 What if you could get around some of the world's most massive, ridiculously dense urban jungles silently, quickly, without dealing with car traffic and without billowing smog everywhere? That's the dream of Gogoro, a company founded by a pair of former executives from smartphone maker HTC. It's not a small dream. The startup has been in stealth mode for over three years now, operating on $150 million in funding from Taiwanese billionaires Samuel Yin and Cher Wang. In fact, they were still on high alert when we went to see their operation late last year. What do you do with that kind of money? Well, it starts with a scooter. An all-new scooter that doesn't really look like any other scooter on the market. It runs on electric power alone, capable of going 62 miles on a charge at up to 60 miles an hour. Then you give it all sorts of weird, cool features like smartphone integration, configurable sound effects, LED head and tail lights, and a completely digital dashboard with customizable backlighting. Scooters aren't particularly common in the US, but they're everywhere in the ultra-dense megacities of Asia, which is clearly where Gogoro is hoping to do much of its business. Well, a couple of years back, we were traveling around different cities around the world. One of the things that was pretty obvious to us was the growing need that these megacities would have for energy, better energy consumption and distribution. Many of the scooters in that market today are old, dirty, and loud, relics of another age. The so-called smart scooter is none of those things. What we wanted to do here was bring the rate of evolution that we've all enjoyed for the consumer market, bring that to the scooter market, and hopefully we've achieved that. But Gogoro's secret sauce really isn't about the smart scooter at all. It's about the network around it. You see, you don't just have 60 miles of range on it and then plug it in at home or the office or wherever it is you happen to be. You swap batteries as needed, pulling the two milk jug-sized cells out from under the seat and plugging them into the Gogoro battery station strategically placed throughout the city. Two charged-up batteries eject automatically, which you plug back into your scooter and shove off. It starts with just the scooter, but the potential is far bigger. At HTC, a lot of people thought, you know, I went there to build smartphones. My fundamental goal was to go there and put the internet in people's pocket. And the smartphone happens to be a great vehicle to do that. Well, at Gogoro, you know, I think that the fundamental thing is that we want to change how people use energy. And the smart scooter is only the beginning in how we believe that that would revolutionize how cities consume and experience energy. What we wanted to do here was bring the rate of evolution that we've all enjoyed for the consumer market, bring that to the scooter market, and hopefully we've achieved that. The cloud is actually very interested in the statistics, how the user rides, not the particulars of where the user rides. But once it can gather those statistics, there's a whole bunch of trade-offs that we can make in real time for the user to improve their riding experience. Roughly thinking about it, anywhere where you're needing power today, substantial amounts of power, that could be met in the future by applying one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, even eight of these, however many you might want. And you could solve a variety of power issues, anything from construction sites to micro generation servers, all of that stuff could be addressed by the batteries. Imagine what the AA battery did for the consumer electronic industry way back when. We think Gogoro batteries and our smart batteries would enable a wide industry of unimaginable innovations to happen in a very, very new future. Clearly it's an ambitious plan. Gogoro, a fresh-faced startup, has to find a way to deploy potentially hundreds of battery stations in each city it launches its smart scooter in. Then it needs to convince scooter owners to buy in by the thousands. That's not cheap and it's not easy. The company hasn't yet said where its first launches will be, but it'll be making announcements later this year. But if it can find a way to pull this off, Gogoro could be the most innovative thing to happen to all electric transportation since Tesla, and it could be deploying it at a much larger scale.