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[Alan Stewart]

Electric motorcycles making a difference!

https://cleantechnica.com/2025/06/25/spiros-rapid-progress-on-the-african-continent-shows-that-the-transition-to-evs-is-well-underway/

[flynnstig82r]

Interesting, I had never heard of this. I wonder what the running costs are like with swapping vs getting gas for the moto taxi drivers. The only concern I can see is that you’re locked into bargaining with whoever owns the stations. If your local gas station jacks prices sky high, you can get your gas somewhere else. If the battery-swap-station (BSS) operator does the same, you’re hosed. If the batteries can be charged from any outlet, though, I suppose people from the neighborhoods could make an informal business of charging and swapping them if the official stations were to raise prices too much.

I also wonder what kinds of subsidies are being offered. BSS’s typically only work under a subsidized model.

[DonTom]

It only has a 3.4 KWH battery, so expect around a 25 mile/40 KM average range.


I think I once heard Africa has more electric motorcycles than any other continent.



-Don-  Ave of the Giants, CA (RV trip with Zero DS)

[Specter]

the theft over there is through the roof so they might have issues on that.   good concept though, just swap the battery for a fully charged one, take 5 - 10 minutes instead of 50 minutes.  be interesting to see how it works, however batteries degrade over time, what happens when you get a lemon battery.  Also, as is human nature, if one does not own something, they don't care for it properly, it's not theirs so why.  What kind of abuse they going to get, what is the fleet of batteries going to look like in a few years?   might it be worth it to just hold onto yours and charge it .vs. putting your good/ cared for battery into a questionable pool.

on paper it looks really good, but how is that going to translate to real life?

Aaron

[T.S. Zarathustra]

The only concern I can see is that you’re locked into bargaining with whoever owns the stations. If your local gas station jacks prices sky high, you can get your gas somewhere else. If the battery-swap-station (BSS) operator does the same, you’re hosed.

Similar to. "If your local battery-swap-station jacks prices sky high, you can get your batteries somewhere else. If the local gas station does the same, you’re hosed."

good concept though, just swap the battery for a fully charged one, take 5 - 10 minutes instead of 50 minutes.  be interesting to see how it works, however batteries degrade over time, what happens when you get a lemon battery.

If you have few year old bike with "worn" battery, you can upgrade the battery at the swap station.

[princec]

But it doesn't take me 50 minutes to charge ... it takes me 0 minutes, because I do it overnight, and never have to divert to go anywhere to get it charged up! I still think battery swapping is just plain daft.

Cas

[DonTom]

But it doesn't take me 50 minutes to charge ... it takes me 0 minutes, because I do it overnight, and never have to divert to go anywhere to get it charged up! I still think battery swapping is just plain daft.

Cas

The only big advantage of the swap, IMO, is your battery lasts forever. But I wonder how they test for batteries in poor health, so nobody gets one with half the capacity or whatever.


-Don-  Redcrest, CA

[TheRan]

Battery swapping makes sense for things like couriers, where you don't have hours to wait for a charge and the bikes that charge in minutes or have enough capacity are prohibitively expensive and heavy. Also the downsides of swappable battery bikes (lower performance, usually scooters) don't really matter.

[flynnstig82r]

the theft over there is through the roof so they might have issues on that.   good concept though, just swap the battery for a fully charged one, take 5 - 10 minutes instead of 50 minutes.  be interesting to see how it works, however batteries degrade over time, what happens when you get a lemon battery.  Also, as is human nature, if one does not own something, they don't care for it properly, it's not theirs so why.  What kind of abuse they going to get, what is the fleet of batteries going to look like in a few years?   might it be worth it to just hold onto yours and charge it .vs. putting your good/ cared for battery into a questionable pool.

on paper it looks really good, but how is that going to translate to real life?

Aaron

The BSS model is actually great for high-theft places. Hard to ride away on a stolen motorbike when the owner carried the battery inside with them. And even if you could put it in a truck, why bother when there’s probably a rideable scooter right next to it?

