping good approach is not good. So because traditional let me start from there because I can contrast traditional people have done is they say OK well how do you sew up a car battery, you build a big robot can move 1000 LB. 

00:10:00 Khaled Hassounah 

Object you drive over it. Often you have to dig in the ground to put it because it's so big and then it comes grabs this 1000 lbs. Imagine the kind of machine that's accurately repeatedly many times a day. Does that right? How expensive it is and how complex moves it out and puts another battery in. And the moment you look at. 

00:10:18 Khaled Hassounah 

About anyone who's kind of technically oriented, or at least logically oriented, we immediately see kind of big. 

00:10:25 Khaled Hassounah 

Alarm bells start hitting right. It's like first is well, that robot is going to be very expensive. How can you make that economically viable? The 2nd is well, you need going to need to change the vehicle so that this battery is designed to plug in and be bolted to last 10 years. Now can needs to come out in and out a few times a month or possibly a few times a week. 

00:10:46 Khaled Hassounah 

And the second thing is, OK, well, you take this big battery from a, call it a SUV and then you need to put it in a tiny car and need to put in a big truck. It's going to be a different size battery unless you have everybody use exactly the same size of battery. And then you have other things like feature compatibility etc. So. 

00:11:06 Khaled Hassounah 

Going back to kind of our approach, what we did is say if you break this pattern, small modular pieces, few things become a lot easier. First, you don't need now one big standard battery, right? 

00:11:19 Khaled Hassounah 

What we do is we build this adapter plate and hence come kind of our ability to work with automakers without having them change a car that has the same shape as the original car's battery. So, for example, we've announced working with Silentis on the Fiat 500 E the the cards designed to work with specific size battery. We have an adapter plate, same shape. 

00:11:38 Khaled Hassounah 

Same software interface, same connector in the front, same mechanical structure rigidity that goes in the same cavity. So at the factory still Lantis is either installing this battery fixed battery or the ample plate and within that plate it defines how many of our modules fit. Think of it as Lego. 

00:11:54 Khaled Hassounah 

Right now we go to a truck. We announced A partnership with Daimler Truck on the Mitsubishi Fuso vehicle. It's a bigger battery, it's a truck, it's designed differently, requires different structure entity. The structure is different around the just the shell, but the same modules, more of them installed in the same car. So that's kind of maybe the first aspect of it that allows us to say. 

00:12:15 Khaled Hassounah 

Now we have the same battery works across different kinds of cars by simply just allowing yourself to rearrange your battery based on the space available in the vehicle and the structure requirement of the vehicle, etcetera, etcetera. 

00:12:26 Niall Ridell 

That's that's quite insightful because the thing that went through my head is when you mentioned Daimler trucks. 

00:12:32 Niall Ridell 

Daimler, when they launched their initial trucks, they were using Mercedes car batteries configured inside them. I'm driving a Mercedes at the moment, so in theory there's not a long way to go to imagine that the Mercedes team might adopt the the ample plate, the adapter plate. 

00:12:52 Niall Ridell 

Can you work out what the configuration of modules was and theoretically my car could become a car that was compatible with your charging station. 

00:13:00 Niall Ridell 

But do I need to configure that car before I buy it? Or do you adapt it after I purchased it? 

00:13:07 Khaled Hassounah 

Yeah, that's a very, very good question. Just first to comment quickly on what you're saying. I think that's probably the automaker. That's the one thing they're super excited about. When they when, when we start working with us is that we don't require them. I mean, Mercedes kind of reuse the battery most actually automakers don't like the Fiat 500 is completely different. The battery in the EK0 platform is completely different than. 

00:13:31 Khaled Hassounah 

Run Pro Master that has just announced 110 kWh and they just really need to redevelop a whole battery from scratch every time in each one of their car platforms because they're very different needs. But the beauty is now the the same core module works across all of these cars and that means that. 

00:13:49 Khaled Hassounah 

Also, it reduces the cost of delivery development, but also all of them. 

00:13:53 Khaled Hassounah 

Can get 100% charge refinements, right? 

00:13:56 Khaled Hassounah 

So to your. 

