Gogoro is an international startup company co-founded by Horace Luke and Matt Taylor both of whom were former executives at design departments in HTC. They started Gogoro with the aim to create intelligent and adaptive systems for today's megacities while also saving energy and one of the most innovative ways to do that according to them was to make a Smartscooter and they invented world's first Smartscooter called "Gogoro Smartscooter".
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The GOGORO Smartscooter |
They have been backed by a Taiwanese millionaire with a $150 Million as funding amount and they have been super secretive about their work since 2011 when the company was started. At this year's CES 2015, they came out with their debut product "Gogoro Smartscooter" and was well received with positive responses.
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The Batteries Under The Seat |
The Smartscooter is an electric scooter which is commuter friendly and runs at maximum speed of 60 mph with an all electronic dashboard. According to Gogoro the scooter can run from 0-31 mph in just 4.2 seconds which is damn impressive for an electric scooter.
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The Electronic Dashboard |
The Smartscooter when linked with its app via Bluetooth in the rider's Smartphone would allow them to download sound effects which would be in use while starting the scooter as well as shutting it down, it would also allow the rider to change the scooter's settings from the app itself and the rider can even set the taillights and the headlights LED patterns. The Smartscooter is always connected to the cloud so when the batteries are getting charged it would notify the rider where and when to charge the scooter.
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The Mobile App |
The best thing about this electric Smartscooter is that the rider will not need to plug in the scooter, instead there are two swappable batteries that are placed below the seat and the rider can swap them for new ones and place the old batteries into the charging kiosk. When the battery is fully charged it will plug itself out of the kiosk. There is also a special encryption which will ensure that the batteries wont charge or discharge unless they are from an authorized device. The scooter will run around 40-60 miles in full charged battery.
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The Swappable Batteries |
The founders have envisaged to place the charging kiosks all over the big cities so when the charging is required, the batteries will be placed into the kiosks. The riders will be charged every month to use the kiosk which will reduce the petrol and gas use and also reduce pollution while the swappable batteries will ensure that the scooter is ready to roll in seconds instead of hours which a normal electric scooter would take to charge. They envisioned it especially for the mega cities in Asia where pollution is at its peak and according to them the Gogoro Smartscooter will help reduce it to much lower levels.
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The Charging Kiosk |
Gogoro has not revealed the price of this Smartscooter or the monthly subscription for the charging kiosks. The Smartscooter will be launched sometime in 2015 but the place has also not been disclosed.