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

After getting a tour of Gogoro’s flagship store in downtown Taipei, I reached a conclusion about the company’s electronic scooters: they’re geekcycles. What else would you call a bike that lets you use your phone to upload custom chime sounds for the turn signals? A bike whose app allots “merit badges” for triumphs like using a charging station at night or riding a certain distance between charges? When I saddled into the bike for a test drive, I thought I was atop a charming – if slightly nerdy – ride.

I thought wrong. My mistake dawned on me about two turns into our test drive, as the kindly shop assistant, Amy, opened the freaking throttle and fired us from a full stop to 80 kilometers per hour (50 mph) in a matter of seconds. And she was just getting started.

Amy – who has several Gogoro merit badges for speed, by the way – rocketed us through the streets of Taipei. The scooter leaned into turns, accelerated without putting up a fight, and stopped on a dime. The gasoline-powered mopeds that clutter every Taiwanese intersection blurred by like slow-moving antiques.

The Gogoro may have the flares and flourishes of a techy ride, but it has the soul of a motorcycle.

Bringing ebikes to Taiwan

In Shanghai, nearly every city block features at least one coin-fed yellow metal box, spilling out electrical cords to a huddle of charging “ebikes.” But in Taiwan, electric scooters have never caught on. Gas-powered bikes are so popular – Taiwan has one of the highest scooter ownership rates in the world – that the island never got around to building the infrastructure required for an electric scooter system.

That means any startup seeking to bring ebikes to Taiwan has to first confront the fact that there are no city-wide – let alone nation-wide – charging systems already in place. But Gogoro was ready for that challenge.

After raising some US$50 million in a series A round in 2011, the company got to work developing its bike and the requisite infrastructure.

“Piece by piece, we built the Smartscooter, the infrastructure for charging the product, and our cloud network from the bottom up,” Ming-I Peng, Gogoro’s marketing VP, tells Tech in Asia. “At first it seemed like an impossible task because there were no existing components that were specially designed for electric scooters.”

The Gogoro team had to design their scooters from scratch. Everything from the vehicle chassis to the motor itself was designed in-house, with high-performance and energy efficiency in mind.

And while designing the bike was no simple task, that is only the beginning of the battle. You could make the world’s greatest ebike (which, by the way, was Gogoro’s objective) but that gets you nowhere unless you’ve got a place to plug it in.

The power problem

To solve the problem of Taiwan’s lack of public charging infrastructure, Gogoro began opening up its own charging stations throughout Taipei. There are presently about 90 stations in the city, with many more in the pipeline.

Dat bike

Charging (heh) into the future