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Comment by justjimmy | Hacker News Reader

The problem is the price. When they first launched, the price was starting at $120,000 NTD. You can get a cheaper, gas scooter for say $30,000 NTD. In China, you can get an electric scooter for around $40,000 NTD.

Once the electric market catches on here in Taiwan, the flood of cheaper eletric scooters from China will be Gogoro's biggest challenge.

Gogoro has recently (3 months after launch) reduced their prices and introduced more models - with the light model (no battery plan included) starting at $88,000. And even with cuts from government programs (up to 3, depending on your location in Taiwan), it can be reduced down to $62,000.

I haven't seen a single Gogoro out wild on the streets since it launched in Taiwan 3 months ago.

I think a better strategy would've been getting people to buy into electric scooters first before pushing an 'Apple' E-Scooter with such a irrational price tag.

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Divide by 30 for US$ prices.

In Taiwan and China people are willing to spend near US$1000 for an Apple smart phone, so $3000-$4000 for a cool 'Apple' E-Scooter still sounds attractive to me. Unlike a car, you can park this thing directly in front of the stores, so everyone can see it/has to climb over it ;-)

I am not their target market, but next time I am in Taiwan I would rent this scooter, even at double/triple the cost of a regular one. I actually wanted to rent an e-scooter before, but everyone advised against it: "Too slow"

So for me the key question is: Does Gogoro feel like a real scooter, even with two people on it? Does it do to e-scooters what Tesla did for e-cars?

Taiwan is HTC country. iPhone is a foreign status symbol. A scooter is just "something everyone has". There are more registered scooters in Taiwan than people!

I showed my friends here (Kaohsiung) the Gogoro scooter a few months ago, and they said they would never buy it. Their reasoning was exactly as the grandparent comment said: there are cheaper alternatives. They said it's also ingrained into the culture to go for the best deal even if something which costs slightly more is much better.

Xiaomi is eating a lot of Apple's marketshare. And a smartphone is almost a requirement, while having some nice e-scooter would be _nice_ but probably not on everyone's affordable list.

But even so, Apple is Apple, which has spent a lot of money into marketing/advertising their product and has a huge loyal following.

I too am interested in trying this out when I visit Taiwan next, but I just don't see a lot of people who want to line up and pay 2x the cost for an e-scooter. Also while their hardware/software integration are well beyond what gas scooters can do, but its look isn't that much better.

(Personally I am also wary of their vendor lock-in with the chargestations)

They are advertising faster speeds, but propably not Tesla like (16% faster than ICE scooters).

And that's basically the only point they raise on their advertisement webpage. They show you some of the special & cool features (suspension, drivetrain,...) but every single one is very propably too expensive and there are much cheaper components to aquire on the market. E.g. the water-cooled engine with planetary gear looks super expensive. They absolutely need massive economies of scale or they will fail. And I don't see the appeal of this scooter. There is no reason to pay double what a cheap one costs. I don't think you can compare an Apple phone with a scooter (style vs utility).

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