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  • What if you could get around some of the world's most massive, ridiculously dense urban jungle silently?

  • Quickly without dealing with car traffic and without building smog everywhere.

  • That's the green of Gogoro, a company founded by a pair of former executives from smartphone maker HTC.

  • It's not a small dream.

  • The start-up has been in stealth mode for over three years now

  • operating on a hundred and fifty million dollars in funding from Taiwanese billionaires, Samuel Yin and Cher Wang.

  • In fact, they were still on high alert when we went to see the operation last year.

  • What do you do with that kind of money?

  • Well, it starts with the scooter.

  • An all new scooter that doesn't really look like any other scooter on the market.

  • It runs on electric power alone, capable of going 62 miles on a charge and up to 60 miles an hour.

  • Then you give it all sorts of weird, cool features like smartphone integration, configurable sound effects,

  • LED head and tail lights, and a completely digital dashboard with customizable backlight.

  • Scooters aren't particularly common in the U.S.

  • But they're everywhere in the ultradense mega cities of Asia,

  • which is clearly where Gogoro is helping you do much with its business.

  • A couple years back, we were traveling around cities around the world,

  • One thing that was pretty obvious to us was

  • the growing need that these mega cities would have for energy, better energy consumption and distribution.

  • Many of the scooters in that market today are old, dirty and loud.

  • relative another age

  • The so called "Smartscooters" are none of those things.

  • What we wanted to do here was bring the rate of evolution that we've all enjoyed for the consumer market

  • Bring that to the scooter market, and hopefully we've achieved that.

  • But Gogoro's secret sauce really isn't about the Smartscooter at all.

  • It's about the network around it.

  • You see. You don't just have 60 miles of range on it and plug it in at home or the office where you're gonna have to be.

  • You swap batteries as needed,

  • pointing the two milkjug-sized cells out from under the seat and plugging them into the Gogoro Battery Stations, strategically placed throughout the city.

  • Two charged batteries eject automatically, which you can put back in your scooter and shove off.

  • It starts with just a scooter but the potential is far bigger.

  • At HTC,

  • A lot of people thought, you know, I went there to build smartphones.

  • You know, my fundamental goal was to go there and put the Internet in people's pocket.

  • And this smartphone happens to be a great vehicle to do that.

  • Gogoro, you know I think the fundamental thing is we want to change how people use energy.

  • And the Smartscooter is only the beginning and how we believe that that would revolutionize how cities consume and experience energy.

  • What we wanted to do here was bring the rate of evolution we've all enjoyed for the consumer market

  • Bring that to the scooter market and hopefully we've achieved that.

  • The cloud is actually very interested in the statistics how the user rides

  • not the particulars of where the user rides

  • But once it can gather those statistics, there is a whole bunch of trade-offs that we can make in real time for the user to improve their riding experience.

  • Roughly thinking about it, anywhere we're needing power today, substantial amount of power,

  • that can be met in the future by applying 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, even 8 of these. However many you might want.

  • And you can solve a variety of power issue, anything from construction sites to, you know, microgeneration, servers, all of that stuff can be addressed by the batteries.

  • Imagine what the AA battery did for the consumer electronic industry way back when.

  • We think Gogoro batteries and our smart batteries would enable a wide industry of unimaginable innovation to happen.

  • in the very very near future.

  • Clearly, it's an ambitious plan.

  • Gogoro, a fresh face startup, has to find a way to deploy potentially hundreds of battery stations in each city as it launches smartscooter in.

  • Then it needs to convince scooter owners to buy it by the thousands.

  • That's not cheap and that's not easy.

  • The company hasn't yet said a word for when its first launch will be.

  • But it will be making announcement later this year.

  • But if it can find a way to pull this off,

  • Gogoro could be the most innovative thing that happen to all electric transportations since Tesla.

  • And it could be deploying it on a much larger scale.

What if you could get around some of the world's most massive, ridiculously dense urban jungle silently?

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