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Comment by blamazon | Hacker News Reader

In this 2 minute video demonstrating a Gogoro swap the rider goes from opening their seat to having a fresh battery and ready to ride in about 50 seconds:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W34k0nrrDQA

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I love the fact there's 2 smaller batteries instead of 1 big one. There's a lot of people with back problems (for example my wife) and this kind of design helps them a lot. Can't wait for this to come to Poland.

Poland has a number of e-scooter companies where you can rent them. They are littered all over Tricity, baby blue ones, but they don't seem to be that popular, especially during the winter months.

Yes I know, we have them in Lublin, but they are priced for occasional short trips not for using them every day. I'd prefer to own the scooter and pay for battery swaps.

Interesting. What about during the winter months?

Have a look at the Silence S01 too, they have a quite different and interesting system that solves for more energy: The battery converts itself into a heavy trolley that you can just pull out, roll to any plug, charge it and put back again.

I seriously ponder getting one as it‘s a nice match for a city apartment with no charging ports.

That looks like such a finished user experience.

Just noticed the Gogoro swap logo in the video. Looks very similar to the Arduino logo. Only difference being the +/- positions are swapped.

Exactly. I expected people fumbling around with smartphone apps, instead the process is extraordinarily easy and simple with no extraneous steps.

I mean it's exactly what I would expect from something with minimal friction. The only improvements I can think of is to make the wait time slower; plugging one battery in should immediately unlock another.

The other improvement depends on battery technology though.

i bet it needs to do some checks to verify someone didn’t plug in a fake battery, the user has a valid subscription etc

The biggest point of friction is finding the swap station. Some swap stations are at ground level and easily visible from the street (e.g. at gas stations or convenience stores). But many are in parking garages and it's never clear what level the swap station is on or where in the facility it's located.

I think the parking garage management gets to choose where to locate these stations, and typically they make it maximally convenient for people who are parking their scooters in the garage, without any consideration for people who are just stopping by.

The app does give you a marker on a map and a photo of the the station, but it's often not enough.

Do you know what causes the slight wait before getting fresh batteries ? some checks ?

Probably some sort of authentication and status checks of the inserted batteries.

Waiting for the animation to finish.

From the comments it seems like there are no fully charged batteries ready to go, and you will be taking some other mostly-charged ones.

It should be able to correctly time most charges, so that you are always getting the highest battery charge state available at that stop.

Most kiosks have 30+ batteries, so each has a while to recharge before being 'summoned' again.

I can imagine it takes a few hours to fully charge these batteries (and to keep them cool), so if it's frequently used there wouldn't be any full batteries and swapping them would be a waste.

I mean it can be scaled up so that one of these stations has hundreds of batteries, an active cooling system etc etc, so it's a fixable problem.

If swapping the battery takes about as long as sitting at a red light, that doesn't seem like a major problem.

Sure, but making you wait 20 seconds isn't going to make a noticeable difference there.

My guess would be getting the phone out and logging in to some app to order the next two batteries. With a bunch of animations and key presses. And ofcourse some "I agree" buttons.

sleep(randint(30, 100))

Battery change is great, but wow the ride sounds noisy! I was under the impression that we could expect electric vehicles to be fairly quiet.

Electric motorcycles have this problem, too. Last year a popular German motorcycle magazine ("Motorrad") tested electric motorcycles in their big mountain test where they bring almost all available motorcycle models from that year to the alps.

The loudest motorcycle driven at normal speeds was an electric one.

I really hope they can bring that noise down further.

Was it loud because of EV drive or just the lack of ICE attenuated chain and sprocket noise further?

Looking at the powertrain:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VD4s92gwlMY

It has to be either the planetary gear set or the chain - none of the gears are helical, so they're bound to be noisy. According to the specs the motor is a permanent magnet synchronous motor, which is normally mostly silent.

The good news is this is India so you won't hear it over the constant honking

Electric cars are whisper quiet at low speeds; at higher speeds tire noise becomes prominent. I wouldn't be surprised if they intentionally add noise for safety reasons.

