Globe-trotting battery swapping motorbike leader Gogoro powers 90% of local electric scooters
When it comes to battery-swapping electric scooters, there are several names floating around out there. But only one can boast near total domination of the market: Gogoro.
The company just announced annual 2022 figures that show its batteries powered 90% of the electric scooters sold in its domestic market.
The Taiwanese-based company is quickly expanding to over a half a dozen countries, but Gogoro’s success is built upon its near complete dominance of its local market where it all began.
Gogoro first demonstrated that its electric scooters could be powered by the company’s swappable battery packs when it started rolling out its battery swap GoStations in 2015.
In the beginning it was difficult to convince businesses to let Gogoro install the small battery swap kiosks in their parking lots. But as soon as word spread that the vending machine-sized GoStations brought in riders (and thus customers), the stations started popping up everywhere. Now thousands of GoStations span the country of Taiwan where they perform around 390,000 daily swaps. There are so many stations that riders are rarely more than a kilometer (0.6 miles) from a battery swap station in large cities like Taipei. Gogoro riders have even circled the entire country, making use of battery swap stations along the way (that circumnavigating Taiwan trip is high up on my bucket list!).
Gogoro’s own electric scooters have proven incredibly popular among riders, but that’s only a portion of Gogoro’s operations. The company has opened its battery network, allowing other manufacturers to build electric scooters that are powered by Gogoro’s batteries. That has lead to companies like Yamaha, Hero, Yadea, A-Motor, eMoving and others developing new e-scooter designs that are compatible with Gogoro’s existing battery network.
Gogoro’s electric scooters are still the majority of all Gogoro-powered two-wheelers, but the other companies in the network also make up sizable shares in the market. In fact, five of the top six electric scooters in Taiwan use Gogoro’s batteries.
Together they account for 90% of all electric scooters sold in Taiwan based on the government’s 2022 annual scooter sales report.
The share of electric scooters is also growing in the country as ICE-powered riders shift towards electric alternatives. E-scooters now make up 12% of all scooter sales, a figure that is quickly growing in part due to government incentives. Battery swapping has helped facilitate that massive shift, with swap stations now outnumbering gas stations in Taiwan’s major cities.
As Gogoro CEO and founder Horace Luke explained:
“We are proud of the progress Gogoro and its partners are making to lead Taiwan into a smarter and cleaner future. With five out of the top six electric scooter makers using Gogoro Network battery swapping, Gogoro is powering 90% of all electric scooters in Taiwan and there are now more Gogoro Network battery swapping locations than gas stations across Taiwan’s major cities. Consumers and governments are demanding cleaner and smarter transportation choices for cities like never before and with Gogoro’s technology, partners and experience we are well positioned to meet their needs.”
The figures behind Gogoro’s success are astounding. The Gogoro Network currently supports more than 524,000 riders and boasts more than 1.1 million smart batteries in circulation. Those batteries account for over 370 million swaps to date across the company’s 12,200 battery swapping GoStations at over 2,504 locations. Gogoro calculates that its batteries have been responsible for saving more than 250,000 tons of CO2.
Gogoro isn’t the only company operating battery swap stations in Taiwan. Its competitor KYMCO also boasts a diverse line of IONEX electric scooters that use KYMCO’s battery swapping stations. The company has rapidly expanded the number of swap stations in Taiwan and is catching up to Gogoro’s over 2,500 GoStations. However, it appears KYMCO has yet to make a sizable dent in ridership compared to Gogoro’s 90% market share.
KYMCO hopes to bring its battery swapping electric scooters to Europe, while Gogoro has so far focused on expanding its operations across Asia. Gogoro has announced that its batteries and/or scooters are now operational or will be starting operations in India, Indonesia, Singapore, South Korea, China, The Philippines, and Israel.
Electrek’s Take
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Gogoro is the de facto battery swapping standard. Other companies like Honda that don’t want to be locked into Gogoro’s standard have set about trying to develop their own competing standards, but they’re not really making any progress. The last I heard, Honda set up four battery swap stations in India. Hey, I guess it’s a start?
I know that competitors would rather control the market, but it would be better for consumers if manufacturers would just standardize. Gogoro’s form factor is convenient, accessible, largely future-proofed (they have solid-state batteries coming in the same battery cases) and they work really well.
