The looks of the Gogoro Smartscooter might divide opinions, but it’s certainly a modern design. And it should be a bit different as it comes from a company run by a designer who worked at HTC, Microsoft and Nike before forming a company with a number of former HTC colleagues and raising $150 million in backing.
First up – the Gogoro smart scooter will hit 31mph in 4.2 seconds, with a top speed of 60mph. At the moment it’s being introduced in Taipei for a cost of around £2575 including a year of insurance, two years maintenance and servicing and two years of battery access, which is where things get interesting.
The plan for Gogoro isn’t for you to spend ages charging your electric scooter before you can get anywhere. Instead, their scooters have batteries which weight 20 pounds and are easy to access and swap out. A battery swap should take between 6-30 seconds. A fully-charged battery will give you around 60 miles.
Instead of owning the batteries which power your scooter, Gogoro is supplying 8 battery charging stations around the size of a cash machine. They’ll cost under £6,000 to install, and riders will be able to pull up, swap the batteries over and ride off. You’ll also get a diagnostic and fault update when you’re swapping batteries.
The batteries were designed in collaboration with Panasonic and use coded encryption to be completely useless unless they’re in an authorized charger.
So the plan is that you bike the scooter for what is currently a pretty low price for an electric vehicle. But you’ll then need to pay for access to Gogoro charging stations once your first two years of free access are up (And there’s no price for continued access yet). Meanwhile anyone can pay £6,000 to have a charging station installed, but again, the station itself belongs to Gogoro. Again, there’s no indication yet on the split on pricing to recoup your six grand and make any money.
So the optimistic view is that you can soon get a cheap electric scooter with a funky modern design for around £4,000, and you won’t have to pay for the electricity to run it or have to plug it in overnight just to get to the shops in the morning.
The pessimistic view is that Gogoro will need to flood urban cities with charging stations to make it work. Not only do you need enough stations to cope with the 60 mile range, but you need enough capacity that riders won’t end up having to wait for a fresh battery to be ready.
It’s an interesting solution to the current cost of electric vehicles, which is largely down to the expense of the batteries required. Whether or not it’s the future, or one of a number of futures that will co-exist, who can say. It’s going to be fun to find out though
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