The scooter is about $1,000 USD, and comes with no battery. It’s intended specifically to work in conjunction with a battery swap service that’s growing in Japan.
Honda appears to sell the 1.5kWh batteries to commercial customers for about $700 USD each, as well as what they are calling ‘Power Exchangers’ which are basically battery-recharging vending machines.
One of these batteries should give the scooter a range of 50km. From this page that’s a couple years old, it seems like the subscription cost is roughly twenty dollars a month, and there are pay as you go rates as well at less than two bucks a kilowatt.
That’s pretty cool.
Jtavent Gogoro been doing this for a few years
The swappable-battery model is so much better in theory. It incentivizes better standardization of battery formats and connectors, it makes upgrades and recycling easier.
Of course, by that logic it would be even better to make the whole scooter swappable, i.e. leased or just outright shared. But I guess humans just need to have their own toys sometimes.
Shared scooters end up being a mess for cities to clean up though. See Lime, Bird etc.
Many people don’t seem to want to take care of things they don’t feel invested in, or that are used by other people. It’s why we can’t have nice things.
