Sweet Belief: Meet Neil Fewster, Savic's First Investor

Neil Fewster was the first person outside the Savic family to invest in Savic Motorcycles. So it was only fitting that he should become our first Australian customer: the proud owner of C-Series #001.

Neil on the C-Series with Dennis and the team.

When Dennis first started tinkering with the design of an electric motorcycle back in 2015, he did an informal internship at a place in Perth called EV Works. This trailblazing workshop was run by a visionary technician called Tim Brunner, who as well as selling lithium-ion batteries was helping a handful of people convert their petrol vehicles to battery power. One of those pioneers was Neil Fewster.

Neil was a honey farmer from nearby Chittering, who was doing an electric conversion on his Megelli 250R. Although it was “a pretty rudimentary rebuild”, it caught Dennis’s eye – and he was inspired to ask if he could borrow Neil’s bike to test various assumptions he’d made in the design of his own café racer.

Neil and Dennis quickly became friends, the 20 years between them dissolving in a shared love of all things two-wheeled. So when Dennis started building a chrome-moly frame to hold the battery pack and motor of what would eventually become the C-Series, it was only natural that Neil should step in to weld all the handmade tubes together.

“I’d had a lot of experience in steel fabrication and I just loved the idea of what Dennis was doing,” Neil remembers. “In fact, the first time I met him, I had a strong feeling that Dennis would succeed in whatever he wound up doing. I’m not sure why… sometimes you just get a positive feeling about certain people.”

Critical funds

Over the next few years, as Dave Hendroff finalised a design for the C-Series and the frame and powertrain came together as a single structure, Neil was always there in the background: encouraging, inspiring, and eventually, facilitating.

“In 2019, Neil offered to invest $50,000 on condition that if we produced a commercial bike, he’d have the first one,” says Dennis. “Without that money, we wouldn’t have managed to develop our first ground-up powertrain build, which led to the call from our first VC backers.

“So the bottom line is: without Neil and Charmaine, there’d have been no Savic Motorcycles.”

For Neil, though, it was more of an extension of his electric hobby, which eventually turned into something a bit more serious.

“I always treated Dennis like he was one of my kids,” he laughs. “If he did anything wrong, I’d get stuck into him. Charmaine was cooking him meals when his mother was away working – and of course, I soon met both his parents and then [his wife] Tess.”

Today, Dennis looks back on those early years with a mixture of pride and immense gratitude. While he was building his first bike, he also had a full-time job with Woodside Petroleum and was somehow finding the time to do an MBA in corporate finance. When he traces the evolution of the C-Series, it’s clear to him that the bike – and the company that grew up around it – would simply not exist without the Fewsters.

“We wouldn’t be here without Neil and Charmaine’s kindness, their belief in our success, and their trust that our team would do everything humanly possible to make this work.”

 Neil on board the C-Series.

Welcome visitors

For the past nine years, Neil has kept up a continuous conversation with Dennis: part mentor, part advisor, part cheer-squad leader.

So last year, when he and Charmaine were returning from visiting their daughter Amba in Brisbane, it was – once again – only natural that he drop in to West Melbourne, where he wound up staying for a couple of weeks, helping out on the assembly line.

“I know Sam, Kim and Adrian pretty well now,” says Neil. “I have to admit, I’m pretty blown away by the whole crew, and the unflinching belief they’ve always had in the C-Series.

“I believe everything is really primed now for this company to become a success story. The bike looks great, and handles really well. I think the whole business is a huge achievement.”

Relentless belief

For Dennis, although he knows that the Fewsters will always be there, cheering him on, it also feels a bit like payback time.

“Charmaine and Neil have always had this relentless belief in our success, whereas I’ve gone through a few ups and downs – especially in those early years.

“But somehow, when these two said it was going to be fine, I always believed them – and it kept me going.

“Nothing makes me want to succeed more than repaying Neil and Charmaine for all the belief they’ve shown in us for all these years.”