Taiwan's battery-swap and e-scoot company Gogoro is about to land on South American soil, thanks to a partnership with energy company Copec. The move will see GoStations and electric Smartscooters roll out in Chile and Colombia.
Along with manufacturing electric Smartscooters, such as the recently-announced Pulse, Gogoro has operated a bunch of battery-swap hubs – called GoStations – since 2015. So instead of riders needing to mull around at charging points while their batteries get topped up, they just roll up, remove a battery pack that's running low and pop in a fresh one.
The company reckons that there are some 1.3 million smart batteries in the wild in Taiwan, supporting almost 600,000 riders and notching up more than 535 million battery swaps so far.
Though there have been a few attempts to move westward, including setting up an Experience Lab in Amsterdam, much of Gogoro's attention has been focused closer to its home turf. The company now has thousands of GoStation battery-swap hubs in Taiwan, China, Israel, Singapore, the Philippines, India and Indonesia.
The expansion into Latin America in partnership with Copec is due to kick off from Q2 of this year, and will see GoStations installed at service stations in Santiago, Chile, and at Bogota in Colombia (which is operated by Copec subsidiary, Terpel).
"The implementation of Gogoro’s battery swapping system in Chile and Colombia is our first entry into two-wheel electric mobility, which means that sustainable mobility will reach many more segments of the population," said Arturo Natho, Copec's CEO. "The partnership with Gogoro will allow us to extend the benefits of electrification and generate a positive impact on people through this pioneering service in the region."
Gogoro's Smartscooters will also be launched in those regions at roughly the same time, and battery swapping will be made available to both individual consumers and delivery riders. "On average, last-mile delivery riders ride more than six-time the distance as consumer riders, so enabling these delivery riders to adopt smart sustainable electric transportation can have an accelerated impact on cities," said Gogoro CEO, Horace Luke.
Source: Gogoro