00:13:58 Khaled Hassounah 

To your question, the approach we we take, we we never wanted to be an aftermarket company. So our approach was not you buy your car and then modify it so that it works. We want to work with the automakers and and and and and that's our every automaker. We're announced we're actually integrating with them at the factory. So when you buy your vehicle, it comes with amplic. 

00:14:18 Khaled Hassounah 

Right. So we just so the reason to make it easy to kind of be a dropper replacement mostly to reduce the complexity of engineering to integrate it. So we can go to market faster and also not take away their flexibility and be able to design the vehicle any way they want to keep advancing it. We don't want to kind of restrict them. So that's kind of our superpower with them. But yeah, you buy the. 

00:14:38 Khaled Hassounah 

Are with the ample technology, the factory, and in a way, if you look at it, the amount of battery EV is on the road is a small fraction of what's going to come on the road. That's what we're really more interested in. We want to scale, we want to get a billion cars on the road. We don't want to make. 

00:14:52 Khaled Hassounah 

The few million are installed going to work right? 

00:14:54 Chris Sass 

All right, so you've got this adapter plate or the battery configuration for the model vehicle and you've got some list of approved vehicles that we'll ask more about in a minute. What's the users experience then? So you just said in 5 minutes I get to 100%. So I'm still scratching my head going. OK, where's the magic? 

00:15:11 Khaled Hassounah 

Yeah. Yeah. So you you look for same way you'll search Google Maps or Apple Maps, I guess wherever you prefer. 

00:15:20 Khaled Hassounah 

To find a gas station, you search for ample swapping station. You drive in. Once you arrive at the station, our plate in the car is wirelessly connect it to the station so we can know which car it is. We do the magic authentication to make sure you are who you say you are and what your car is. That station actually adjusts itself because the station is designed to be flexible. 

00:15:41 Khaled Hassounah 

It can handle different wheel bases, different tracks. 

00:15:44 Khaled Hassounah 

Prizes and our robotics is flexible to pick up the battery anywhere because it's different arrangement as we described, right. So anyway arrange itself first it asks you Are you sure you want to swap? We don't want to move robots without knowing you want to you say yes, it arranges itself, takes a few seconds to the the the station door rolls up and you just drive in. Now we guide you in the drive. 

00:16:04 Khaled Hassounah 

Kind of think a bit cooler car wash, right? Like where we're telling you, giving you lights, making it easy. You go in when you align, but then the moment you're in the right place and people get it very quickly, it's really easy. And then we say, OK, Are you ready to swap? We just want to again get confirm. You're interacting with the user, you say? Yes. 

00:16:23 Khaled Hassounah 

And then the system autonomous autonomously actually swaps your battery. We lift the car, the our stage, our kind of robot comes in, picks up Trey, picks them one at a time, and then removes the battery modules, put new ones in, puts these trays back in the car. The car comes down and drive off. Now I'm trying to describe it. 

00:16:44 Khaled Hassounah 

Using my hands, I'm not successful. If you go to our website you can see kind of a quick video shows you robotics but in effect to make it a lot simpler you drive in, you wait for a few minutes, you drive off with 100% charge. That's a user experience. That's what you. 

00:16:57 Chris Sass 

Right. So I've driven in theoretically this really ****** robot comes, does all kinds of stuff in my car. Few minutes later, there's a a new battery pack underneath that goes to ownership and business models, right? So if if I buy an EV today and it's got a battery in a huge part of that cost, it's probably that battery. 

00:17:17 Chris Sass 

So if I'm a manufacturer and I want to have some flexibility, or maybe I want to have a different way of financing. 

00:17:23 Chris Sass 

Let's talk about this new model of battery. So who actually owns this battery and how does it get paid for? 

00:17:29 Khaled Hassounah 

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let let me let me again as as I I'm going to do again and again I'm going to take one step back before I can jump in. Yeah, we people have been using gas cars and owning them and leasing them and financing them for a long time, right. And then what we've done to people is we went and we said, hey, we're going to give this new car. 

00:17:49 Khaled Hassounah 

It's 30% more expensive and guess what? The most expensive part of the car is the one that's going to go back first, so you're going to have to make sure you charge it very carefully and if you. 

