Borrowing a page from Teslaor, at least, Tesla's grand ambitionselectric scooter manufacturer Gogoro has unveiled both an electric scooter and a new battery-swap program designed to replace the normal (and possibly annoying) process of plugging in an electric vehicle and waiting hours for it to charge back up.

That is, of course, assuming that Gogoro can get a number of its battery-swap stations around cities where its to-be-launched scooters are popular. Though it is going the all-or-nothing route by requiring Gogoro scooter owners to sign up for a subscription to the company's battery swap service at the point of purchase. In other words, no, you can't just buy a scooter and plug it into the wall outlet in your garageas we understand it, the battery-swapping bit is a requirement.

That's one way to ensure that you have to create enough infrastructure, we suppose, though we're not sure how it might affect the electric scooter's initial rolloutscheduled for some point in 2015, but that's as specific as Gogoro is getting. It's a chicken and an egg scenario: If you want to buy a scooter, you're going to have to make sure that you have a decent number of charging stations around where you plan to drive the thing (the scooter itself should hit anywhere from 30 to 60 miles on a two-battery set). Otherwise, you're a bit out of luck.

Assuming said infrastructure exists, though, Gogoro envisions a pretty simple swapping process for the 20-pound batteries (roughly the size of a gallon of milk). You'd pull up your smartphone, fire up the related Gogoro app, find the nearest battery swap station, then heft your battery into one of the available charging slots. A freshly charged battery will unlock, you'll dump that into your scooter, and off you go. The process should take less than a minute, ideally.

And, to Gogoro, this quick-swap charging process for its scooter is just the beginning of what could ultimately be a brand-new kind of infrastructure in the urban environment.

"With the world's megacities at a tipping point in population density, pollution fallout and rapid expansion, we reimagined the energy infrastructure and created a renewed mindset for how tomorrow's urban generation can bring change. With the Gogoro Energy Network we're doing for urban transportation what the AA battery did for the consumer electronics industry. The concept of easily accessible, hyper connected portable power will help turn the world's most densely populated megacities into smart cities," the company said in a a blog post.

Gogoro hasn't yet said how much its scooter, or the scooter's battery subscription plan, might cost.

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