Horace Luke, founder and CEO of Gogoro, leans on a scooter at a store in Taipei, Taiwan, on January … [+]
It’s easy to imagine Gogoro, an eight-year-old Taiwanese company with a cool founder’s story and environmental appeal, taking a lead in sales of electric scooters. The company has already sold 160,000 of its quiet, non-polluting vehicles in scooter-mad Taiwan and claims 97% of the island’s battery swap stations. It also has in place agreements with three other vendors, such as Yamaha Motor, to use the batteries it produces.
But it has a challenger, a big challenger. That’s Kymco, Taiwan’s 55-year-old maker of traditional gasoline-powered motor scooters. Kymco gets more than $1 billion in annual revenues on a total 10 million vehicles. Last year, the company announced at a scooter show in Tokyo that it planned to roll out 500,000 electric machines over three years. Kymco is also developing a battery recharging scheme that will be available in 20 countries, Taiwan’s Commonwealth magazine reported in April 2018.
The race shows that consumers, perhaps goaded by environmentally conscious policymakers in numerous countries, are looking ever more seriously at electric scooters. That’s despite prices that are higher than gasoline-powered equivalents and the risk of running out of juice. Gogoro vs. Kymco? “I expect them to compete for e-scooter sales and battery charging,” says Ryan Citron, senior analyst with Navigant Research in Vancouver.
Starting line in Taiwan, finishing line offshore
Gogoro’s cofounder Horace Luke, a U.S. citizen, had previously worked as the chief innovation officer for the Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC. Kymco came out of the era when Taiwanese firms were producing all sorts of machines for export. Both picked 2018 as a year to move ahead fast with e-scooters.
The home market by last year was already taking to Gogoro’s e-models despite costing around $2,900, at least twice that of a petrol-powered scooter. So it started working then with Yamaha and two other brands: Fellow Taiwanese scooter builder Aeonmotor will launch a model next month with Gogoro’s battery. PGO Motive Power, also based in Taiwan, expects to release its own electric scooter powered by a Gogoro battery by year’s end, according to the island’s Smart City Summit & Expo.
Allen Ko, chairman of Kwang Yang Motor Co. (Kymco), poses for photographs with the company’s Ionex … [+]
An Aeonmotor spokesperson says that, based on pre-orders as of early September, this model should sell well. “We are Gogoro inside just like Intel inside,” Luke says in an interview, quoting the American computer chip developer’s motto.
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Kymco stands to jump ahead on scale of sales and geographic reach. Its 500,000 scooters would cover 10 separate models, Citron believes. The first one rolled out in June last year. Kymco is also sales in sighting other countries, including India where it invested $65 million last year in the startup Twenty Two Motors.
Gogoro sells scooters only in Taiwan. However, a European partner called Coup runs a sharing service with Gogoro scooters and has about 6,000 users in Europe, a spokesperson for the Taiwanese firm says. A partner in South Korea also helps sell to delivery fleets. More later? “We are currently working on a variety of significant global expansion plans,” the spokesperson says.
The better battery charging scheme
Kymco and Gogoro are competing too on who can offer a more viable scheme for recharging scooter batteries before they die. Batteries generally last 30 to 50 kilometers, Citron says. That range deters would-be riders, who would fear running out of power before getting to their destination.
Scooters with Kymco’s Ionex batteries can keep running on a backup system while the primary one recharges for about an hour. “While other scooters can’t be ridden once the battery is removed, Kymco lets riders continue riding and going about their business while they charge their battery,” the company says on its website.
Gogoro uses a battery swap system instead. In Taiwan it has worked with government agencies to secure roadside land where scooter riders can drop off an old battery and insert a new one. The 1,300 stations occur at least every two to five kilometers, Luke says. Riders of the e-scooters by Yamaha, PGO and Aeonmotor will be able use the swap system, too.
