prasad1
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The electric scooter company that thinks it can transform urban mobility and the way we store and manage electricity, is opening for business in Taipei. Gogoro is the long-hyped, well-funded startup that revealed its debut product, the Smartscooter, at CES this year. It’s a sleek looking ride with impressive stats, but the real innovation is the system that lets customers swap depleted batteries for fresh ones at ATM-sized stations.
A pilot program starts this week, with a full commercial launch planned for this summer.
Battery swapping for electric cars has an unimpressive history (see: Better Place), but there’s reason to think it could work for scooters. The batteries in the Smartscooter weigh just 20 pounds, so you don’t need complicated and expensive machines to handle the swapping process. A rider can easily pull them out and pop fresh ones in. Based on a Gogoro demo, the whole process should take six seconds. The stations will be small and affordable, and easy to put in enough places to make the idea of range anxiety disappear.
The Electric Scooter That Could Make Battery Swapping Work Launches This Summer | WIRED
