Wouldn?t it be great if you had an electric motorbike that didn?t take an hour and a half to recharge" No" Ok not everyone wants an electric bike. In fact plenty of you absolutely detest the idea of it. But for those of you that are a little more open minded, and wouldn?t categorically rule out the idea of a ?leccy bike, this is good news. Motorbike battery sharing is coming.

The idea behind ?battery sharing? is quite simple. When the battery in your bike is running low, you find a ?swap station?, pull yours out, and replace it with a charged one, and head on your merry way. Yours goes back into the changing bank at the swap station, to be charged up ready for the next punter to come along.

It means that rather than having to wait for ages and ages to charge your own battery up, when you?re running low, you can ?refuel? in the same time as it would take to fill a tank of petrol, and be away.
And there?s quite a few benefits of that, as we?ve touched on in previous posts. First of all, the fact that you can top up ?instantly? is pretty handy for anyone that doesn?t have an hour or two to kill. But also, if you had plenty of these swap stations, strategically enough placed, it?d mean you wouldn?t need as much range out of your bike. That would mean the battery wouldn?t need to be as heavy, so it?d perform better, be more efficient etc. etc.

Gogoro

I thought that it would be quite a few years before battery sharing of this kind actually started...