Taipei-based Gogoro’s Smartscooter is touted as the World’s first and Only One

Gogoro

Within the last few years we have seen an large increase in hybrid vehicles and fully-electric vehicles that aim to ease us off our dependency of fossil fuels. Companies like Tesla and BMW have introduced solid fully-electric automobiles. Aside from full-sized cars, we haven’t really seen that many other electric vehicles…until now. Meet the Gogoro: it’s a fully-electric scooter and it is also the worlds first smartscooter.

Gogoro is a Taipei-based startup that wanted to produce an electric scooter that would help revolutionize urban travel and transportation. Their final product is the Gogoro Smartscooter and it is actually a pretty impressive vehicle. The company is targeting large cities and urban areas, as that is where this scooter really aims to excel. It boats a very modern and futuristic design, in addition to being powered entirely by battery packs.

The scooter can achieve speeds of 60mph and can go from 0-31mph in just 4.2 seconds. Sure you aren’t going to be making any land speed records in this thing, but that’s not what the scooter is intended for. It’s designed for simple use within a city, an area where you will rarely ever go faster than 50mph. The scooter is made from aluminum and is fairly light as it weighs only 247 pounds.

What makes this scooter really impressive, is that the Gogoro is a smartscotoer. The scooter has around 55 sensors on-board and it can pair with a mobile application and Gogoro’s cloud service. The company plans on setting up battery stations around urban areas allowing you to quickly change batteries as well. The sensors allow you to see how much range you have left, and can help you navigate to the nearest battery station. The combination of the scooters sensors and the application also allow the user to monitor performance, energy consumption, and they provide the user with feedback about the scooter. With the app you can also reserve battery packs at the battery stations, ensuring that you’ll never be without power.

The scooter is also highly customizable and you can change the color of the display, change the sounds the scooter makes, and even put custom decals on it to make it more “you”. The scooter has a range of 62 miles, and while that’s not very long, it’s more than enough for a large urban area. Manhattan, for example, is only 13.4 miles long and covers an area of 33.6 square miles, so that range is more than enough. It also only takes less than a minute to swap out a battery pack at a swapping station. If you can’t reach one of those, the scooter can plug in to charge via a regular outlet.

Gogoro has received a considerable amount of financial backing, and the company plans on releasing the scooter sometime either this year or early next year. Once they get their battery station infrastructure up and working, the Gogoro scooter should ease congestion within large cities.

Photo from Gogoro

Written by Sebastian Hensiek

From Philadelphia, Sebastian is a fan of music, writing, art, and entertainment.