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[Alan Stewart]

https://electrek.co/2021/04/21/battery-swapping-gogoro-announces-partnership-with-worlds-largest-motorcycle-builder/

[Crissa]

Alas, these batteries aren't really relevant to highway bikes.

But it is kinda cool for urban scoots.

-Crissa

[Richard230]

I have been aware of some urban scooter brands using replaceable batteries but this is the first time I have seen photos showing how these systems work. Very impressive, but you probably have to sell a lot of scooters to support that infrastructure. Here is another article regrading the subject:  https://electricmotorcycles.news/hero-motocorp-and-gogoro-announce-strategic-partnership-to-accelerate-the-shift-to-electric-mobility-in-india/

[Crissa]

We'd probably love a bicycle version of that set-up.  Uber took and crushed all of our docked and undocked rental bikes.

-Crissa

[flynnstig82r]

JUMP bikes were fun while they lasted, but they launched without a coherent strategy so the bikes being taken off the streets and crushed was the only possible outcome. They literally had to use a van to take the whole bike back to a central charging location every time it was low on power. It was a typical tech startup story of growing like crazy on borrowed money and pretending to be in business long enough to get bought by a big player (UBER in this case).

[Crissa]

Crushing JUMP bikes in a year that e-bikes were so scarce they were going for way above list price seems dumb.

-Crissa

[flynnstig82r]

Converting a shared bike or scooter into a personal one would require hiring people who know how to work on the mechanical, electrical, and software aspects. Even at inflated market prices, you’d pay many times the amount you’d ever get back. You can’t really even bulk ship and outsource the work to somewhere like China because the quality you’d get back would be garbage. The people who knew how to do all that stuff under one roof at high quality were the people who built the vehicle in the original factory on the original workflow.

That’s assuming it was a high quality product to begin with, which is the other rub. At Scoot, I used to half-joke that people would stop trying to steal our Telepod scooters if they realized how shitty they were. It always sucks to see seemingly functional vehicles going to waste, but shared e-bikes and scooters only have added value within the shared network. As soon as you try to do anything else with them they become a liability you can’t get rid of except as scrap.

[Crissa]

...Or, since you own the company that has them, you flash the operating system and sell them instead of scrapping them.

I don't take corporate bullshit.

And yes, they were considered some of the most durable and advanced e-bikes out there.

-Crissa

[flynnstig82r]

It's just not that simple, unfortunately. The "brain"'s of shared vehicles are wired into the ignition system and perhaps even integrated into the controllers, and they came that way from the factory. An engineer at the shared vehicle operator configured the firmware to talk to the company's servers. When those servers are offline, it takes someone who knows what they are doing to get them to turn on with a switch, key, Bluetooth signal, etc. Paying those people would cost more than you'd ever be able to sell the vehicles for.

Once you get them to turn on, now you have a much bigger problem. Shared vehicles get treated like rented mules. While most users don't run into mechanical problems that often, that's because there is a full time staff of trained mechanics who are constantly fixing them, and a lot of those seemingly rock-solid vehicles are practically held together with chewing gum and silly putty. As a user, you don't see the dozens or hundreds of vehicles at HQ all torn apart, or the corner of shame where all the unfixable ones go. If you allowed the public to buy these things without the staff support, buyers would get hurt and the company would be liable.

[Crissa]

Literally it is that simple.

They bikes didn't dial home to ask for how their motor controllers work.

They would just need firmware to not dial home when activated.

-Crissa