Here in Taiwan, a company called Gogoro [1] manufactures electric scooters (the type you sit on, similar to a motorcycle). These electric scooters have become fairly popular, with electric scooters capturing 15% of new scooter sales (the majority of those are Gogoros but there are also other brands) [2]. The scooters go up to ~90 kph and can travel anywhere a gasoline scooter can.

Gogoro scooters' core innovation is their swappable batteries: when you run out of juice, you pull up to a battery station, take the two batteries out of the scooter (each is about 9 kg and a little smaller than a loaf of bread), put them into the swap station, and take two new batteries and put them into the scooter. The whole process takes under a minute (video [3]). You get around 65 km of range on a pair of batteries, and there are around 1,800 stations in Taiwan [4], which works out to around 4.5 km between stations, but in practice they are very dense (5-10 blocks apart) in the cities and nonexistent in the mountainous central rural areas (map [5] or [6]).

I think Taiwan has a lot of road smog, which especially affects scooter riders (who are the majority of road users), since a car has an air filter and a helmet doesn't. Gas scooters are definitely a big (possibly the biggest?) source of road smog. I'm glad that Gogoro is putting a dent into this problem.

Personally, I purchased a used Gogoro 2 Plus about a month ago and am quite happy with it; it's quite a well-designed product with good attention to UX detail. It's good for running errands, getting around town, and getting to hikes/nature close to the city. However, riding a scooter is inherently less comfortable than driving a car because you're exposed to the elements, and it can't carry as much cargo (or people) as a car. My partner and I took a 400 km 2-day road trip on it, but it was exhausting and I don't plan to ever try traveling 200 km on it in a single day again (again, this is a general scooter thing, not specific to Gogoro as a brand). I'm working on getting a Taiwanese car license so I can rent a (gasoline) car for longer trips.

Various local governments have given subsidies to encourage people to purchase electric scooters, similar to this Lithuanian example, although they could probably do more, as electric scooter sales have dipped 23% YoY in recent months [7].

I'd love to see Gogoro expand to more places, although I think the limiting factor is the battery station network; you need a relatively dense market like Taiwan for it to make sense. You also need a market where consumers are interested in driving scooters instead of cars. Gogoro has started expanding internationally, with Israel as their first foreign market [8], so maybe you'll see them for sale near you sometime soon :)

(Not affiliated with Gogoro, just a person who hates smog and is excited about what Gogoro is doing).

[1] https://www.gogoro.com/

[2] https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2020/03/13/200...

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_-PKSPbvpw

[4] https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3988915

[5] https://www.gogoro.com/tw/findus/

[6] https://mowd.tw/gostation/map/

[7] https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/4024434

[8] https://electrek.co/2019/12/11/gogoro-electric-scooters-glob...