About 35 Savic C-Series motorcycles are on Australian roads right now. Another 40 are being built. A company in West Melbourne assembled every one of them, designed the powertrain, wrote the software, and put the thing through ADR compliance itself — more than any other vehicle manufacturer in this country has managed in a decade.
Last week Savic Motorcycles turned 10 and announced it was open to being bought.
But this isn’t a fire sale. Savic has a $1.3 million order book, a factory that can build 500 bikes a year and three more motorcycles already engineered, looking for someone with the money and the markets to build all of it faster than it can alone.
Where the company actually sits
Chief executive Marc Alexander took the job in December 2025, after a decade knowing founder Dennis Savic and about six months working inside the business. His brief was blunt.
“The mandate was stabilise and grow,” he told me. “Stabilise, grow, realise a whole range of latent or almost ready things that need to get done.”
The West Melbourne shop has been rebuilt around production since. “When you see it now, you’ll see the whole place feels bigger,” Alexander said. “Our production engineer’s redone the whole thing. So we can comfortably do five per week and even go to ten per week.”
The company isn’t profitable yet, and he doesn’t pretend otherwise.
“On a run rate of three per week, we’re cash flow positive,” he said. “We’ve gone to between two and three, but not quite consistently over three.” Past three a week, with 23 people on the payroll covering software, electronics, engineering and the line, “anything above that is all net profit”.
The C-Series is still $29,990 rideaway, and Alexander says that isn’t what’s holding people back.
Savic Motorcycles CEO Marc Alexander.
“Everything I’ve seen, and customers’ and potential customers’ input, is that that price is fine and it’s not a decision factor.”
He’s a rider, for what it’s worth — grew up on bikes, still has a soft spot for early two-strokes and anything loud. He talks about the C-Series the way owners do.
“There’s something really special about a full-size performance EV motorbike,” he said. “Pleasure not paying for petrol. Just that liquid smooth torque. It’s so satisfying.”
What’s coming
As motorcyclists, most of us should care more about what’s to come than any M&A negotiations. Alexander doesn’t disappoint.
The C-Series sits on what Savic calls the SM1 platform, and it’s genuinely modular. Pull three pieces of bodywork off a C-Series, swap the headstock, and the wheelbase, rake and trail all change with it. Re-skin it, retune the performance, change the dash graphics in software, and you have a different motorcycle sharing 95 per cent of its parts with the one before it.
The first of those is a sportsbike, known inside the company by the codename Futura, with fully 3D-printed bodywork. It should be seen before the end of the year. A streetfighter and a hypersport sit behind it, both off the same platform.
Then there’s SM2 — smaller, lighter, and aimed at a hole Alexander reckons nobody has filled.
“A huge gap in trusted urban commuting,” is how he puts it. A mid-size to maximum-capacity electric machine, and he’s emphatic about what it isn’t. “A real proper bike,” he said, rather than the things currently doing wheelies down bike paths and giving the whole category a bad name.
And there’s a third: an electric scooter platform, which the company says is designed, engineered and ready to go.
Why sell now
Three platforms are exactly why Savic’s announcement leads with acquisition rather than investment.
“We wanted to put acquisition first to make sure the right readers in that interest category didn’t miss it,” Alexander said. “Savic is an outstanding tech company that’s developed a whole platform, which is a significant acceleration, and delivers a lot of products in different size classes in the market as well.”
The pitch is aimed squarely at manufacturers in China, Vietnam and India who already build competent electric scooters and have nothing to put on the tank.
“There’s a mid-size to max EV scooter market that pretty much doesn’t have any brands or any sort of brand affinity applied to it, that we have, and the whole tech stack,” he said. “A tech stack, like a software tech stack takeover by Savic, and branding and a little tweak from us, and they would be outstanding. I’m really excited about that.”
Delivery fleets are the other target. Electric scooters are everywhere in Asian cities already, but as Alexander describes it, “a scrapbook of rider-owned and unknown-brand manufacturer type scooters” that break down and embarrass the brands using them.
“For the first time, there’d be a trusted brand and a connected brand for delivery and fleet.”
Talks have been moving slowly. Going public was a way of speeding them up, Alexander says.
“If we want to close something out before the end of the year, we might need exposure.”
Does the bike stay Australian?
Alexander says the Australian operation is the point, not a cost to cut. He believes Australia should remain where the bikes are developed, and the premium ones are built, with volume production sitting wherever the volume markets are.
“We’d always keep production here in Australia for a certain market,” he said.
“We can’t service the production run rate that’s needed for some countries, but we would be, I guess, that leading edge development and production facility.”
Sub-assembly already runs out of a Savic-owned factory in Taizhou, China, where company staff build the battery and powertrain unit and freight it to Melbourne. He’s unapologetic. “We’re not doing every single screw, nut and bolt assembly hands-on in every country.”
Ten years ago an engineer in Melbourne decided to build an electric motorcycle, and against every reasonable expectation, he did. What’s on the table now is three platforms, a software stack and 23 people who know how to take a bike from a sketch to your garage without leaving the country.
Tilting at windmills? Or a genuine opportunity? The clock is ticking…
Mike Sinclair is Principal Columnist and a partner in TheAutoExec, an automotive industry website covering the business of motoring in Australia and the region.
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