I say that as the owner of a Gogoro scooter. I live in Tel Avi and use a Gogoro S2 ABS scooter as my daily driver. I end up swapping batteries around once a week or so and it’s a quick, easy and painless operation that takes around 30 seconds. I never charge. I never worry about range. I just ride. If I get low on battery, I’m basically always less than about 2 km (1.2 miles) from a swap station, and usually I’m much closer than that.
I’m not surprised to see that Gogoro still retains such a large market share in Taiwan even as other electric scooter companies grow their operations. What I’m really excited about though is their international expansion plans.
People always ask me when I think Gogoro will come to Europe or the Americas. It doesn’t seem to be in Gogoro’s short term plans, but I could be wrong. As it stands, it looks like they want to dominate Asia first due to the massive size of the market there and the opportunity that such a vast amount of riders offers to make an even larger impact on the two-wheeled landscape and on the environment. But with European and American riders obviously begging for Gogoro to continue rolling westward, it can only be a matter of time.
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A new study by the Pembina Institute shows that a third of the commercial trucks and vans on Toronto’s roads are ready to electrify today – while nearly half could be electrified by 2030.
A new analysis by the Pembina Institute titled Electrifying Fleet Trucks: A case study estimating potential in the GTHA finds that as many as a third of trucks in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area (GTHA) could go electric today, rising to more than half by early 2030s — insulating businesses from rising fuel costs and reducing harmful air pollution that drives up health care costs. What’s more, the report found that battery range and charging access are less of a barrier than expected.
“Real-world travel data from Canadian trucks, collected over summer and winter months, shows that electrification is possible today,” says Chandan Bhardwaj, Senior Analyst at the Pembina Institute. “In fact, with a staggered approach, the GTHA — home to over half the province’s vehicle stock — could reach 50% sales for lighter trucks by 2030, helping offset lower adoption rates for heavier trucks.”
So, what’s holding back electric vehicle adoption? According to the study’s authors, it’s a matter of public policy. But without the right policies in place, the study argues, businesses face unnecessary hurdles in making the switch.
“Our analysis shows that Ontario has a clear path to accelerating the transition to zero-emission trucks — unlocking economic opportunities, improving public health and positioning itself as a leader in clean transportation,” says Adam Thorn, Transportation Director at the Pembina Institute. “With the right policies in place, businesses can reap the benefits of lower costs while the province strengthens its manufacturing sector and energy security.”
We already knew this
If all of this sounds a bit familiar, it’s probably because you’ve heard this before. The California Air Resource Board (CARB) came to very similar conclusions in their report, titled, Determining energy use patterns and battery charging infrastructure for zero-emission heavy-duty vehicles and off-road equipment.
CARB staff believe that several heavy-duty ZE vocational trucks are ready to be electrified because of their low daily mileage demands (<100 mi). Long-haul Class 8 trucks continue to be a challenge to fully electrify because of the long operation range (300+ mi) and on-demand charging need.
In fact, the California study came to almost the exact conclusion that the Toronto study did when examining the heavy-duty Class 7 and 8 EV market. Which is to say: it’s not a question of capability, but a question of availability.
“The availability of on-road heavy-duty ZE trucks has increased in recent years,” reads the report. “But their numbers remain significantly lower than their diesel and natural gas counterparts. As of 2022, an estimated 2,300 on-road ZE medium- and heavy-duty vehicles are operating in California, with the vast majority located in South Coast Air Bassin (Figure 1). On-road heavy-duty ZE transit buses account for the majority of all on-road heavy-duty ZEVs in California, but, as of 2023, sales of ZE heavy-duty trucks and medium-duty step vans have outpaced other vocations, indicating that these vehicles will be more prevalent in fleets in the near future.”
That’s proven to be true, with sales of Class 2 vans and other medium-duty EVs rapidly outpacing the general public’s adoption of EVs as new options became available in 2024, with no signs of slowing down in 2025 (at least, where the right policies are in place).
Here are some of the key takeaways from the Pembina Institute study from the Toronto truck market. Obviously, it won’t directly translate to every city’s truck fleet – but take a look at Toronto’s demographics and some of the key variables involved (truck size, average loads, miles driven, etc.) and you might be surprised at how similar your city and your fleet might be.
- Businesses can save up to 40% of fuel and maintenance costs by switching to electric trucks.
- Electric trucks eliminate tailpipe emissions, cutting harmful air pollution and improve public health.
