Innovative Entrepreneur Tim Huntzinger Launches 3-wheel On-Road EV Scooter Focusing on Safety and Fun

Automotive and aerospace designer Tim Huntzinger turned entrepreneur takes you on his journey of co-founding an EV startup called XOTO. The company recently introduced a 3-wheel on-road electric “scooter” built to have greater stability to avoid skids and front wheel drive for enhanced control and maneuverability. 

Hear how he gathered his team, went from concept to prototype to production---protected his IP, and learned the ropes to engage with investors. 

Tim offers a designer’s approach to navigating the path from career product innovator to risk-taking entrepreneur following a dream. 

Transcript

Jeanne Gray: I'm Jeanne Gray, publisher of American Entrepreneurship Today and host of the podcast series, Experienced Voices, where I talk with highly accomplished people who share the critical elements that led to their success.

Many entrepreneurs are innovators who have launched a new product based on a passion or learning experience. Our guest today on Experienced Voices is Tim Huntzinger, who founded California-based XOTO in 2022. 

Tim's vision was to make motorcycles safer based on his riding experience, though he envisioned adding stabilizing back wheels to a motorcycle years ago.

His experience designing electric vehicles and working at NASA, Boeing, and other top companies led him to introduce a new and safer vehicle for on-road riding.

Tim, welcome to Experience Voices. Thanks for being a guest. 

Tim Huntzinger: Yeah, thanks for having me, Jeanne. 

Jeanne Gray: Well, let's start off having you tell the listeners about your three- wheel electric scooter that you have developed and have intellectual property for. 

Tim Huntzinger: Yeah, so XOTO is a three-wheel self-stabilizing electric scooter.

And the idea behind the design is, that we wanted to start with something that's really easy to ride. Really approachable, not, not intimidating, but also really functional. It, it has the ability to carry lots of heavy things really easily without affecting the rider and it's a super capable vehicle for, you know, 3000-watt motor.

It can go 45 miles an hour, which is fast enough on city streets to be kind of faster than the rest of the vehicles. In California, we can lane split. You actually are able to go to the front of the line for every light and be able to make it to the next light before everybody else. And yeah, it makes commuting really quick.

Jeanne Gray: That's it. That that's the selling point. So how about on the aspect of the fact that it's three wheels and, and safety? 

Tim Huntzinger: Yeah, so, I mean, I guess the germ of the idea started when I've been riding motorcycles for about, about 32 years and there was one evening I was coming home in a snowstorm and you know, no matter what I was doing, I was riding as carefully as I could and no matter what I did, every time I went into a turn, I dropped the bike, you know, just because it's a high center of gravity and, and low traction.

There's just nothing you can do basically to keep that, keep that vertical. I had my feet out and just going super slow and still it would fall down. And it got me thinking, you know, there's gotta be some way to keep all the good things about a motorcycle and still make it stable in situations like that.

And, you know, even on the best of days, there's situations where you lose traction and you can drop a bike, which could totally ruin your day. So, yeah, we, started working on that. and then a number of years later in grad school, I, actually was able to patent a mechanism that I felt would probably work.

It was you know, in a small-scale model I did some larger prototypes that you could ride, but you know, it was still like. Basically a bicycle with an electric motor. And then after COVID hit, I felt like it was time to dig that patent out and try to figure out how to actually make the vehicle that I had dreamed of.

So that's, where Xodo started. And it still took a number of prototypes after that to actually get a vehicle that really did behave like a motorcycle but have all the stability benefits that I wanted it to have. 

And so if you count all that there is a number of years in the making and finally coming up with something that actually works really well. It was sort of a labor of love, but in the process we had over 1200 people ride the vehicle. We have a running list of people that have ridden the vehicle and those test rides were essential to getting a vehicle that, that really works. It's really kind of a joy to put people on it now and, see their experience, see the face of those people.

Sometimes people kind of you know a scooter... I'm not sure and then they ride it and then they get it. You can see that kind of process happen on their face and, and they come away with smiles, which is super gratifying. 

Jeanne Gray: Do you think that people who would not normally ride motorcycles would be a target audience For the scooter.

Tim Huntzinger: Yeah. The goal with the company is to remove all the barriers to entry for new riders, but then also keep all the good things that exist in a motorcycle. So that experienced riders can actually have a lot of fun with the vehicle too. The main barrier to entry is safety.

