Gogoro, a company offering electric mopeds and scooters with removable battery packs, recently announced some cool features for owners of both the company’s scooters and an Apple device. The vehicles can now be unlocked and started with phones or watches, found with Apple Find My, and otherwise enhanced with other key Apple integrations.
About These New Features
The biggest thing Gogoro featured on the announcement website was that the scooters can now be unlocked with Apple Wallet. With express mode, you don’t even need to unlock your phone. As long as it’s powered on, you can put the phone up to the scooter and unlock it. Unlocking can also work in power reserve mode. Access can be shared with friends in a few steps, and it also works with Apple watches.
According to the company, the key never leaves the device and nobody logs when your scooter is started and stopped. So, privacy is secured.
The scooter will now also show up in Apple Find My, like other compatible devices. This could help in the event you forgot where you parked it, somebody moves it, or if it’s stolen. Gogoro says that the feature works even when the bike’s batteries are dead, so your chances of recovery are much greater.
The company also announced several other cool integrations with the Apple ecosystem. You can now send commands to the vehicles via Siri, use Apple Pay for charging swap stations and shared scooters, and make the vehicle a lot harder to steal via “Security Boost Protection”.
This was all possible by creating secure links between Gogoro’s iQ System 6.8 and the Apple ecosystem. The iQ System has an intuitive interface, the ability to add features via OTA updates, and an LTE data connection to control and enhance it with Apple or Android phones.
Full details on the system and new Apple features are available at Gogoro’s website.
Why We Love Gogoro
If you haven’t heard of Gogoro, you might wonder why we cover things like this closely. So, I want to briefly explain why Gogoro is an important cleantech company.
The company started in Taiwan, a place where there were tons and tons of dirty two-stroke scooters. Scooters are not only cheaper than cars, but take up a lot less space in cars, so they’ve become a key element in the country’s transportation ecosystem. But, replacing dirty scooters with electric is tough because most people live in multi-story buildings, with four floors being very common (5+ floor buildings must have an elevator, but they’re common, too). There isn’t really much other choice when you cram 25 million people in a place less than half the size of Florida.
With the density and parking situation, most people don’t have a place with even a wall plug to charge a scooter or bike. So, Gogoro started putting in battery swap stations at convenience stores so that people could get more range with no wait time. It’s also possible to lug the batteries up the stairs and charge them in an apartment, but they’re kind of heavy.
This battery swapping arrangement has proven extremely useful outside of Taiwan. Other places like Singapore, Japan, and the Philippines also have the density and charging access problem, along with a bunch of dirty scooters to replace with EVs. So, the company has enabled a solution to a major global problem.
Featured image provided by Gogoro.