- Traffic related air pollution in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area leads to 700 premature deaths and 2,800 hospitalizations every year, costing health care system $4.6 billion annually.
- Ontario’s Driving Prosperity plan highlights the need for increased electrification, while the City of Toronto is targeting 30% of all registered vehicles to be electric by 2030.
- Governments worldwide are embracing electrification, setting ambitious sales targets for zero-emission vans and trucks.
- By 2030, jurisdictions like Europe, China, California, British Columbia and Quebec aim for about 35% of new truck sales to be zero-emission, ramping up to nearly 100% by 2040.
SOURCES: CARB, Pembina Institute, via Electric Autonomy; featured image by PACCAR.
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Tesla’s former head of artificial intelligence, Andrej Karpathy, who worked on the automaker’s self-driving effort until 2022, warns against believing that self-driving is solved, and fully autonomous vehicles are happening soon.
Karpathy is a very respected leader in the field of artificial intelligence.
In 2017, Musk poached him from OpenAI and he quickly became the head of Tesla’s AI effort, including leading neural nets for Autopilot and Full Self-Driving.
He left Tesla in 2022 and return briefly to OpenAI in 2023 before starting his own in AI education company, Eureka Labs.
The Slovak-Canadian computer scientist is widely regarded as one of the top computer vision experts and he pioneered Tesla’s vision-only approach to self-driving.
Karpathy gave a talk at Y Combinator’s AI Startup School event this week and made some interesting comments about self-driving.
He recounted when a friend working at then Google self-driving company, now Waymo, gave him a ride in a self-driving car in 2013:
We got into this car and we went for an about 30-minute drive around Palo Alto, highways, streets and so on, and that drive was perfect. Zero intervention. And this was 2013. It was about 12 years ago.It kind of struck me because at the time when I had this perfect drive, this perfect demo, I thought “well, self-driving is imminent because this just work. This is incredible.” But here we are, 12 years later, and we are still working on autonomy. We are still working on driving (AI) agents. Even now, we haven’t actually solved the problem.
12 years later, Waymo currently operates over 1,000 vehicles in California, Arizona, and Texas where it completes hundreds of thousands of autonomous rides with paying customers every week, but Karpathy explains that this doesn’t mean autonomy is solved.
He continues:
You may sees Waymos going around and they look driverless, but there’s still a lot of teleoperation and lot of humans in the loop in this driving.
Waymo has confirmed that it uses some teleopeartion, but it’s not clear to what level. It’s clear that it at least communicates commands to the vehicles remotely when they get stuck.
Kaparthy adds:
We still haven’t declared success, but I think it’s definitely going to succeed at this point, but it just took a long time.
The engineer added that “software is tricky” and that he believes that “AI agents”, which is a term often use to describe AIs that can perform tasks for humans, like driving a vehicle, are going to take time. He believes this is not the year of AI agents, but the decade of AI agents.
Here’s the full presentation:
Electrek’s Take
While Kaparthy didn’t name Tesla, the timing of his comments as Tesla is launching its “Robotaxi” service this weekend is interesting.
It certainly contracdits what his former boss, Elon Musk, is saying: that self-driving is solved.
He highlights the fact that humans are still “in the loop” in Waymo’s vehicles, but we recently learn that this is even more true with Tesla’s Robotaxi launch, which involved not only teleoperation like Waymo, but there’s also a Tesla employee in the front passenger seat ready to press a kill switch.
As we have often highlighted in recent weeks, Tesla’s Robotaxi launch is simply a game of optics for Tesla to be able to claim a win in self-driving after years of broken promises and missed deadlines just as Waymo is rapidly expanding its own self-driving services.
I think Kaparthy, who led Tesla’s computer vision effort behind self-driving, knows that has yet to solve the problem and will require human supervision for a while longer.
Based on the best data available, Tesla currently achieves a few hundred miles between critical disengagement with FSD and it needs to get into tends of thousands of miles to achieve a true level 4 autonomous systems.
We are still a few years away from that at best.
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Senior Israeli officials said this week that their military campaign against Iran could trigger the fall of the regime, an event that would have enormous implications for the global oil market.
The oil market has reacted with remarkable restraint as Israel has bombed the third-largest crude producer in OPEC for eight straight days, with no clear sign the conflict will end anytime soon.