00:18:00 Khaled Hassounah 

Month it's gonna you're gonna lose value. Thousands of dollars. But listen, even if you do, this is going to lose value over time. And your car. The whole car is going to lose value and residual value at the end of life is going to be a lot lower. And you see tons of Nissan leaves around with 40 miles of range that are worth $2000, right. These cars should have been worth $12,000. 

00:18:20 Khaled Hassounah 

So we don't think that's a good approach. We think you should not be owning your battery. That's not a good idea because it's the part first. 

00:18:30 Khaled Hassounah 

That has a different lifetime than the rest of your car. Second, you should not be responsible for. Please make sure this works really, really well. Instead, it's just a gas tank. You just want to get energy into your car. So our approach with you, where your car without the battery, you don't even worry about it. You pay us a subscription and we'll make sure you always get the car a battery as good as needed. 

00:18:51 Khaled Hassounah 

For as long as you need it so once. 

00:18:53 Khaled Hassounah 

So if you don't want to use after four years, stop being subscription, you move to the next person. If you use it for 12 years, you can do that. And one quick thing just I will mention also is that over time battery will get good. We're now in the early, I don't know if you remember when iPhones first came out, everybody was afraid of buying an iPhone because in three months it's going to be better. 

00:19:14 Khaled Hassounah 

Oh. 

00:19:14 Khaled Hassounah 

Coming out or Android phone. So we're in that new phase that we know the battery will get better now. We're actually giving you that for free as long as you create subscription over time we keep. 

00:19:23 Khaled Hassounah 

Advancing the better and giving. 

00:19:24 Niall Ridell 

You more range, so I'm getting quite excited about quite a lot of this because what we've seen with automotive manufacturers is they've had to continually improve their battery and. 

00:19:34 Niall Ridell 

Get more kilowatt hours squeezed into the frames and the cars are going up and they're getting bigger and all this sort of stuff. But what you're actually describing. 

00:19:41 Niall Ridell 

Thing is like your your cars battery will get better over time because batteries will get better over time. And by the way, if a bit of that battery goes bad, one of the modules goes bad. I'm assuming you swap it out that disappears and gets sent off on a different route and next time when you turn up you get a really good module. The technology will improve and like you say, you're buying into an ecosystem which will. 

00:20:01 Niall Ridell 

Improve as your vehicle improves, there's a lot of really cool stuff about this that suddenly changes the way that people will interact with that vehicle. 

00:20:11 Niall Ridell 

The question, of course is can you build up a big enough ecosystem for people to buy into it? Where are you on that ecosystem development journey? Because we've mentioned two OEM's where where's, where's it going? Where are we getting to? 

00:20:26 Khaled Hassounah 

Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a that's a good question. So let me let me touch on that. So when when you say 2 OEMs, those are the two OEMs we've announced, right, like it takes us kind of few months to a couple of years of work coordination, safety testing, validation before we get a car on. 

00:20:45 Khaled Hassounah 

On the road. 

00:20:46 Khaled Hassounah 

And we're actually working with a much bigger number of OEMs. So we've announced Elantris, we've announced Daimler truck kind of top automakers in the world's top three. I mean, I think down the track, I think is by far the largest truck maker in the world, but we're working with a few more. I can't say names. 

00:21:07 Khaled Hassounah 

But let's just call them all of them top five automakers in the world. So I think within kind of months. 

00:21:13 Khaled Hassounah 

It's going to be obvious that the vast majority of large automakers in the world, all of them, are integrating ample technology into it. So I'm making a big statement and I will roll out just quickly would be that the beauty of what we're doing is that we can roll out to demand. We're not gonna building charges and hoping people come. We understand exactly where the sales are, where they're happening. We're working with our partners. 

00:21:34 Khaled Hassounah 

Especially with our focus on fleets initially we know where the demand is. Once you build enough state, you can think of gas station. Once you build enough stations in a geographic area, I think the Bay Area, we're already covered. You go anywhere from Oakland, San Jose, San Francisco and anywhere in between. You're within 510 minutes of this walking station. 

00:21:50 Chris Sass 

And there's not concern that manufacturers would want to try to differentiate with their software and their batteries. So I think of, like Tesla wanting to own their battery, their giga plants or something like that. Do you take any value away or commoditize to straight energy? And does it really matter at the end of the day if you do? 