Getting a motorcycle license is a huge barrier for a lot of new riders. The intimidation factor, insurance, et cetera. All of those things are easier, cheaper or non-existent with our vehicle. You don't need a motorcycle license to ride it. You do need a driver's license. It is a DOT approved vehicle.

It does need insurance, et cetera. But because it's such a small vehicle, insurance is almost very little. The cost of ownership is very low. It costs a nickel to charge it to go 90 miles, which is pretty incredible. But it is really a capable vehicle too. So really experienced riders can jump on the vehicle.

It can do a full 45 degree lean at five miles an hour, low speed. Maneuverability is really tough on a motorcycle scooters in general. So this vehicle can keep all of the really fun aspects of riding. Leaning is the thing that makes riding fun for me. And this vehicle can do all those things at speeds that make sense in an urban environment. 

Not most motorcycles get a 45-degree lean. If you ever get a 45-degree lean, it's iat a hundred miles an hour or more right up in the canyons or on a track somewhere, but this will do it at five miles an hour. You can be just trolling around in the streets and have a lot of fun with it.

Jeanne Gray: You're in production now. Tell the listeners how you moved from prototype to production and, and their access to buying the scooter. 

Tim Huntzinger: To get a a vehicle into manufacturing quickly and cheaply is really tough to do. Me and the rest of the team all come from kind of an aerospace and electric motorcycle background. We have a lot of experience. 

It's basically using commercial off the shelf, pre-approved DOT approved parts. And we only really needed to innovate the portion that's new, which is the front suspension, rear suspension and the drive train. The scooter portion is a scooter that you can take to any scooter shop or any bike shop and actually get it worked on. I's really easy to find places to get work done. It's really easy to find millions of off the shelf parts that you can replace on the vehicle. For instance the brakes you can find brakes almost anywhere and replace.

There are a few custom bits on the vehicle. The front suspension, rear suspension, and those are engineered to be super durable. But it's a huge thing to figure out how to manufacture anything in low volume at a price point that actually meets customer needs. The way that we did that is by sourcing really great high- quality parts instead of trying to redesign and reinvent everything.

There's so many young companies that want to build everything from the ground up custom and that usually ends up biting them in the butt because gets really expensive really quickly and then all the serviceability goes out the window. It's really tough to make something serviceable if it's all custom parts.

Jeanne Gray: Can you share a little bit about the, the trial and development experience. Innovators and inventors come up with an idea and they have to go down that road. Now you've got a great experience in the aerospace industry and have worked with top companies, but if you could go in their shoes and say I have to build a prototype I have to trial it.  Who trials it in order to give you legitimate feedback that your idea is really grounded in reality. 

Tim Huntzinger: That's a really good question. To start off, I think the biggest mistake that most entrepreneurs or even young startups make is that they feel like they have to get this huge investment before they can really get started.

What we did is we just figured out what we could do with the money that we had to make a few prototypes and, you know, move the needle. And then as we began selling vehicles, obviously we had enough funding to continue development and, and be able to move forward. That was a really important key for me.

The problem is that so many young entrepreneurs is that money doesn't happen right away n the timescale that they want. Then they just aren't able to complete their vision or their dream. If you can take count of what you have, what your team has, the skills that they have, and then just figure out what you can do today. 

I think that you'll end up in a much better spot and then it's much easier to go look for funding once you've reduced some of the risk and proved that your idea works and basically de-risked the entire thing. There's a lot more investment opportunity that way, but sometimes you don't need that investment either because you're far enough along.

Jeanne Gray: It sounds like for a designer product developer that resourcefulness is a great attribute for them to have. If they want to go the bootstrapping entrepreneur route. 

Tim Huntzinger: Yeah, I say most entrepreneurs and even early employees a startup, you need to be a Swiss army knife, not a scalpel.

You need to know a lot of different things and be able to do it fairly well, as opposed to being an expert in only one thing and only knowing one thing. I mean, it's great to have expertise in as many things as you possibly can. But that's definitely not me. I know a little bit about a lot of things.

Jeanne Gray: You mentioned your team, share a little bit about, are they co- founders or are they advisors or potential employees? What was your strategy in bringing other people involved? 

Tim Huntzinger: We have a team of five right now, which is, is really small. Most of the work that we've done has been done by our co-founders and all of us have basically put our own money into the company and we've bootstrapped to this point.

All of the work that we were not able to do with our in-house expertise, we just found contractors and paid to have that work done. That makes us really lean, makes us pivot really quickly and move really quickly as well. In areas where we needed to get a lot of design work, we just hired on a number of designers and got the work done really quickly.

