It’s been a very busy week for the folks over at Gogoro. Apart from releasing its most performance-oriented model to date, the Pulse, the Taiwanese e-mobility innovator has announced yet another major expansion initiative. Through a partnership with Latin American energy company Copec, Gogoro is set to launch its battery swapping tech and Smartscooters in Chile and Colombia in the second quarter of 2024.
Copec, an established energy and retail company based in Chile, operates in excess of 3,000 service stations and retail stores across the region. With the growing demand for electric mobility all across the world, it’s a good opportunity for the established energy company to embrace modern technologies and take a future-proof approach towards mobility. At present, Copec has the largest electric charging network for electric vehicles in South America.
In Gogoro’s official press release, company founder and CEO Horace Luke explained that Gogoro’s partnership with Copec is part of its vision of transforming urban transportation. “Our partnership with Copec, a major Latin American energy company, is an important milestone in our mission to transform urban transportation around the world. Together we will provide an accessible path for both consumer and delivery riders to adopt sustainable urban mobility and play a key role in battling climate change and making the world better for all.”
Chile and Colombia are home to a thriving last-mile delivery industry, with lots of people making a living from riding their scooters and motorcycles around town fulfilling deliveries of food, products, and parcels. It’s precisely for this purpose that Gogoro’s Smartscooters have become so well-received in other parts of the world.
In turn, the vehicles used for last-mile delivery duty must not only be efficient, but robust, reliable, and affordable to maintain. “On average, last mile delivery riders ride more than six-times the distance as consumer riders, so enabling these delivery riders to adopt smart sustainable electric transportation can have an accelerated impact on cities,” explained Luke.
As for Copec, it looks forward to embracing Gogoro’s tech, as it also marks the company’s first foray into the electric two-wheeler space. Given the popularity of two-wheelers in Latin America, Copec will be able to extend its reach to a much wider audience thanks to Gogoro’s battery-swapping tech and Smartscooters. In the same press release, Arturo Natho, Copec’s CEO, stated, “The implementation of Gogoro’s battery swapping system in Chile and Colombia is our first entry into two-wheel electric mobility, which means that sustainable mobility will reach many more segments of the population.”
Gogoro’s massive success in Taiwan is what Horace Luke envisions for each and every country the company enters. In its home country, Gogoro’s robust network supports close to 600,000 riders and has in excess of 1.3 million smart batteries in circulation. All this is spread across a network comprising 12,000 battery swapping stations at more than 2,500 locations. According to the company, since launching the infrastructure in 2015, it has saved more than 900,000 tons of CO2.