00:22:07 Khaled Hassounah 

Yeah. And to be honest, the battery has already commoditized, right? Like if you think about it and I think that challenge you have is that you have 10s of automakers that all of them want to build the best battery. 

00:22:17 Khaled Hassounah 

The world and only one of them will build the best battery in the world, right? Because that initial best means one so. But if you look at it, there's been initially. So when Tesla first started, there's a lot of innovation and battery pack design, right? How do you fit more? How do you make it safer? How do you make it streamlined, etc. I think we're at the point in which that problem has been highly optimized. 

00:22:38 Khaled Hassounah 

Right. So right now you don't really pick. 

00:22:42 Khaled Hassounah 

A Volkswagen ID for Kia Niro EV or Ionic 5 based on the battery, you don't go read the battery spec to find out you say doesn't have enough range. Does it work with me? But then you look doesn't have luggage space and can I fit my kids here? Right? Like that's really what you think about when you buy a car. Same way when you buy a gas car, you don't think about how big the gas tank size, I guarantee you. 

00:23:03 Khaled Hassounah 

Most of us will not remember the size of our gas tank size, so a great degree that's not where differentiation definition will come from the battery cell. 

00:23:11 Khaled Hassounah 

Efficient is a science problem and the challenge you have today is that it takes five years on average to get the best new chemistry into cars and most of the time doesn't make it into the newer cars. And we're actually opening the door to make it very easy to get it into new vehicles faster. So in a way, we're actually taking that problem off the front line and saying. 

00:23:31 Khaled Hassounah 

Let's get the best battery in our pool and we'll make sure we give you the biggest range you. 

00:23:35 Khaled Hassounah 

Have. 

00:23:36 Chris Sass 

Do you see a point in the future when I might use a different battery for different things? I might pay less to get a commuter battery because I'm only going 20 kilometers a day and then on holidays like Easter coming up where I'm going to drive to go see family, I might want a heavier battery on the road where I put more wear and tear on the vehicle, but it gets me further. Is that something you see happening? 

00:23:55 Khaled Hassounah 

100% right, like so and that's kind of the point. Also Neil was making which is. 

00:24:01 Khaled Hassounah 

Right now, because everybody has charging exactly, no one is afraid of how far the car goes. But everybody afraid what happens when turns out the charge because you're gonna stop, right? So everybody's trying to get as many kilowatt hours inside this chassis as as possible to tell people. Don't worry about it. You can go further. You can go visit your your family. Right. So that's the fundamental challenge. And I think the. 

00:24:23 Khaled Hassounah 

The effect of that is that you have so many big batteries that most of the time you don't use. 

00:24:29 Khaled Hassounah 

Right, So what ends up what ends up happening is that you commute 20 miles a day or 30 miles a day, and you have a 300 miles. You don't need that. Mostly you need that because you're afraid of the long trip. You're going take. You don't buy a car. It's not going to take you the few times a year you want to go further and you that charging is so painful that you don't want to go and wait. 

00:24:50 Khaled Hassounah 

The five stars are for two hours every time at 1:00 AM every time you need. 

00:24:53 Khaled Hassounah 

To charge so but. 

00:24:56 Khaled Hassounah 

With our modularity, what we're able to do is to say we can give you a smaller battery and make you payless for it. So your car is few $1000 cheaper. This is not kind of you're nicer the environment. This is your nicer environment and it's few $1000 cheaper. But then at the same time also when you want to take a longer trip. 

00:25:16 Khaled Hassounah 

You can put more modules in your car. 

00:25:20 Niall Ridell 

So can I go back to that battery swap? I arrive in my Fiat 500. I'm off on. I'm just doing my daily commute. The plate comes off the bottom of the car and the modules are arranged on it and you swap the modules and you put the plate back in the car. Is that a correct description? 

00:25:37 Khaled Hassounah 

Kind of. Kind of, yes. So so I'm sorry. So there's three components. There's a plate that's installed in the car, the plate. 

00:25:42 Chris Sass 

Yeah. 

00:25:44 Khaled Hassounah 

Comes out. 