When we needed more engineering work, we hired on more engineers. But the core team is designers, engineers, and motorcycle riders, and people with past experience in startups. Like I said we're all kind of Swiss army knives in the sense that we'll all do each other's jobs and we know who does what better. But getting something done and then letting somebody come in and improve on it is much easier than everyone trying to wait for somebody else to get something done.

Jeanne Gray: Look at the personality makeup of the team. Did you know the individuals far enough in advance to anticipate where they would work together or where someone was a sort of a more individual personality, but they were important to be brought on board. How did you kind of think that through?

Tim Huntzinger: Yeah, it's a good question. Personalities are super important. Especially in a startup where you only have five people. each personality affects everybody else significantly, right? And the amount of time that you want to spend together, you want to be able to be working with people that you really enjoy and that's one of the things that we've been really fortunate. 

Everybody's super excited about moving this forward. They're willing to spend the time doing things that's not their core competency, but they're willing to do it anyway and then fix each other's mistakes...when we make mistakes and be willing to admit I didn't do that right...Let's change it make it better.

I didn't know the team initially. For instance the manufacturing engineer that we have, Clarence Harrison I met him through a mutual friend and she just recommended this really great manufacturing engineer. At that point, I had a prototype, but it really wasn't ready for manufacturing production.

It was gonna be really expensive to make. And so he went through it and figured out how to improve the efficiency of manufacturing, etcetera. And he's done really great with that and so him and I worked together really hard to get that part done and get all of our sourcing done correctly.

And then with marketing Diego Cardenas, he's super well known in the electric motorcycle realm and, and he just knows everybody, which is, really great. You know, he's, done a bunch of long distance runs on his electric live wire and lots and lots of long distance riding.

I just met him at an electric vehicle show and he and I had a booth together right next to each other and we ended up talking for a really long time and after I think I had known him for about three months before I asked him to be part of the team, but, yeah, he, jumped right on and that was, that was exciting.

The financial people that we have involved I've known them for a really long time and are really close to me. That that's probably the only people in the team that, that I knew really well previously. 

Jeanne Gray: You built a prototype yourself. it was still rough as far as the development but having that prototype was that a selling point for building the team? 

Tim Huntzinger: I think for a lot of Americans, it's tough to sell them on the idea a really fun cool scooter until you ride it. And then you're like, Oh yeah, that's, that's, that's really fun. And a lot cooler than I thought it was going to be.

For instance, Diego been riding motorcycles, like I have for, 40 years, probably a lot longer than I have. And it wasn't until he wrote it that he's like, Oh wow. Yeah, that there's something there. The main selling point of the vehicle is to get on it and ride it. Anytime I have somebody I frequently get ask the question, why is it a scooter?

Why do I need this? I'm a motorcyclist. I already ride. Why do I need three wheels? And I say, jump on it and then come back and we'll have a conversation after you've ridden it. And after they ride it, it's a totally different conversation because it is. like almost self-explanatory. Like once you've ridden it you're like, oh, yeah I I can see how this would fit into my life. If yoi're a cyclist and you're going down to the grocery store uou're not going to take your Ducati.

It's just like the wrong tool for that job. You can't carry groceries on a Ducati easily. That's not what it's made for. And our vehicle you can for new riders. They typically can't just jump on a motorcycle and go into traffic safely. It just isn't a safe thing until you've gottena lot of experience under your belt to ride in traffic.

Our vehicle, people have ridden in traffic with less than five minutes of explanation and no experience riding without any accidents at all. We, out of the 1, 200 people that we've had ridden, ride the vehicle, many have never even ridden a bicycle before, like they don't know how to balance on a bicycle and they're able to ride our vehicle and they're able to do it safely.

It just changes the way that you ride it. This stability mechanism makes a huge difference. And I really feel like that's the future of motorcycling actually is to have these active safety mechanisms that make it easier to ride, make it more fun to ride because you can actually pay attention to riding instead of trying to pay attention to all the gravel and potholes and trying to avoid slamming on the brakes too hard or accelerating too hard. All of those things. 

You can just ride the vehicle and you can just enjoy riding the vehicle. Front wheel drive on, on the vehicle fundamentally changes the way a motorcycle behaves. If you can just point the power where you want to go and go there, you don't have to worry about high sides and low sides and all the crazy physics of, of riding a motorcycle.

And you can just enjoy riding, just enjoy riding. 

