Electric Passion

Dennis Savic has taken his passion to the next level with the Savic electric motorcycle

Several years ago we featured Dennis Savic in VTE magazine early on when he was in the throes of turning his dream into a reality. Now the first Savic electric motorcycle is about the hit the road as a viable alternative to the internal combustion engine motorcycle.

Mr Savic was a speaker at the SAE-A AGM, he spoke firstly of his dream to one day produce his own high performance electric motorcycle.

“I’ll delve into the journey of Savic Motorcycles,” he began but before that he outlined his own family background, he was born to immigrant parents who had come from Bosnia determined to make a good life in Australia. That drove him to work really hard, as they had.

After moving to Perth in WA Mr Savic recalls going over a bridge into Perth and looking out the car window and seeing what he considered was a very ugly car. That inspired him to work in the automotive industry.

“Time went on and I liked to ride my pushy around when I was at school,” he said. “And when I was about 14, I thought it would be pretty good if there was a motor in this bike. It would be a lot cooler.

“But, again, immigrant parents, we didn’t have a lot of money growing up, so there was no way my parents were going to spend 600 bucks on a motorbike for me … So, I got the pencil case out, came up with what parts I needed to buy, broke the piggy bank up and worked out, right, I can actually build this myself. I was in a motor work class at school.

“I finished all my work and I brought all this to the teacher and I said, look, how good is this? Will you help me build it? And the teacher said, absolutely not.”

He recalls that the teacher, though disappointing him initially suggested that he need to be an engineer.

“At that point, I was basically failing year 10 and to get into engineering – you needed reasonable marks. So, I just worked pretty hard, scraped into UWA (University of Western Australia) and that’s where I did my degree. And as soon as I finished my degree, I started building bikes.

As a university student at the University of WA he became involved with Formula SAE-A and says that it was the best educational experiences a student can get.

“I built my first bike in 2015 and I’ve been bashing my head against the wall ever since. Now with a team of people collectively bashing their heads against the wall.”

By 2018 Mr Savic had raised his first small amount of capital from friends and family and built his first concept bike launching publicly as Savic Motorcycles in November that year. However, the ride wasn’t smooth in more ways than one, the concept bike was expensive to build, and the performance wasn’t adequate, neither was the reliability and quality. It proved to him that he couldn’t build an electric bike using existing components it had to be a ground-up design.

“Right, we’re going to have to do this ourselves. And that’s when we started designing motors, designing battery packs, and, I mean, fast-forward a few iterations and quite a lot of pain,” he said. “We have a bike where pretty much 95% of it is done by us. Software, hardware, rims, axles, nuts. Instrument cluster, over-the-air updates, backend cloud infrastructure.

“We’ve got a lot of passion in the team. And we definitely wouldn’t be where we are today without all those people. And where we are today is pretty much on the brink of commercial production.”

The first customer bike has been built, just about ready to go out the door, after spending around $5 million of investor equity to get there.

There are several things that are equally hard in this business Mr Savic explained, engineering the product is hard, the greatest engineering challenge has been EMC, electromagnetic compatibility.

But then the supply chain to go along with it also presents a difficulty, because the supply chain actually doesn’t really exist for this type of motorbike. Mr Savic had to go to suppliers, take what they’ve had off the shelf, redevelop it, and ask for a custom specification.

Around the beginning of this year Savic Motorcycles took its bike to Lang Lang to complete durability testing, this is the first time any motorbike as ever been testing at that site.

The bike passed with flying colours because as Mr Savic said, it is every engineer’s nightmare if it doesn’t.

“You know, building these bikes is so cool. And I’d tell someone ... And they’d say to me, why are you doing that? Do you know how much oil’s in the ground? Are you sure you’re spending your money wisely and investing everything you’ve got? This is back in 2015, 2016. And I thought, oh, that’s a bit narrow-minded,” Mr Savic said.

In 2017 Mr Savic moved to Melbourne and he says that was instrumental in fuelling his desire to build this motorcycle because his dream was shared by others.

“I thought, hmm, these are my people. I’m in the right spot. And one of the things that I reasoned was that the thing that kind of brings us all together in this room and in other parts of the industry is a common interest, right? And it might be bikes, it might be cars, but in general, automotive, manufacturing, design, we all kind of fit together,” he said.