Look! It’s a bike! It’s an EV! It’s an…e-scooter?
Its name is actually the Gogoro Smartscooter, a big energy-friendly scooter project headed by former HTC execs and designed to reinvigorate personal urban transportation. No Uber or mass transit for the intrepid Smartscooter users – they want control over their own vehicles and environmental sustainability at the same time.
The Gogoro Smartscooter is completely battery operated, but the charging stations are unique. Instead of plug-and-wait options, Gogoro is using a swappable battery model. Batteries are available at kiosks around an urban environment. Scooter-users will have an app that sends them an alert when they are running low on juice and shows them where the nearest kiosk is. They can pull up and swap out their dying battery (well, two batteries. actually) for a charged version via the encrypted network. The batteries themselves were designed by Panasonic. The kiosks are about the size of an ATM, so they can fit easily on a number of street corners without hogging too much space.
The Smartscooter is still finding its first wheels. Gogoro has selected the Taiwanese Taipei City as its first experimental public release. It’s probably a smart choice: Taipei has a famously high number of scooters on the street, with a 1:1 ratio of people to scooters, and the city is pushing its citizens away from gas-powered transportation and toward more sustainable methods, making the Smartscooter a winner in both the right place and the right time.
How the kiosk battery method will function in the real world is still uncertain, however – hence the slow start. Gogoro is hoping to provider around 100 riders with scooters for an early beta phase, then release the Smartscooter commercially to the whole city later in the summer. So far there is no firm word on pricing or later release dates.
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