海角大神

Gogoro, a Taiwanese startup founded by former HTC executives, has been operating in stealth mode for more than three years, only occasionally teasing what it鈥檚 up to with announcements about transforming energy use in cities.

At CES 2015, the company finally revealed what it鈥檚 been working on: the Smartscooter, a commuter-friendly electric scooter that has an all-electronic dashboard and can hit a top speed of 60 m.p.h.

The Smartscooter links up with a rider鈥檚 smart phone via Bluetooth, allowing him or her to program the vehicle鈥檚 settings, download sound effects for start up and shut down, and even set light patterns for the LED headlights and taillights.

The rider can also adjust the scooter鈥檚 throttle responsiveness via smart phone. And because the Smartscooter is connected to the cloud, it can tell the rider when and where to recharge the batteries when they鈥檙e getting low.

Why would someone need to know a specific charging location? Because the Smartscooter doesn鈥檛 plug into a wall to recharge. Instead, it runs on swappable batteries; when your juice runs low, you visit a charging kiosk and swap your old batteries out for new ones. A shows a rider opening the scooter鈥檚 seat like the lid of a jar, hoisting out two green-handled batteries about the size of one-gallon milk jugs, depositing them in the kiosk, and putting fresh batteries in the scooter. Special encryption means the batteries won鈥檛 charge or discharge unless they鈥檙e in an authorized device.

Gogoro envisions a around cities; riders would pay a monthly subscription to use them. This subscription would replace a monthly gas budget, and swappable batteries mean scooters can go from depleted to ready-to-roll in seconds, not hours. The scooter has a range of between 30 and 60 miles on one set of batteries, meaning it鈥檒l need to stay close to the networks of charging stations. Gogoro hasn鈥檛 said how much the scooter will cost, nor how much a battery subscription would cost.

One of the company鈥檚 main goals is to help reduce pollution in urban areas, particularly in Asia. Yes, electric vehicles still pollute (after all, the energy for the batteries has to be produced somewhere), but Gogoro founders Horace Luke and Matt Taylor say it鈥檚 better to produce that energy outside of cities, and then use it to power clean vehicles in areas where lots of people live.

Mr. Luke says the Smartscooter will launch sometime in 2015, but wouldn鈥檛 say where. Perhaps it鈥檒l be easy to tell in advance, if you notice green-handled batteries being deposited in a charging station near you.