What does an ebike that's a joy to ride look like? Can you design and build the ebike of the future today? Does it play a role in accelerating the transition to smart cities? Will it seamlessly fit into our connected lives and make them better?
These are just a few of the considerations we toiled over when we began work on Eeyo over three years ago. It's what drove us to challenge ourselves to reimagine the ebike from the ground up. Eeyo is not only ultralight and eye-catching but smart where it counts and innovative where it matters.
Why Gogoro?
Let's start back at the beginning in 2011. When Gogoro was founded the mission was simple: Accelerate the shift to sustainable urban life by designing and building smarter mobile solutions for people to move around their cities.
What that looks like today can be seen on the streets of Taiwan where over 300,000 smiling Gogoro riders zip around daily. They effortlessly swap over 200,000 Smart Batteries every single day, whenever needed, at any one of the thousands of battery-swapping GoStations throughout Taiwan. That's over 120 million battery swaps and nearly 200 million kg of CO2 saved since Gogoro launched in 2015.
That experience in Taiwan has made us experts in electric powertrains, given us a deep understanding of how batteries work and how to make them better, and established us as creators of incredible designs that people want to ride.
We’ve learned that when you innovate through better design, you inspire change.
But Why An Ebike?
Our mission today is the same as it was in 2011, and Eeyo broadens our vehicle portfolio to help achieve our vision where smart, connected light electric vehicles, like ebikes and Smartscooters, can help accelerate positive change.
The UN estimates that by 2030, 60% of the world's population will be living in the urban sprawl. By 2050 that estimate increases to 70%. We see the future challenges of cities as opportunities to create cleaner, smarter, better solutions. And we take leaps to help get us all there faster.
Spurred by the pandemic, there's been an incredible re-emergence of the bicycle as a popular form of safe transportation, exercise, and even relaxation. Cities worldwide have responded by closing thousands of miles of streets to traffic and given that space back to pedestrians and bicyclists.
As a result, even more people are now seeing glimpses of what the city of the future, a city less reliant on personal cars as a primary form of transport, looks like. But keeping those bike lanes and pushing for more shouldn’t be limited to new policies.
It’s quite simple: If you don't love the bike you’re on, you won't ride it. And if more of us don't ride, our cities won't transform as quickly, or in the ways we all want and need.
So, to get more people to adopt bicycles, you need to get them to reconsider what a bicycle can be. By adding a bit of power, you suddenly have a bike that lets more people expand their range with a smaller footprint. But what if it was built for a different kind of ride, where having fun was the central tenet and not just the ability to go faster?
A Trojan Horse at the Gates of the (Smart) City
Ebikes should do all the things you expect them to, but they shouldn't be relegated to fitness goals or hauling stuff. To build momentum behind ebikes, we designed Eeyo 1 to not only meet the challenges of urban living itself but also offer other bicycle manufacturers a way to electrify their own designs with our state-of-the-art Smartwheel. (This is similar to the approach we’ve taken with our electric drivetrains and battery swapping technology by enabling other scooter companies to electrify their scooters and integrate with Gogoro Network battery swapping.)
Most ebikes today are cumbersome and boring, so we took a different approach and handcrafted Eeyo 1’s frame from carbon fiber to make it easier for anyone to effortlessly carry it up and down a flight of stairs. The result is something that catches everyone’s eye, weighs 26.4lbs., but, more importantly, gives riders precise handling and control.
Though it looks small by comparison, the Smartwheel that powers Eeyo 1 does even bigger things. It intelligently matches a rider’s effort with the right amount of assistance, so every ride is smooth and fun. And unlike other ebikes, we engineered the Smartwheel to house the battery, motor and sensors into tightly packed space that neatly fits into the rear wheel. You can hardly tell it’s an ebike.
But that’s not all. Like your smartphone, Eeyo 1 is built to stay up to date over the air with the latest features and we’re already working on new ones that will be releasing soon.
The Eeyo 1 moves beyond the paradigm of just being an electrified bicycle. It offers an entirely new riding experience afforded by lightweight construction and compact technology. Combined with powerful computing and cloud connectivity, Eeyo 1 delivers a smarter urban mobility experience designed to become more personal and improved over time, just like our Smartscooters.
Eeyo was born from Gogoro’s commitment to delivering smarter urban mobility experiences. We don’t get closer to the future we all want and deserve by taking on these challenges alone, though. It’s what Gogoro has always done - anticipating what’s coming next by being prepared for it now and bringing everyone along for the ride.
