Tilt | Martin van Wunnik
My first conversation with Martin van Wunnik began with pleasantries around the subject of language. Martin, who is based in Brussels and comes from a Dutch-French family, moves fluidly in his personal and professional life between English, French, and Dutch (he is working on his Arabic with his spouse); I told him about my own household, where Korean, Spanish, and English intermingle. We spoke briefly about the peculiar richness of multilingualism: the way language carries not only information but texture, intimacy, worldview; of the way moving between languages can also mean moving between ways of seeing. I envy the multi-fluency van Wunnik possesses and its gifts in the opportunity for connection it brings.
It was a tangential beginning, but not an unhelpful one. Before we arrived at motorcycles, batteries, cornering, and patents, the exchange offered a small clue about the entrepreneur himself: someone perhaps especially comfortable crossing between systems, cultures, and frames of reference, and interested in what becomes possible when familiar structures are loosened.
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Martin van Wunnik rode small motorbikes as a teenager in southern France. He crossed Europe on his Vespa and Suzuki, owned Benellis, HONDAs and BMWs. He smiles recounting a motorcycle dealer refusing to buy his bike during his divorce because he was so struck in their short conversation by how much it meant to him.
Van Wunnik has filed a patent for a tilting battery pack system for electric motorcycles: his design intended to assist in the weight management of motorcycles in cornering, an impossibility with the fixed architecture of internal combustion engines.
On a gas motorcycle, the engine, transmission, and chassis exist indeed as one tightly integrated mechanical structure. Electric motorcycles introduce flexibility - Heavy battery packs are theoretically able to move independently from the chassis itself.
The objective is not speed but the creation of a system built around safety and stability. The motorcycle would take the same corner at the same speed, but with less lean angle. A more upright motorcycle allows the suspension to function more effectively, improves tire contact patch with the road surface, and reduces the risk of sliding. This concept of controlled shifting of the combined center of gravity is oriented towards larger, heavier bikes.
In much of the world, motorcycles remain practical transportation tools: lightweight machines carrying families through cities in Vietnam, Indonesia, Lagos, and Colombia. The challenge for motorcycles — gas and electric — is that the larger machines needed for broader utility also bring heavier mass and more cumbersome handling. Van Wunnik’s patent is aimed at that tension: using an opportunity inherent in electrification to make a bigger, heavier motorcycle easier and safer to control.
The patent itself remains intentionally broad. The tilting system could mature into something relatively simple: gyroscopes, mechanical systems, or even manual thumb controls that shift the battery left or right. It could also materialize into something far more sophisticated, with AI analyzing rider weight, speed, and road conditions in real time.
Van Wunnik’s idea: bring a new dynamism by using the heaviest component of the motorcycle to improve the way it behaves. The concept reflects something larger about the transition to electric vehicles: electrification is not simply replacing engines with batteries. It reopens fundamental questions about what motorcycles can be (particularly, in comparison to historically-ingrained notions of their form), how they function, and how riders interact with them.
For van Wunnik, the open-endedness is the appeal.
Martin van Wunnik likes to keep his mind working to (try to) generate creative thoughts on a multitude of topics, both in his private and professional life.
He is fully aware of how lucky he has been that the good cards he found in his crib allowed him to live his life; sadly, not everybody can be as fortunate.
On this inequality, the prominent evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould who wrote: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
The Panda’s Thumb, Part 4, ch. 13, “Wide Hats and Narrow Minds” (1980)
Martin van Wunnik
Written by Chessin Gertler in conversation with Martin van Wunnik | Media provided by Martin van Wunnik