my gf said its because they are like family transporters or something like that. i wasn’t buying it.
Family size is down to three or four, kids aren’t playing sports so there’s no soccer mom effect…it’s pure keeping up with the Chens.
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I agree. You’re not saving the planet nor an eco-saint for driving an electric vehicle. Minerals still gotta be dug up. Parts still have to get manufactured. Everything still has to get transported across the globe. Dino juice still has to be burned to produce the electricity. The only difference is the amount of localised air pollutants (which I can see the benefits of in a densely populated place like Taiwan) - but if you really cared about it you’d get on a bike or a bus.
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Anything from a foreign land with a known brand name is expensive in Taiwan, let’s say a Blendtec professional blender, double the price from the US.
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if you replaced all the scooters with gogoros, all the cars with teslas and all the buses with electric buses overnight there would be a massive difference. the noise would be like 90% less, bad smells and breathing fumes from scooters completely cut out. does it still pollute the planet ? sure but life quality would be far better.
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It would be a great step for local environmental quality.
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an audi Q2 would be very nice and not big at all. I’d buy one if they had it in the USA.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_wb9WJSlkk
Ok, but would you, as an existing Blendec owner, go protest on the street against reduction of Blendec prices in Taiwan? 
I’m no saint and I like the tech (acceleration and no smelly, leaky, maintenance heavy ICE engines) but:
EVs are easiest to take advantage of renewables. With adaptive battery charge times, they can absorb solar and wind production peaks making them more plausible.
They are more efficient than gas powered cars:
Tesla S 100D fuel economy is 92MPGe city (miles per gallon equivalent) which is ~39km/l
This is close to typical, run down scooter. So in CO2 terms they are a net gain.
https://www.fisherhonda.com/how-to-calculate-mpge-vs-mpg/
Of course, currently in Taiwan they would be powered in 46.6% by coal.
(but this is in part thanks to anti-nuke environmental groups in Taiwan).
In many other countries this could be close to 100% renewables (Norway is 99% hydro power, in large parts of Europe wind power, south of US solar)
Total power generation in 2017 was 270,279 GWh – which was supplied from coal (46.6%), natural gas (34.6%), nuclear (8.3%), renewables (4.6%), oil (4.7%), and pumped-storage hydro (1.2%).[13]
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Uh, is it a failure? They apparently had 109% sales growth last year, and subjectively I’m seeing a lot more Gogoros (and their battery stations) around.
They don’t seem particularly expensive, either – ~$60,000 for the Gogoro 2 after government rebate, which is … cheaper? … than a new Sym.
I do think people should be putting up solar panels to charge them, like flatlandr said. It would be nice if energy prices went up meaningfully, but my understanding is that it’s mostly government subsidies keeping them down, which in turn means people have no economic incentive to install their own sources.
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I was curious about the “failure” comment too. They’re valued at over a billion USD and have ~10% of the local market share. Wish I failed more like that.
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Yeah if that is failure…And a start-up with a fairly novel idea to boot!
Last year the other vebdors put up big discounts to compete against gogoro. It was actually a record year for scooter sales in general (unfortunately the vast majority were motor scooters).
But gogoro is forcing the big players to react, that’s a good thing.
As for them being expensive , they are for the large wedge that purely drives a scooter for the ‘cheapest way to get around quickly’. The government needs to lend a hand by pushing people away from buying polluting vehicles.
For gogoro, they have used the classic cell phone model or going in with a high end spec first to maintain profit margin while building out (exactly what Tesla have done before them).
Ford used to sell key trucks and festivas in taiwan. Now its ford rangers and mustangs…teslas are not too big for here.
You can’t find that many charging stations for Tesla. And if you don’t have a house I guess it’s a problem installing chargers in apartment basements.
The mindset in Taiwan is not “What is a fair price for my product?”, it’s more like “How much can I rip off people and get away with it?”
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They are kind of too big. The Tesla S looks too big for a lot of parking spots.
The Tesla X with the cool gullwing doors, a lot of mafan in Taiwan.
I say this as a big Tesla fan (you can find my posts where I spotted the potential of Tesla many years ago).
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The whole car industry battle with mainland has been lost anyway. They hoped to get large production plants by imposing the 60% tariffs on cars. But they all opened shop in the mainland. Where you can now buy german cars at normal prices. But they also still offer the german imported versions for chinese people who prefer to pay the 60% extra for the same car.
Doesn’t that happen in most places?
Not really, some places have trade agreements. They was trying to something like that with the pacific trade agreement but Trump had pulled the plug on that completely I believe.
Having a superior product in 2015, they have 13% in November 2018 of new scooter sales in Taiwan four years later. (from link)
It is ok for local player but it is a relative failure: of funding and market capture, if you compare to alternatives. (Gogoro does rental in other markets)
What are they facing in US is Bird, Lime and Spin. Maybe unicorns will fail but Niu which just makes simplistic scooters for them has ~600M USD market cap already. Spin is backed by Ford.
Gogoro needs to take a lesson from unicorns and expand to other markets and innovate or they will end up like HTC.
SE Asian, which they have in their sights, will need even cheaper models than Taiwan.