I don’t have first-hand experience with Gogoro’s battery stations, only swapping Genze 2.0 scooters for Scoot back in the day, but typically if there’s a problem with the battery, you report it and it gets flagged for the next technician to look at. Our batteries did get treated like rented mules, and I was amazed at how well they held up. Tens of thousands of charge cycles in some cases, some hadn’t been cell-balanced in a dog’s age, and most of them still ran just fine. The bad ones we sent back to the OEM in batches with diagnosis tickets and they figured it out.

[Specter]

someone was saying it makes no sense when you can charge overnight at home.  well, this IS Africa, they don't have quite the quality of life that many other countries do.  May not be able to charge at night because no electric where you live, or it's very sporadic, or maybe the bike is owned by 3 or 4 people who use it at different times of days to goto their respective jobs, so you really don't have 8 hours of down time, with reliable power to charge it, or a place that you can put up a charger and not have it stolen when you are at work etc etc.

also i don't think charging stations are going to be as prolific as a gas station would where you can just drive a block and a half and there's another one if you don't like the first one.  it might be a 40 mile ride so you are stuck with his high prices.  kind of like the charging stations are now in most of the country where you are not in an e vehicle sweet spot that packed 100 stations in a 10 mile radius for some reason, leaving the rest of the state a dice roll to get to the next working one.

i hope it works out for them, because the more success stories that can be shown with the electric vehicle scene, the more apt folks are to continue / improve it.  The demand has to be there, and that won't be there until the perceived reliabliity is there.

Aaron

[flynnstig82r]

someone was saying it makes no sense when you can charge overnight at home.  well, this IS Africa, they don't have quite the quality of life that many other countries do.  May not be able to charge at night because no electric where you live, or it's very sporadic, or maybe the bike is owned by 3 or 4 people who use it at different times of days to goto their respective jobs, so you really don't have 8 hours of down time, with reliable power to charge it, or a place that you can put up a charger and not have it stolen when you are at work etc etc.

That’s right, you can’t judge BSS’s in 3rd world places by the standards of the 1st world where electric buyers have private garages and reliable electricity. Vehicles like this are going to be used by the whole family, both as personal transportation and as a way to put food on the table. Swapping provides 24/7 uptime and you don’t need access to a plug and won’t be affected by things like nightly power shut-offs or outages. It also makes the vehicle much cheaper to purchase upfront and you can offset any ongoing subscription fees with the money you make as a taxista or delivery rider.

also i don't think charging stations are going to be as prolific as a gas station would where you can just drive a block and a half and there's another one if you don't like the first one.  it might be a 40 mile ride so you are stuck with his high prices.  kind of like the charging stations are now in most of the country where you are not in an e vehicle sweet spot that packed 100 stations in a 10 mile radius for some reason, leaving the rest of the state a dice roll to get to the next working one.

i hope it works out for them, because the more success stories that can be shown with the electric vehicle scene, the more apt folks are to continue / improve it.  The demand has to be there, and that won't be there until the perceived reliabliity is there.

Aaron

That’s the big question. It’s a tricky thing to set up competition among operators, yet all using a common standard and form factor with 100% compatibility. Now I’d actually like to know more about the history of how gas stations standardized but still remained mostly independently-operated with commodity price competition. That’s not usually how these ventures happen. When moneyed interests invest in a new platform, it’s usually about establishing a monopoly so you can draw people in and then put the screws to them when they’re locked in, pardon my cynicism.

I’m sure there were overriding interests from automakers 100 years ago that made it happen, and I wonder whether such a thing is possible for BSS’s. Without such competition, I’d be very concerned about buying into a system with a single operator as a subsistence moto-taxi driver with no political power. I’d also be concerned about withdrawal of subsidies leading to stations shutting down and leaving me without a reliable way to power my scoot. I also hope this model takes off, as I was a big believer in it at Scoot and did my Master’s thesis on the topic. But if I were living in one of these places, I’d probably either still be riding on gas, or I’d at least make sure to have a charging plan for when I can’t swap at the station.

[princec]

2p of something about bike theft - scrotes don't normally even bother starting the bike. They turn up two-up on a stolen scooter, one of them hops off and nicks the bike, the other one rides behind it pushing it forward with his foot.

Cas