- MOREMORE
If you had a regular bunch of automotive engineers building a motorbike from the ground up, you’d have a hard job doing it remotely. Engineers need tools, right? Spare parts? Face-to-face meetings and feisty, coffee-fuelled discussions about the latest performance stats and design modifications?
Fortunately for the Savic team, the Stage 4 lockdown that shut most of Melbourne this past month came at a relatively manageable time. Landing right between our design freeze and our final production build, we’ve been able to return to our homes and continue tweaking our designs, retooling parts, and laying the ground for our upcoming HQ launch.
There’s masses to do, of course. But with our batteries and powertrain components not arriving until late September, August was a time of locking in designs, testing and fine-tuning components, and managing deliveries from suppliers – all of which we could happily do online.
In Carlton, our software whizz Kim built himself a ‘test desk’, where he completed the front-end coding of our dash and is now hard at work on the back-end codes for our CAN-Bus and VCU. Our amazing new dash [link to next story] reflects the incredible dedication of Kim and Sam – who, over in Heatherton, completed the stunning design in between updating our website, fixing up logos, editing photos, and setting up our online shop with Michael in Forest Hill.
Meanwhile, Adrian in Berwick was liaising with compliance engineers to make sure every last part of our homologation bike cruises through its regulatory tests, and working with Dennis in Essendon to freeze the final engineering chapters of our epic design story. When he wasn’t talking to manufacturers and suppliers, Dennis was often in meetings with the global ‘Savic family’ – writing promos in Perth, tweaking code in LA, organising capital in Rome – this build is truly international!
In an era of high-speed clouds, 3D rendering, Zoom and Google Meet, Slack and Monday, we’ve been able to get around the need for meeting and testing our work face to face. We miss each other terribly, of course, and our Aussie family is itching to get back to fixing up our great new workspace. But for now, the heartfelt camaraderie that Dennis has built up and the unshakeable faith we all have in our incredible bikes are enough to get us through.
Lockdown sucks. But the reunion will be all the sweeter for the time that we’ve spent apart!