Oil prices are up about 10% since Israel launched its attack on Iran a week ago, but with oil supplies so far undisturbed, both U.S. crude oil and the global benchmark Brent remain below $80 per barrel.
Rising risk
Still, the risk of a supply disruption that triggers a big spike in prices is growing the longer the conflict rages on, according to energy analysts.
President Donald Trump has threatened the life of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and is considering helping Israel destroy the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program. For its part, Iran’s leadership is more likely to target regional oil facilities if it feels its very existence is at stake, the analysts said.
Israel’s primary aim is to degrade Iran’s nuclear program, said Scott Modell, CEO of the consulting firm Rapidan Energy Group. But Jerusalem also appears to have a secondary goal of damaging Iran’s security establishment to such an extent that the country’s domestic opposition can rise up against the regime, Modell said.
“They’re not calling it regime change from without, they’re calling it regime change from within,” said Modell, a former CIA officer and Iran expert who served in the Middle East.
Official denial
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denies that regime change is Israel’s official goal, telling a public broadcaster on Thursday that domestic governance is an internal Iranian decision. But the prime minister ascknowledged Khamenei’s regime could fall as a consequence of the conflict.
Defense Minister Israel Katz on Friday ordered Israel’s military to intensify strikes on Iran with a goal to “destabilize the regime” by attacking the “foundations of its power.” Israel reportedly sought to kill Khamenei in the opening days of its campaign, but Trump vetoed the plan.
There are no signs that the regime in Iran is on the verge of collapse, Modell said.
But further political destabilization in Iran “could lead to significantly higher oil prices sustained over extended periods,” said Natasha Kaneva, head of global commodities research at JPMorgan, in a note to clients this week.
There have been eight cases of regime change in major oil producing countries since 1979, according to JPMorgan. Oil prices spiked 76% on average at their peak in the wake of these changes, before pulling back to stabilize at a price about 30% higher compared to pre-crisis levels, according to the bank.
For example, oil prices nearly tripled from mid-1979 to mid-1980 after the Iranian revolution deposed the Shah and brought the Islamic Republic to power, according to JPMorgan. That triggered a worldwide economic recession.
More recently, the revolution in Libya that overthrew Muammar Gaddafi jolted oil prices from $93 per barrel in January 2011 to $130 per barrel by April that year, according to JPMorgan. That price spike coincided with the European debt crisis and nearly caused a global recession, according to the bank.
Bigger than Libya
Regime change in Iran would have a much bigger impact on the global oil market than the 2011 revolution in Libya because Iran is far bigger producer, Modell said.
“We would need to see some strong indicators that the state is coming to a halt, that regime change is starting to look real before the market would really start pricing in three plus million barrels a day going offline,” Modell said.
If the regime in Iran believes it is facing an existential crisis, it could use its stockpile of short-range missiles to target energy facilities in the region and oil tankers in the Persian Gulf, said Helima Croft, head of global commodity strategy at RBC Capital Markets.
Tehran could also try to mine the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow body of water between Iran and Oman through which about 20% of the world’s oil flows, Croft said.
“We’re already getting reports that Iran is jamming ship transponders very, very aggressively,” Croft told CNBC’s “Fast Money” on Wednesday. QatarEnergy and the Greek Shipping Ministry have already warned their vessels to avoid the strait as much as possible, Croft said.
“These are not calm waters even though we have not had missiles flying in the straits,” she said.
Greater than even odds
Rapidan sees a 70% chance the U.S. will join Israeli airstrikes against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Oil prices would probably rally $4 to $6 per barrel if Iran’s key uranium enrichment facility at Fordow is hit, Modell said. Iran will likely respond in a limited fashion to ensure the regime’s survival, he said.
But there is also a 30% risk of Iran disrupting energy supplies by retaliating against infrastructure in the Gulf or vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, according to Rapidan. Oil prices could surge above $100 per barrel if Iran fully mobilizes to disrupt shipping in the strait, according to the firm.
“They could disrupt, in our view, shipping through Hormuz by a lot longer than the market thinks,” said Bob Bob McNally, Rapidan’s founder and former energy advisor to President George W. Bush.
Shipping could be interrupted for weeks or months, McNally said, rather than the oil market’s view that the United States Fifth Fleet, based in Bahrain, would resolve the situation in hours or days.
“It would not be a cakewalk,” he said.
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