Volts podcast: Horace Luke on decarbonizing the world's two-wheelers

In this episode, I discussed swappable, rechargeable batteries in two-wheeled electric scooters with Horace Luke, the CEO of Gogoro. Luke’s company is selling subscriptions to batteries in bustling emerging-market cities like Taiwan. We talked about consumer requirements for swappable batteries, the other kinds of technologies that might use them, and his plans for expansion.

Full transcript of Volts podcast featuring Horace Luke, April 22, 2022

(PDF version)

David Roberts:

Electric vehicles are all the rage these days, but at least here in the western world, most of the attention has focused on four-wheeled passenger vehicles, first Tesla and then all the companies trying to catch up with Tesla. However, across the globe, more than 50 percent of commute miles are undertaken on two-wheelers — scooters, mopeds, and the like. China, India, and Indonesia alone contain more than 500 million two-wheelers; anyone who has visited big cities in those countries has seen the vehicles swarming the streets.

And they are dirty as hell. Their two-stroke motors emit as much as five times the pollutants of the average new car in the US. Millions of people have died from two-wheeler pollution, to say nothing of the climate impacts.

But two-wheelers are difficult to electrify. Their owners tend not to have extra cash; theft is a constant danger; and urban density makes plugging in, especially in a place sheltered from the elements, difficult.

Today’s guest, Horace Luke, set out to solve this problem with his company Gogoro, founded in 2011. The idea was simple: consumers would own the scooters, but Gogoro would own the batteries, which would be made available in stations across the urban fabric, such that riders could easily find one to swap. Consumers would subscribe to the service, effectively ensuring that they would always have a charged battery available.

The company took a different course than he expected — Gogoro ended up building its own scooters, stations, and batteries, doing far more hardware than the software-minded Luke had originally envisioned — but his persistence won out and the model is taking off, preparing to expand from Taiwan (where it started) to a range of other burgeoning megacities in emerging economies.

It’s a clever model, a mental shift that opens up all kinds of new possibilities, so I was excited to chat with Luke about the problem of two-wheelers, the consumer experience of subscribing to Gogoro, and the other kinds of things, outside of transportation, that cities might be able to do with thousands of distributed, swappable batteries.

So without further ado, welcome, Horace Luke, to Volts. Thanks for coming.

Horace Luke:

Thanks, David.

David Roberts:

I'm so taken by this whole idea. Tell us a little bit about the problem of two-wheelers: where they are, how dirty they are, and how big a part of the climate problem they are.

Horace Luke:

Most of the people in the audience probably don't realize that more than 50 percent of all commute miles done globally every day are done on two-wheelers.

While we in the United States look at it as more of a recreational or very short-distance commute, in the East – Vietnam, Thailand, China, India, Indonesia – you can't cross the street without being hit by one if you’re not careful. They're just everywhere. In China, India, and Indonesia alone, there are more than 500 million two-wheelers roaming around every day – taking people to school, to work, to the market. They are the absolute utility dependency vehicle that people look for when they're moving around town, and people on average ride somewhere between 300-700 miles a month.

Unfortunately, because of the economics of it, the chance of them being clean is not very high. When compared to a gasoline vehicle in, let’s say, California, there are five times more pollutants coming out of the tailpipe per kilometer, easily. On top of that, you have people not using premium fuel and other carelessness that makes owning a two-wheel vehicle extremely polluting.

On top of that, they're usually being used in densely populated cities where thousands of people are living on top of each other. If you're walking down the street, you can definitely smell them, you can feel the heat from them. It is a central problem that we need to solve.

I grew up on the west coast of the United States. I worked for Microsoft, where I was one of the original founders of Xbox, then eventually was fortunate enough to lead the Windows XP user experience and product experience side of the business. Eventually I moved to Taiwan, where I worked for a company called High Tech Computer (now HTC). I created some of the world’s first Android phones – the T-Mobile myTouch, the Verizon Droid – and was pretty successful there.

At age 40 I was traveling around Asia, thinking, “I made that company number one in the world, shipping 43 million phones a year – now what? As the world is moving to 5G and then to 6G and beyond, is that really the end game? Is human computing to make humans more efficient and more productive really the way of the future, or is sustainability?”

So I picked sustainability. I think that this is the decade of sustainability. Mobility plays a huge role within that, and trying to figure out how to get the eastern hemisphere to adopt electric was the essential problem that we needed to solve. With Gogoro, we did that.

David Roberts:

So cities are choked with these two-wheelers, which have some of the dirtiest engines possible, and you're trying to think about how to solve this problem. One way would just be to go electric, the same thing we've been doing with cars. Why isn't that the intuitive solution, to make electric versions of these scooters?

Horace Luke:

In most areas of the world where two-wheelers are massively adopted, people live in stacked apartment buildings. Thousands and thousands of people live on top of each other, and these vehicles are being parked on the side of the road in a very ad hoc kind of way. You've got nowhere to park, so you really don't have a solution for nighttime charging.

During the daytime commute, some technologies are emerging for fast charging – something like 10-15 minutes for about a 50 percent charge. Maybe that's doable, but in a two-wheeler, you don't have the comfort of a sofa, you don't have a stereo system, you don't have an environment where you're protected against the natural elements. If you're in line in front of me and somebody else is in front of you, we're talking 30-45 minutes exposed to rain, to heat, to sun. That just makes it almost impossible.

Plus there’s the economics of it. You've got batteries, you've got a fast charger – now you're trying to figure out how much the vehicle actually costs. By removing the battery from that purchase equation, we help the user adopt the electric solution much quicker. Instead of buying the battery and charging it yourself, you stop by one of our GoStation battery swapping stations and just swap out the battery.

David Roberts:

Back in 2011 when you first started Gogoro, did this vision – that you take the battery out of the scooter and make the batteries interchangeable, a quick swap rather than having the consumer own the battery – just come to you in a flash? Is that what the company has always been about?

Horace Luke:

The company has always been about that. We started the company with 27 desks; we were thinking that we were a software company helping to create the algorithm and efficiency of swapping and mana