00:25:45 Niall Ridell 

OK. 

00:25:45 Khaled Hassounah 

Right. That stays in the car and that's connected the same with the original, with the big connector etcetera. Inside that plates there are battery trays, which is our unit swap. And these trays is what holds our battery modules. So think of it like the kind of pulling a drawer, but we're kind of putting it out completely. We remove the modules, put new ones in, we get the drawer back or the trays. 

00:26:04 Niall Ridell 

And we put them in, so nothing stops you. 

00:26:07 Niall Ridell 

Filling half the trays. 

00:26:09 Niall Ridell 

And giving you half the weight, which reduces the weight concern around EVs. You get your daily commuting all sorted, you come back for another swap at the end of the week. I'm going away for the weekend. I fill all the trays. Now I'm fully loaded. I've got my maximum range. And if I do go further my range, I just pull over another swapping station. 

00:26:27 Khaled Hassounah 

Exactly right. 

00:26:28 Niall Ridell 

Starting to become quite an elegant answer to the problem of, you know, the charger anxiety, the range anxiety, and of course the other business models that spin up off the back of that fascinating. 

00:26:37 

I'm gonna tell you. 

00:26:37 Khaled Hassounah 

Something funny, which is a Tesla, uses a third of the energy stored in its battery, moving the. 

00:26:43 Khaled Hassounah 

Battery around. 

00:26:44 Khaled Hassounah 

Right. Like it's like like, why do you do that like so? And and there's good reason. Because really once you buy the car, you're you're stuck with it for 10 years or however long you want to own it. And now we're saying no, you're not. Like, you can just choose, you want less weight. You can even like it has tons of application in commercial application when you're delivering goods, you're often fighting between the weight of the car and the weight of the payload. 

00:27:06 Khaled Hassounah 

Now if you have less. 

00:27:08 Khaled Hassounah 

Weight of the car or less battery weight. You can actually put more goods inside that truck and deliver more, so it just works in so many ways to be able to have the flexibility of saying if I don't read the range they may not pay for the cost and the weight. 

00:27:22 Khaled Hassounah 

Of of that of that range. 

00:27:24 Chris Sass 

Now I hear it. In principle, I'm I'm always a little bit of a pessimist, pessimist and a little bit skeptical. 

00:27:31 Chris Sass 

How big do these facilities need to be? Because if I'm in a metropolitan area and I have a lot of batteries to swap and they're not that small, you know, or if I'm on the side of the highway, so I'm on the Interstate and I pull over into the you, let's assume you get a contract at one of the interest rates and I go in and want to change my batteries. 

00:27:49 Chris Sass 

You probably need a pretty big inventory battery sitting there. That's my. 

00:27:52 Khaled Hassounah 

That's a good, good question. So I mean there's 22 components to that question, right? Like one of them is. 

00:28:00 Khaled Hassounah 

How big are the stations and the 2nd is how big is the inventor? Right. So let's let's address them quickly. So first, how big is the station? So because of modularity, the station is a lot smaller, right? So if I take a big battery, I need space just to move that battery around. So there isn't kind of a lot of these pack level swapping. 

00:28:20 Khaled Hassounah 

Build underground and build big building is the build the battery itself if you're moving. 

00:28:24 Khaled Hassounah 

A car, Oregon. 

00:28:25 Khaled Hassounah 

Maybe half the width of the car or the length of the car. You know tons of space just to move it around to be able to arrange it. In our case, we break into small modules. Literally. We have a shelf. 

00:28:35 Khaled Hassounah 

In which you plug in batteries as this big right. So in a way the space. 

00:28:38 Chris Sass 

I can verbally describe that cause our audience a lot of folks are listening, not watching you. 

00:28:42 Khaled Hassounah 

Sure, sure. So so in a way, instead of taking the whole pack out, we're moving typically kind of 110th to 115th of it, which is the size of the module. So that's a much smaller module is kind of twice the size of your laptop. That's kind of how big it is. It's very, very small relative to the size of an easy battery, which is really a lot bigger, it's usually a. 

00:29:02 Khaled Hassounah 

Dining table size. 

