Electric scooter maker Gogoro Inc (睿能創意) on Saturday said pre-orders for its Gogoro 2 series have set a company record.
Pre-orders for the scooters have surpassed 13,000 units as of the end of last month, after the company started taking orders on May 25, Gogoro cofounder and chief executive officer Horace Luke (陸學森) said.
He estimated that Gogoro, which last year sold nearly 13,000 scooters in Taiwan, will more than double its sales this year.
Photo: CNA
On Saturday, the first batch of Gogoro 2 scooters was delivered to customers at 34 locations around the nation. A handover event was held at the National Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall, where 200 owners picked up their new vehicles.
An owner said he felt the new scooter had more torque than gasoline-powered scooters.
Changing batteries at swapping stations is also faster than refueling at a gasoline station, he added.
Gogoro operates nearly 400 battery-swapping stations around the nation and is to expand that number, Luke said.
The company has also signed agreements with 7-Eleven and the RT-Mart (大潤發) and Pxmart (全聯) hypermarket chains to set up battery-swapping stations at their outlets, he said.
The Gogoro 2 is priced at NT$73,800, but Taoyuan residents can purchase one for NT$38,800 thanks to subsidies offered by the Taoyuan City Government.
Luke said about 25 percent of Gogoro 2 buyers overall and more than 60 percent in Kaohsiung did so to replace their two-stroke scooters.
People replacing their two-stroke scooters are eligible for a government subsidy aimed at reducing air pollution caused by the gasoline-powered scooters.
This demonstrates the government’s determination to fight air pollution and shows that more people are trying out a new lifestyle, and identifying with Gogoro’s focus on “smart” transportation and energy, Luke said.
A total of 20,628 electric motorbikes were sold in Taiwan last year, according to Environmental Protection Administration statistics.
Of these, 62 percent were Gogoro scooters and 22 percent were made by China Motor Corp (中華汽車).
Overall, domestic motorbike sales rose 8.41 percent annually to 424,988 units in the first half of this year, according to data compiled by Taiwan Transportation Vehicle Manufacturers Association.
Kwang Yang Motor Co (光陽工業), the nation’s largest motorbike maker, reported sales of 156,979 units in the first six months, up 5 percent from a year earlier, with a 36.9 percent market share.
Sanyang Industry Co (三陽工業) the No. 2, sold 85,531 units, up 13.05 percent year-on-year, giving it a 20.1 percent market share.
Meta Platforms Inc offered US$100 million bonuses to OpenAI employees in an unsuccessful bid to poach the ChatGPT maker’s talent and strengthen its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) teams, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said. Facebook’s parent company — a competitor of OpenAI — also offered “giant” annual salaries exceeding US$100 million to OpenAI staffers, Altman said in an interview on the Uncapped with Jack Altman podcast released on Tuesday. “It is crazy,” Sam Altman told his brother Jack in the interview. “I’m really happy that at least so far none of our best people have decided to take them
BYPASSING CHINA TARIFFS: In the first five months of this year, Foxconn sent US$4.4bn of iPhones to the US from India, compared with US$3.7bn in the whole of last year Nearly all the iPhones exported by Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團) from India went to the US between March and last month, customs data showed, far above last year’s average of 50 percent and a clear sign of Apple Inc’s efforts to bypass high US tariffs imposed on China. The numbers, being reported by Reuters for the first time, show that Apple has realigned its India exports to almost exclusively serve the US market, when previously the devices were more widely distributed to nations including the Netherlands and the Czech Republic. During March to last month, Foxconn, known as Hon Hai Precision Industry
PLANS: MSI is also planning to upgrade its service center in the Netherlands Micro-Star International Co (MSI, 微星) yesterday said it plans to set up a server assembly line at its Poland service center this year at the earliest. The computer and peripherals manufacturer expects that the new server assembly line would shorten transportation times in shipments to European countries, a company spokesperson told the Taipei Times by telephone. MSI manufactures motherboards, graphics cards, notebook computers, servers, optical storage devices and communication devices. The company operates plants in Taiwan and China, and runs a global network of service centers. The company is also considering upgrading its service center in the Netherlands into a
Taiwan’s property market is entering a freeze, with mortgage activity across the nation’s six largest cities plummeting in the first quarter, H&B Realty Co (住商不動產) said yesterday, citing mounting pressure on housing demand amid tighter lending rules and regulatory curbs. Mortgage applications in Taipei, New Taipei City, Taoyuan, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung totaled 28,078 from January to March, a sharp 36.3 percent decline from 44,082 in the same period last year, the nation’s largest real-estate brokerage by franchise said, citing data from the Joint Credit Information Center (JCIC, 聯徵中心). “The simultaneous decline across all six cities reflects just how drastically the market
RSS