Electric scooters in Taiwan are a big hit and the credit all goes to their maker – Gogoro – a start-up established in 2011 with its headquarters in Taiwan. Since its inception, the company has made electric scooters in the city immensely popular through the development of an end-to-end platform. It now intends to launch a new system that would facilitate vehicle sharing.

Named GoShare, the program is all set to begin operations in Taiwan this August with a test model of about 1,000 Gogoro smart scooters. Following the results of the pilot fleet, the company would consider launching the program as a turnkey solution to its partners. 

Explaining the concept of GoShare, Gogoro’s Co-founder and CEO Horace Luke said that it is the “first fully integrated mobility-sharing platform and solution.” He added that his company intends to partner with other firms so as to expand this concept in global markets such as Europe, Australia and Asia by 2020.

Gogoro currently manufactures electronic scooters and their batteries, and also develops software, telematics control units, and backend servers. According to Luke, Gogoro scores over other similar vehicle-sharing programs of companies like Uber, Lyft, and Coup. This is because the former is involved in building the entire platform, including the scooter’s unique swappable battery. 

This way the company can keep vehicle performance under constant check while also making required amends to the system and introducing new designs as and when needed. “We’re a platform, we create hardware, software and server technology to serve the transportation of the future and if we can make cities cleaner and healthier, we will do it anyway possible, whether through ownership and charging batteries at home or buying scooters and swapping batteries in the system we provide or, in this case, not even buying a vehicle, but sharing it,” said Luke.