00:29:04 Khaled Hassounah 

So for that size you need a lot less space to move it around, and literally you arrange it on a shelf. So in our station we have a thin compartment where there's a shelf of batteries and we have a pick and place mechanism inserts in the shelf and takes another one out. In effect the result of that is that our stations are actually pretty small, right, so we can. 

00:29:24 Khaled Hassounah 

Drop a station in Solar Station in three days. Literally, we build at the factory. We just drop it on the ground and we turn it on and we have a swapping stations. It's that simple to install and it fits in three parking spots. That's all we need. Just give us 3. 

00:29:36 Khaled Hassounah 

Parking spots and three days and we get a station up and running. So first the stations are very small and that's because we need construction. We're not digging in the ground. We don't need tons of space. We don't need lots of power. We said we reduced the power requirement. 

00:29:50 Khaled Hassounah 

That's how we can deploy in urban spaces a lot easier, a lot faster. So if you look at San Francisco, you look around there is how many places are there where there's a MW connection, you can do construction and you need to use it for. 

00:30:04 Khaled Hassounah 

Years and how many places there is 3 parking spots with 100 kilowatt connection you get from the building next door and you can leave for two years. So that makes it. 

00:30:12 Khaled Hassounah 

A lot easier. 

00:30:13 Khaled Hassounah 

I'm happy to address that inventory question, but I'll let you can ask me about it later if that's important, yeah. 

00:30:19 Niall Ridell 

So that I'm supremely excited about this and we've started to hear and see signs of battery swapping emerging around the world as a business. How old are you? How long you been operating and where are you on that journey to being able to enable me sat here in the UK, roll out the door and swap my battery rather than charge my bag? 

00:30:38 Niall Ridell 

Sorry. 

00:30:39 Khaled Hassounah 

Sure, sure. We're, we're, we're as a company, we've been a little over nine years old. So we're kind of an adolescent startup, but we really spent the first seven years of ample hiding in a garage, just developing technology. We did not like. We announced 2 1/2 years ago because. 

00:30:59 Khaled Hassounah 

We we didn't want to do and that's kind of my Co founder, John, this is not our first rodeo and our second company together we we don't, we don't want to. 

00:31:11 Khaled Hassounah 

Have a dream and go tell the whole world about it. We want to first make sure it's real. We can bring it to reality, spend a lot of time in a garage. Really just playing with technology for last 2 1/2 years we've been rolling out technology just to demonstrate in the real world. But really we know that our our critical mass will will start once we're. 

00:31:30 Khaled Hassounah 

Fully integrate into an automaker so you can just go buy a car with technology. 

00:31:34 Khaled Hassounah 

And recently that's been our prime focus and that's why we're announcing some partnerships and working very actively on others. 

00:31:39 Chris Sass 

All right. That leads me to my last question to this interview, which is a crystal ball. So you're you're you're pretty bullish. You've been working on this kind of quasi stealth mode then you've come out and you've gotten some proof of concept. 

00:31:50 Chris Sass 

24 months from now, how many of the top three automakers do you think will have this technology available to me as a consumer? 

00:31:58 Khaled Hassounah 

Ohh in 24 months I'm pretty confident behind 3%. 

00:32:02 Chris Sass 

All right, we're going to come back and then we're going to, we'll play that sound bite. 

00:32:05 Khaled Hassounah 

You put time on the calendar. 

00:32:07 Chris Sass 

I I will absolutely marked on the calendar. This has been a fascinating journey. I'm excited to hear about the technology. I'm still a bit of a pessimist because when it sounds too good to be true, I always worry a little bit that that maybe Neil and I have been friendly and we haven't really pushed the edges. I assume some of our listeners will add comment or questions in the comments. Please do in the YouTube. 

00:32:27 Chris Sass 

On the LinkedIn, if we didn't cover it, just ask. I'm sure we'll get an answer when we're there. Thank you so much for being a guest on the podcast today. 

00:32:36 Khaled Hassounah 

It's a great conversation. Thank you, guys. Really appreciate it. 

00:32:40 Chris Sass 

For our audience, we hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Insiders Guide to Energy EV series. If you have, don't forget to subscribe. Do watch us on YouTube and do subscribe there and we'll see you again next time on the insiders guide to Energy EV series. Bye bye for now.