Originally Published: 3rd July 2025
Savic’s C-Series and a New Era in Australian Motorcycling
From a dream in a school notebook to a handcrafted electric café racer, the Savic C-Series rides the line between memory, ambition, and the future of Australian motorcycling.
There’s a particular kind of person who builds a motorcycle from scratch. And not the backyard-custom kind of scratch. We’re talking Carl Sagan levels of scratch: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” And while Dennis Savic can’t create the universe, he’s done the next best thing: built a high-performance electric café racer with nothing but a dream, a workshop in West Melbourne, and a small team of true believers.
He told a teacher at 14 that he’d one day build an electric motorcycle. By his twenties, after a stint at Ford and with an MBA under his belt, he was plugging away in that Melbourne workshop, turning ambition into current.
What emerged is the Savic C-Series, a low-slung, high-voltage café racer that’s fast, unapologetically Aussie, and almost cartoonishly ambitious. It’s the first production motorcycle to be built commercially in Melbourne since the collapse of our domestic car industry. And despite its compact team and shoestring origins, it has already won design awards, blitzed a 170 km/h run at Phillip Island, and gained ADR certification in time to start delivering bikes to customers in early 2025.
Beneath its handcrafted fairing is a modular electric powertrain, the SM1 platform, developed entirely in-house. The numbers read like something out of a performance spec sheet rather than a startup press release: 60kW peak power, 200Nm of torque, and a 0–100km/h dash in 3.5 seconds. That’s what happens when you wrap a 16.2kWh battery around a three-phase PMAC motor, bolt on a single-sided swingarm, and feed power through a carbon Optibelt belt drive.
But Savic didn’t just engineer a machine for the spec hunters. This thing has a story, one with just enough romanticism, risk and resolve to earn it a place on the shortlist of modern Australian design triumphs.
It’s a reminder that world-class vehicles don’t need giant budgets or legacy badges, just a few sharp minds, some stubborn optimism, and the willingness to start from a blank sheet.
Attribution
This article originally appeared on TheModes, on 3rd July 2025
Words: Justin Jackie
Photography: Provided by Savic Motorcycles
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