Jeanne Gray: Well, it sounds like there are a lot of people who are designers who are designing things that they actually do not use themselves. And it sounds like what is moving you forward more quickly than others is you've designed something that you've been intimately involved with almost your whole life.

And so it shortens the trial and error period. So did you craft a business plan? It's interesting how you built your team, which really came down to really good networking, which is one of the key aspects of being an entrepreneur, especially if you're looking for funding is to be able to go out and meet people.

But did you put anything on paper and you know, Formalize it. 

Tim Huntzinger: Yeah. So as far as a business plan, we didn't actually build a complete business plan. We did put together what I would call a proforma. So basically an Excel spreadsheet of expenses versus costs and, and basically come up with our final price, that was how we arrived at our price.

Basically, right now we're selling the vehicle at cost because we are a low volume manufacturer, you kind of have to do that. The customer gets a lot more vehicle for their dollar than maybe they would with, with a much larger company. And, and that's what you have to do to be able to build a brand and move forward.

 We did put together a lot of PowerPoint presentations and pitch decks. Initially we did look for funding as we were moving forward, because we weren't sure how to make it to the next step with just what we had. And it seems like every, every step of the way, when we were right at a point where we're going to take outside investment something happened that made it so that we didn't need to.

And I would call that luck in, in a lot of ways. But yeah, we put a lot of thought into how to build the company, not just how to build the product and, and kind of going back to your, to your earlier question. I spent a lot of time thinking about how to, how to do this in a way that actually made sense and not get trapped in that loop where you have a great idea, and you don't have enough funding to actually make that idea happen. 

And I know that there is probably a point in the not so distant future where we want to scale more rapidly and we probably will take outside investment, but as we are right now, we're growing and, and we're just moving step by step with our bootstrapping.

I think that's actually maybe another place where a lot of startups , get caught is after they do move into the market, they maybe expand too rapidly in the sense that they increase their overhead very dramatically without actually having the sales to back up that growth and they get kind of, underwater and aren't able to meet their debts and have to go under.  We've been really careful with how we've grown in a way that allows us to not have to go into debt and not have to increase our overhead too quickly. 

Jeanne Gray: Have you thought out then if you were to get a great relationship with a dealership or some type of fleet? Have you already thought through the production steps because you are low volume now, but someone who has the capability of pushing it through a channel for you, they would want to hear that you can ramp up pretty quickly. 

Tim Huntzinger: So that's, that's one of the joys of, of designing the vehicle, the way that we've designed it.

Basically the front suspension slots into any. Scooter that exists with the with a triple tree. So it, our front assembly basically slides into the triple tree. The rear assembly connects right where the swing arm used to be on a standard scooter. And so almost any scooter with just a little bit of redesign could take our front and rear assemblies and make the vehicle that we're making now. 

Like I said, we're not trying to revolutionize the scooter. We're just trying to revolutionize the parts that are bad, the front and rear suspension and it could be applied to a lot of other scooters. We've been looking for partners that would help us in manufacturing.

We have spent a lot of, a lot of time thinking about how to design the vehicle so that it would be really quick and easy to manufacture almost anywhere in the world. We feel very confident that with the right partners and with continued growth, we'll be able to expand really rapidly, which is great.

And you know, going back to, to one of the other questions that you asked earlier about, having initial riders, the group that were our initial testers were us, right?  I've been riding for long enough that I was able to jump on the vehicle and tune the vehicle to a ride experience that I, as a rider of 32 years would find exciting and still make it really, really easy for new riders.

We were constantly getting people that had never ridden onto the vehicle as well. That gives you a lot of time over the two years of development that we went through to figure out. How to properly design the vehicle, how to properly manufacture the vehicle.  Though it was really quick in some respects cause it was just the five of us, we were able to be really efficient with the time that we spent being able to do really quick iterations, even in one day we'll go through, I think, 15 different setups for our suspension to be able to get something that, worked really, really well.

And I don't know that you can do that with a different team. 

Jeanne Gray: And you have the intellectual property that is an important part of the design, right? 

Tim Huntzinger: So patenting was also essential to what we were doing and being able to cover it properly. I believe this is the future of motorcycling, being able to really encapsulate all the joys of riding in something that's safer and, and have all of these active features that, that make it safer in an electric vehicle.

We wanted to be able to wrap that up pretty well and so the patents are around the rear suspension and the front drive train. 

Jeanne Gray: it sounded like you have put your toe in the water and speaking to potential investors. So what did you learn when you put your toe in the water and did you have your pitch deck?