The batteries don't look all that big. Do you know what the range is on a fresh pair?

I would typically plan for 60 km between swaps, which includes a healthy error margin (I owned a Gogoro 2+ when I lived in Taiwan a year ago). Gogoro advertises 110 km but that is at 25 kph which is unrealistically slow.

60 km actually goes quite far in Taiwan, which isn’t a very big place compared to eg the United States. Gogoro has an extensive network and you only range limited in rural areas like the east coast or the central mountains.

Can you plug in a gogoro to a regular wall socket? Better a slow charge than to be stuck.

You can always just push it down the road, load the whole thing on a truck, or carry new batteries to where it's parked if it comes to that.

I wonder how long before someone comes up with a fake battery pack that looks identical and registers as having a higher battery power then it actually does and has fewer cells internally so they can take the real higher power more cells genuine battery and leave behind a fake on that barely works. Like fake memory cards you can get from wish.com that state they have much higher memory then what they actually have.

You're not going to get much repeat business if you hand out crappy batteries. It seems like incentives are decently well-aligned here.

I guess you might be able to scam the rechargers themselves if you want to "return" a knock off. But if I were them I would put tamper resistant asset tags on my batteries and ensure that whatever battery im taking back is the same as the one I handed out.

It’s the same as any kind of theft really. You probably get away with it to start but eventually the loss becomes great enough that the company pays attention and starts tracking it down. And if you have been doing this on a large scale you could be looking at serious criminal theft.

About as long as it would take for Gogoro to put a camera on their battery kiosks.

This is relatively straight forward to prevent with signed certificates stored on a secure coprocessor.

Each battery can have a serial number and an embedded ARM chip and the charger be connected to the internet.

So the central server will reject the battery if it can't authenticate with the proper RSA private key, or that key is already online somewhere else.

Just like creditcards with chips are validated each time.

You don't even need to go that far with the on-board hardware. Just track battery exchange history with charging pattern data, and identify offenders.

Bad actors can spoof the battery charge reader, but it's much harder to spoof the juice out of the charger.

Battery tracking leads to ads. Ads lead to the dark patterns of the force.

I uh, don't see the point?

You have the charging electronics which will tell you very quickly when a battery is dead, and you know which subscriber gave you the faulty battery. Sure faulty batteries can happen naturally (and accidentally), two faulty batteries though should be statistically enough to trigger an investigation from the company.

I think the idea is that the battery reports voltage like a mostly charged normal battery for just long enough for you to leave the scene with a good battery.

Ideally this would be coupled with lax device receipt keeping so while the company could tell that one of these thousand customers that used the kiosk that day returned the faulty battery it'd be hard to pinpoint a specific wrong doer.

That said, it feels like the margins on this would be low enough to make it not worth the effort.

You could take a legitimate battery and swap good cells for cheaper or old cells. The actual cells usually don't have any smarts to them and would still show as having a full charge but the range would be limited. It could take at least one depletion cycle for the processor inside to realize the cells are of poor health and may just look normal to untrained eyes. Proper security would include soldering batteries in, welding the plastic seams shut, or adding tamper indicators in the battery like a switch on the lid. The system could just refuse to charge any tampered batteries or the attendant could refuse to swap any batteries that have obvious damage.

A lot of battery controllers are intentionally designed to make the batteries unusable if the cells are removed for even a moment. Sometimes the controller uses a volatile ROM that wipes itself when it loses voltage, other times there's software actively looking for it and stopping the controller from working when detected. It's very consumer unfriendly in general for batteries that the consumer supposedly owns, but for batteries that are more loaned property like this it's a reasonable anti-tamper system.

Thankfully someone with such skill will be very unlikely to commit petty theft like this when there are more profitable endeavors to pursue with their skill.

No way! Just because you're skillful doesn't mean you're property utilized, or even (easily) utilizable, due to other issues. I met plenty handy unemployed without steady housing.

And get life ban for the subscription. I think these batteries are properly sealed and their ROI is pretty quick. Much more benefit is from that rapid electricity transfer/exchange.

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