Gogoro 2

They made a sales-policy decision - for quite valid reasons, IMO - and they’re apparently making a hell of a lot of sales despite the apparent downsides for the customer.

People who don’t like the proprietary tie-in need not buy Gogoros. No company has an obligation to extend its target market. Apple, for example, deliberately ignore people who want an anonymous grey box, and have become one of the world’s most valuable companies by doing so. Lexus have no intention of selling a cut-price car for middle managers: it would devalue their brand if they did.

In Gogoro’s case, it makes a lot of sense to capture those people who are prepared to pay a bit extra for something “cool”, rather than chase the much harder target of people who will cling onto their gasoline engines like their life depends upon it.

Of course Gogoro are chasing profits. Companies that have “I want to make the world a lovely place” as their sole business goal are destined to fail. You need to get that cash rolling in or you’re going nowhere.

I think it was Elon Musk had an interesting way of defining “doing good”; he suggested one should aim to maximize the “delta benefit times number of people”, which in non-nerd-speak means either doing a little bit of good for a large number of people, or a lot of good for a small number … or of course any variant in between. I think Gogoro have found a sensible midpoint on that curve: doing a modest amount of good for a modest number of people.

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At least they learned something from greedy Apple! And they are ex-HTC people, so something more they learned, how-not-to-do-it!

This could be paraphrased ‘kids these days will buy anything cool’ :slight_smile:.

There’s nothing stopping any other company going in and challenging them for the electric market with a more flexible offering.

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If that’s the excuse they’re going with, that’s well within their prerogative to do so. But they, and their admirers, have to accept that Gogoro’s business practices are partially responsible for holding people back from adopting what they are preaching is environmentally friendly technology that people should be adopting. It’s hypocritical of them, actually.

There may, in fact, be something stopping other companies from challenging Gogoro: patents. Elon Musk is more genuine in his goals and actions. He made a number of Tesla’s patents available for competitors to use to speed up the adoption of EVs. Gogoro has yet to put forward a show of good faith.

Other companies can allow people to charge the batteries at home or some other charging system. Isn’t that what you and others were complaining about?

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As Brianjones pointed out, there’s absolutely nothing stopping other companies from competing. The subsidies are available for the asking, especially if you’re a well-placed scooter-company executive. I bet there’s a lot of private finance sloshing around too, now that Gogoro are coming up with the goods. The playing field could hardly be level-er. In fact it’s still tilted in favour of the established players.

But no - nobody wants to take up the challenge.

I honestly don’t see how patents can be an issue. There’s just too much prior art. You can’t patent an electric scooter, or any of the other ‘obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art’ subsystems that might go into it. No doubt Gogoro have some very narrow patents around (perhaps) their battery management technology, but, again, the answer to that is for the big boys to do their own research and get their own patents.

You seem to be asserting that a company that purports to have a socially-useful product must put aside the ordinary rules of running a successful business, while companies that don’t make any such claim can do whatever they like.

From a marketing point of view, it’s quite correct to sell your product at the maximum price the market will bear. There are two reasons for this: (a) something that’s almost-but-not-quite unattainable is valued more highly, and (b) people use price, in the absence of any other cues, as a metric for quality. Selling at a tiny profit margin would most likely not increase sales, and would jeopardize the future of the company. Servicing loans and keeping up with R&D are not cheap.

It is precisely those battery-swapping patents. I imagine Gogoro will protect theirs like Apple does. I imagine, also, we won’t see much progress on that front until there is meaningful patent reform, but that won’t happen for a few more years yet.

I don’t get it. You were complaining that the battery-swap method is what puts people off, so if they have patented it, it’s irrelevant to the home-charging sales model.

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There seems to be some miscommunication. I’m not asserting they can’t have a well-run business, and I never said the battery-swapping was turning people off.

Lots of businesses are genuine in their motives, treat their customers fairly, and turn a decent profit. Then there are monopolies and companies that try to lock in their customers, denying them alternative choices.

I do think it’s a mistake for Gogoro to attempt to do everything themselves. They should license their battery-charging technology to whoever wants to set up a recharge station, at a nominal price. The economics of those stations are fairly clear-cut, so it would be a license to print money (not a lot of money, but I would guess better than a 7-11 franchise). That would give people like me - who worry that Gogoro might implode - some confidence that the product will keep going even if Gogoro doesn’t.

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Yes. No one buying a Gogoro realizes that if the company goes bankrupt in a year’s time, they can’t charge their scooters anymore.

However, I don’t mean just a franchise, but actual competition. That’s why I want a home charger. Right now, there’s no way to ensure Gogoro charges a fair price for their monthly battery contracts. (Think about photocopiers and printers that make most of their money on the toner and cartridge refills. Now, THAT’S a licence to print money!) If I had the option to charge at home, I could use my own electricity, and that would force Gogoro to charge reasonable prices at the Go stations. I could swap batteries if I were going on a longish trip through Nantou, but I could also charge my batteries at home when it was convenient. At least I would have one alternative instead of none.

Also, like Family Mart gives competition to 7-11, there needs to be another battery-swapping network (or two, or four) for people to opt in to. If Gogoro opens up their tech so that a standard is set–in a similar fashion to what Tesla has already done with their battery charging–it will hasten the adoption of electric scooters and protect the customers from being gouged by a monopoly. Tesla has already set the precedent. Gogoro needs to be similarly motivated and committed.

The big worry, however, is that the Gogoro boys come from the world of smartphones and seem to be bringing that mentality with them. Things could get very polarized if that’s the case. I worry, also, that this could end up like Betamax vs. VHS. Sony protected their format and wouldn’t share. Despite a promising start and certain strengths, the format that shared broadly across all their competitors won out.

