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Comment by r3m6 | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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).

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)

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.

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