Following Tesla’s lead, Gogoro to take funky electric scooters to Amsterdam

Gogoro’s smart electric scooter (Photo: Tech in Asia)

If any western city is synonymous with bikes, it’s Amsterdam. That could make it a good place for transportation startup Gogoro to pull its first move beyond its native Taiwan.

Gogoro announced today that it will launch its funky electric scooters in Amsterdam in the first half of 2016. That means the startup must also build a charging network for its e-bikes where owners can swap packs to get a fully-charged battery. The smart scooters will hit additional European cities later in 2016.

The startup last week secured US$130 million in series B funding, with investors including battery cell supplier Panasonic.

My teammate Erik Crouch was in Taipei last month and took this video of a Gogoro battery-swap station:

A video posted by Erik Crouch (@erik_crouch) on Oct 20, 2015 at 8:10pm PDT

See: Gogoro is a geeky electric scooter with the soul of a motorbike

The Gogoro Smartscooter first launched in Taipei this summer after years of development on both the bikes and the battery network. In Taiwan, the scooter costs NT$128,000 (US$4,140), making it pricier than the island’s ubiquitous and noisy gasoline-powered scooters, but the firm claims that the requisite monthly subscription to the charging network – coupled with Taiwanese government subsidies for electric bike buyers – makes running costs lower than for gas-guzzling scooters in the long-run.

Road bumps

While Amsterdam seems like a great spot for Gogoro, the Taiwanese startup faces a host of challenges. For one, it won’t be competing against a US$2,500 Suzuki scooter in Amsterdam – it’ll be up against a dirt-cheap bicycle. Plus, can the Smartscooter secure subsidies from authorities in the Netherlands to make the price less prohibitive?

(Photo: Tech in Asia)

Furthermore, an electric scooter won’t feel so novel in the city because the Netherlands is one of the countries leading the way in building charging infrastructure for electric cars. Plug-in hybrids cars are fairly common, and there are schemes from automakers for leasing electric cars.