You don’t seem to have considered the possibility that it is a fair price. Printer companies charge stupid money for ink cartridges because if they didn’t, the printers would cost NT$20,000 upfront and nobody would buy them. It’s just an amortization scheme. They re-invest that cash to develop some absolutely astounding technology that I could not have imagined 30 years ago. Have you seen a “sparkjet” printer from 1985? Nothing shady about their business model. Much.

The cost of recharging a battery is actually the depreciation cost of the cells, not the electricity itself. Their charging model makes sense in that context, and their price (599 a month, is it?) it not unreasonable. You might theoretically push that down to maybe 399 a month - the actual cost of providing the service. But then everybody loses. Come on; let the little guy - the guy who sits in the charging station all day - make a living.

I’ve done some work on EVs myself (including a patent) and I have a fairly good handle on the economics involved. Battery-electric vehicles are inherently wasteful. They’re a really sub-optimal solution (my personal interest involves V2G systems with wired roadways). However, if you insist on using BEVs, you have to realize that batteries are damned expensive to make and to recycle compared to the energy they store. You canna change the laws of physics, captain.

Yeah, I must say, I don’t like that aspect. It’s winning sales, but it’s fundamentally stupid. The world is a weird place these days.

Can you guarantee that the prices will be fair in three years’ time? Five? Ten? There’s no incentive to be fair once they think their sales are beginning to plateau and people have no alternatives. There’s no way to keep them honest.

I dislike the printer/photocopier industry’s practice and think they should sell their machines at a reasonable cost of production and sales and reinvest those profits in R & D. Same goes for the refills. They may have their excuses, but that doesn’t make them right. I know of no on who is happy with this.

Yes, the network’s prices will reflect the cost of the batteries in their pricing of the home charging and swapping. No arguments there.

Bottom line is, Gogoro wants to eat their cake and have it, too. Their strategy and pricing so far mirrors that of distasteful companies’ and industries’. They’re saying, “Trust us”, yet they seem to be putting up a wall against any of the various means that consumers have to protect themselves from potentially shady companies.

Their marketing is good, I’ll give them that.

The same logic applies to pretty much any other business; somehow, they all stay more-or-less honest.

It’s unlikely they’ll remain a monopoly forever, anyway. They’ll develop new products. They might, eventually, see the value in licensing deals. If you look around, very few businesses choose to deliberately gouge their customers, for the simple reason that customers know they’re being gouged and create bad PR for the company, which then goes into a downward spiral. Even supermarkets, which have the world’s most luxurious almost-monopoly, only make about 5% at the bottom line.

You might not be happy about it, but those companies employ armies of psychologists who know exactly how people behave, as opposed to how people say they behave. They know, despite the public grumbling, that people will buy far more printers (well, far more of anything really) if the cost is shifted down the road. You could equally well lambast credit-card companies, or store cards, for using the purest form of this model to make money.

There actually are printer companies (or were - haven’t checked lately) who sell at a standard markup. Kyocera, for example. They target business users, because they’re the only people who can afford upfront the cutting-edge technology that goes into printers. Their sales volume is/was very small, and their products are very expensive. Which proves what all the other companies know: nobody is interested in quality, or at least not interested enough to pay for it.

Well, I agree about that, although it’s simply protecting oneself from the vagaries of capitalism. One needs to know that that one’s expensive new scooter will get serviced and recharged without problems for the lifetime of the product. Gogoro have made the bad mistake of assuming that a scooter is like a phone - you buy a new one every six months. This will sink them unless they fix it.

Actually, most companies do try to gouge their customers initially. It’s competition that forces them to stay more-or-less honest. There’s no competition for Gogoro’s batteries yet, so they have free rein.

I don’t own a printer. Nor do I use store credit. I’ve never carried a balance on my credit card. Yes, some (many?) people do, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good decision. In some cases, there’s simply no choice, and I empathize in those situations. In many cases, though, it’s just poor decision making. I don’t own a Gogoro for the same reasons, but would consider one if they improve their business model.

Hopefully they won’t remain a monopoly for long. Better yet would be customer pushback right now to force them in the right direction. That’s not happening because many are lapping up the marketing. I’ve talked to a few people about Gogoro now, and most hadn’t even considered the drawbacks. That’s okay if you (or your Mom & Dad, in the case of the Strawberry Generation) have deep pockets, but it’s not cool if you’re just an average Joe.

Probably the fact that the batteries are network connected when being charged will make it more difficult for others.

There’s huge market share for gogoro to take.
Remember…This year Taiwan will have a total market of 800,000 scooters. 19 year high.
So far Gogoro sold how many units this year, 20,000?
Plus they have locked in subscriptions to at least cover their energy network costs over time.
Gogoro have also raised 300 million in latest financing round. They are in good shape for what is a start-up company.

Its like 7-11, family mart, ok mart.
There’s space for a few big guys to play.
Its not gogoro problem nobody else has the balls to go for it yet!
Existing motor scooter companies are still creaming it in, approx 750k petrol scooters at average selling price 60k or 70k ntd…Huge money…Its the dirty scooter companies that are really to blame for lack of choice!

Kymco have annual sales of a billion USD , 300,000 scooters sold in one year in Taiwan!

300,000!

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Exactly. With profits like that, they could fund some cutting-edge transport research with just the spare change they find down the back of the corporate sofa. They just don’t want to.

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Yes, there is a fair bit of truth in that statement.

I’d like to think the gas-powered scooter manufacturers are, as we speak, developing a universal standard for something similar to what Gogoro has–or maybe even a better solution–but I’m skeptical. I don’t mind waiting for something better to come along. But, it is a joint problem–both Gogoro and the gas-powered scooter industry–that something better doesn’t exist now.