Did you do it cold or were people referring you to people? Can you share any of the brushback pitches that you faced I hear the angels can be fairly abrupt if you don't have all your ducks in a row. 

Tim Huntzinger: I learned a lot about pitching from pitching as many times as I have.

 It's not something that comes naturally to me. I'm not a natural salesman. I guess , I'm more of a, a designer and an engineer. But my, my experience is, you know, I'm looking for the right partner as much as they're looking for the right investment. And if that doesn't gel, then, you know, , that's fine.

I feel like some people think it's like there's certain magic words you have to say or certain magic things that you have to do. There's a lot of untruths that get thrown around in, in pitching and I guess I don't believe in any of that. I feel like if it's meant to be, it's meant to be and it'll happen.

Every time that we've almost jumped in, it's, it's not happened and I've been okay with that. But I think maybe that that's an area where when I look out into the market and I look at, at how people are pitching their vehicle, even in marketing materials, there's a lot of things that are not being said that are being said untrue the lies. There's a bunch of lies out there and it's impressive, when people make these stats on their electric vehicles by the size of their battery and the size of their motor, that those stats just aren't real.

It's a little frustrating. But also then you, you kind of see karma happen as those vehicles go out into the market. Customers are a more savvy than I think a lot of companies them credit for and people figured out pretty quick that that's not, what they're being sold.

Jeanne Gray: Did any of the angels that you spoke with, did they take in a an educational or, and were they helpful to you or were they just simply refusing to pursue the conversation? Is there a learning curve that every entrepreneur has to go through of pitching.

Do they find the engagement with the angels helpful or do are generally the, it's the rejection that makes you go back to the drawing board and recraft your pitch. 

Tim Huntzinger: Initially, it was the rejection that, that drew you back to the drawing board, but I I've learned over time that most investors are a little bit hesitant to give constructive feedback because they don't know how it's going to be taken.

If you're willing to just, ask for it and be humble enough to receive it. Many people will be willing to give you as much feedback as you're interested in taking and, being able to apply that feedback also makes a lot of friends, you know everyone wants their feedback to be valuable and treated as valuable and process.

I've met a lot of what I would call mentors in marketing as well as in investing. That's been hugely beneficial to me. So even if we didn't become investment partners, being able to apply their good ideas. There's so many smart people out there in the investment world, being able to apply their ideas into marketing and into the vehicle have been super helpful.

Jeanne Gray: So my last question is as an engineer, what did you learn about being an entrepreneur? 

Tim Huntzinger: Yeah. being an entrepreneur, I would say is, You have to be good at everything, right? Everything that you're not good at, you either have to cover with someone else who is good at it, or you have to just learn it yourself.

Early on in my career, actually, would say more of a designer and less of an engineer. Any engineer they would probably laugh if I said I was an engineer. I have done a lot of engineering, But mostly I'm a designer.

And think early in my career, I thought once you have the design done, you're like 80 percent there. Right. What I've learned over time is, once the design is done, you're just getting started, you know, and then engineering happens, then manufacturing engineering happens. And then You know, marketing happens and then, sales happen and then customer service, you know, there's, such a long chain of events that happen after the design process and after the initial engineering process that there's just so much more.

And that's why having a good team is helpful, but also why it's, it's really important to have an open mind and, and listen to good feedback, not that all feedback is good, but you have to be able to sort out what is good and what's, what's not super helpful. And be able to apply that , in a way that makes sense to grow your company.

So I guess putting that in a nutshell, it's just that there's being an entrepreneur, there's so many things that you have to be good at and you have to constantly be learning. But I think maybe that's, one of the things that keeps me excited about it is yeah, it keeps me on my toes. 

Jeanne Gray: It sounds like you have a willingness to adapt.

Tim Huntzinger: Yeah, I love learning. I spent number of years as a, professor of design at, at Art Center College of Design. And honestly, the reason I enjoyed that the most is I, I learned so much from, from teaching. You know, it felt like I was, still going to school. So I spent eight years there teaching and those eight years really taught me a lot and was great. But I enjoy learning. 

Jeanne Gray: Well, Tim, it's been great speaking to you about your three-wheel scooter and how you've made such progress in bringing it to the market. So I'll look forward to hearing more in the coming months as as you're ramping up. So again, thank you for being a guest on experienced voices. 

You have been listening to the podcast series, Experienced Voices. To hear more and subscribe, visit americanentrepreneurship. com forward slash podcast, where you will also find a form for listener feedback.