Battery swapping for electric scooters is big business in Taiwan, where 340,000 swaps are made every day by riders who subscribe to the service. Rather than charging batteries at home or work, the riders simply rock up to one of nearly 11,000 swapping stations and change their depleted battery for a fully charged one.

It’s one answer to the conundrum for flat dwellers – how to charge your scooter when you live on the 7th floor.

The system is run by Gogoro, which launched it in 2015 and now provides a standard battery swap service for ten different brands of scooter, including Yamaha. It claims to have 92% of this ‘electric refuelling’ market in Taiwan, covering 25% of all powered two-wheelers sold in Taipei in the first half of 2022. Users pay a monthly fee to subscribe to the service, and over 500,000 of them have now signed up. Gogoro reckons it has provided over 325 million swaps since the scheme was kicked off seven years ago. Not surprisingly, it’s thought to be the world’s leading operator of a battery swapping scheme.

Could we see it in the UK? Not yet, but with Honda, Yamaha, Suzuki and Kawasaki co-operating on electric vehicle hardware, battery swapping could become an everyday part of our urban transport network.

Jim Freeman, BMF Chair, commented: ‘The BMF have commented on this scheme already, but it does no harm to mark its ongoing success, particularly the potential for a common standard, which is one of the great bug-bears of the current multitude of different chargers, cables, charging rates and suppliers. We need the simplest, most widespread, high performance recharging solutions possible. Swappable battery packs, widely available, is one route to this.’

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Written by Peter Henshaw

Top image courtesy of Gorogo