Many have said that if a Vespa and a smartphone had a lovechild, it would be the Gogoro Inc (睿能創意) scooter.
However, Gogoro is more about pushing forward “a revolutionary way to reinvent the way people consume energy” than making battery-powered intelligent scooters, marketing vice president Peng Ming-i (彭明義) said.
The company’s ambition also goes beyond what is suggested by its motto: “Tesla on two wheels,” Peng added.
Photo: Chien Jung-fong, Taipei Times
Gogoro strives to be a frontrunner in the transportation industry with a smart power grid for swappable batteries, Peng said in a recent interview.
However, before that energy network can be facilitated, Gogoro must prove that its futuristic scooter can make gains among Taiwan’s nearly 14 million motorcyclists.
This summer, Gogoro is to start scooter sales — and make public its retail prices for the greater Taipei area — before adding services elsewhere in Taiwan or in 230 other interested cities in the world.
The vehicle is a “charming enough high-performance electric vehicle to accelerate the switch to green energy,” Environmental Protection Administration Department of Air Quality Protection and Noise Control Director-General Chen Hsien-heng (陳咸亨) said.
The agency has been promoting electric vehicles because from 20 to 35 percent of PM2.5 pollution — airborne particles measuring 2.5 micrometers or less that can enter deeply into human lungs — in metropolitan areas is produced by gasoline-powered vehicles.
The rate of adoption of electric scooters in Taiwan has been slow since 2008. Last year, just 4,482 electronic scooters were sold nationwide, mainly in the public sector, compared with annual sales of more than 40,000 electric bicycles, according to statistics provided by the Electric Vehicle Development Association in Taipei.
The biggest hurdle to rapid adoption is not a high price, but rather the lackluster performance of electric vehicles, Chen said.
Despite the bureau’s subsidies of up to NT$20,000 per vehicle, motorcyclists have been hesitant to switch to electric scooters, as performance often falls short of expectations when it comes to battery capacity, charging time and hill-climbing capabilities, as well as the lack of charging or battery exchange stations, Chen said.
Gogoro’s scooter might hold the answer to all these problems, as the company claims its product’s performance is equal to that of a 125cc motorcycle, he said.
The Gogoro Smartscooter, 1.73m long and weighing 94kg, can accelerate from zero to 50kph in 4.2 seconds toward a maximum speed of 96.6kph, according to Gogoro, which was founded in 2011 by former HTC Corp (宏達電) executives Horace Luke (陸學森) and Matt Taylor.
The vehicle has a maximum range of 96.6km at an average speed of 40kph per battery swap, the company said.
The proprietary battery design employs 18650-size, cylindrical, automotive-grade lithium ion energy cells supplied by strategic partner Panasonic Corp, Gogoro said.
The electric scooter has a central processing unit that can process data collected by its 80 embedded sensors, including 25 for the batteries, within six seconds, Gogoro said.
Riding data is uploaded to the cloud every 10 minutes through Gogoro’s mobile app on a user’s smartphone or when a battery is exchanged at a GoStation through near-field communication connectivity, the company added.
The Smartscooter is so technically complicated that even the nation’s three top motorcycle makers would have a hard time reproducing it, senior manager of product management Troy Shih (施宜亨) said.
“All of these smart features are the reasons behind the positive feedback from those who have had a test ride on our scooter recently; most of them agreed Gogoro is ‘so much fun’ and ‘fierce’ to ride,” Shih said.
However, industry watchers, drawing on experience, have not been optimistic about the revolution Gogoro is attempting to begin.
“It is a global trend to be green, but the government has to take the initiative and impose a ban on gasoline-powered vehicles,” Electric Vehicle Development Association secretary-general Chang Chen-lung (張振隆) said. “Otherwise, it will be an uphill battle.”
With this year’s Semicon Taiwan trade show set to kick off on Wednesday, market attention has turned to the mass production of advanced packaging technologies and capacity expansion in Taiwan and the US. With traditional scaling reaching physical limits, heterogeneous integration and packaging technologies have emerged as key solutions. Surging demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing (HPC) and high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips has put technologies such as chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS), integrated fan-out (InFO), system on integrated chips (SoIC), 3D IC and fan-out panel-level packaging (FOPLP) at the center of semiconductor innovation, making them a major focus at this year’s trade show, according
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
DEBUT: The trade show is to feature 17 national pavilions, a new high for the event, including from Canada, Costa Rica, Lithuania, Sweden and Vietnam for the first time The Semicon Taiwan trade show, which opens on Wednesday, is expected to see a new high in the number of exhibitors and visitors from around the world, said its organizer, SEMI, which has described the annual event as the “Olympics of the semiconductor industry.” SEMI, which represents companies in the electronics manufacturing and design supply chain, and touts the annual exhibition as the most influential semiconductor trade show in the world, said more than 1,200 enterprises from 56 countries are to showcase their innovations across more than 4,100 booths, and that the event could attract 100,000 visitors. This year’s event features 17
EXPORT GROWTH: The AI boom has shortened chip cycles to just one year, putting pressure on chipmakers to accelerate development and expand packaging capacity Developing a localized supply chain for advanced packaging equipment is critical for keeping pace with customers’ increasingly shrinking time-to-market cycles for new artificial intelligence (AI) chips, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said yesterday. Spurred on by the AI revolution, customers are accelerating product upgrades to nearly every year, compared with the two to three-year development cadence in the past, TSMC vice president of advanced packaging technology and service Jun He (何軍) said at a 3D IC Global Summit organized by SEMI in Taipei. These shortened cycles put heavy pressure on chipmakers, as the entire process — from chip design to mass
RSS