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Speedmaster to Start Manufacturing Custom Cars

Speedmaster will begin manufacturing its first custom car in the US on Wednesday. This signals a dramatic shift for the company, which started as a bricks-and-mortar store in Wollongong in 1979 before making a name for itself developing aftermarket automotive parts to sell online. 

Speedmaster is now Australia’s largest supplier of aftermarket automotive parts and on track to become the largest in the US market next year. The decision to move beyond parts was based on customer demand, according to Speedmaster CEO Jason Kencevski. 

“We were listening to our customers, which everyone should do, and they were saying, ‘We love your parts, but we want a complete solution’,” he said.

Speedmaster specialises in building new parts for classic cars, especially muscle cars. But while the collector and restoration car market is incredibly niche, demand is growing from wealthy customers in Asia and the Arab world, who are increasingly interested in buying not just expensive cars, but rare ones.

Kencevski saw an opportunity. And when Speedmaster won two prestigious SEMA awards at the industry’s leading trade show last year, bringing its grand total up to eight in seven years, the timing seemed right.

“We had four or five of our top customers in the room, so we asked if they would buy a Speedmaster-built muscle car. We had a deposit from one and interest from a second and third customer right then,” he said.

The first step was to find a partner who could supply the chassis and body and get approval to replicate classic muscle cars. Speedmaster invested in an American manufacturing company that had the rights to build iconic three models, including the Shelby Daytona Cobra Coupe, and supplied all the other parts itself. 

The two companies assembled a proof-of-concept, and on Wednesday, they will start officially manufacturing cars. Since each model is custom-built, they won’t exactly be rolling off the assembly line.

“The engineering that went into the proof-of-concept will be applied to the rest, but it’s not about mass production. People might want more power or grip, or one car might need a different suspension that requires different engineering,” Kencevski said.

The first car will be based on the Shelby Daytona design and is due to be finished in time for Kencevski to drive it to this year’s SEMA show in Las Vegas on 1 November. The whole process will be filmed for a reality television show in the US. And a sheik has already put a deposit on the car, which is expected to sell for more than US$500,000. 

“It’s definitely a Speedmaster car, it has all our DNA in it. What we currently do is award-winning,” Kencevski said.

But custom cars are only one part of the company’s grand plan. Speedmaster will eventually segue into mass-producing muscle cars with electric engines. Kencevski called this “the biggest hurdle” the company faces in its transition into car manufacturing.

The engine, which is being patented by a Speedmaster engineer, is an internal inverter electric engine capable of doing 2000 horsepower, with the half the electricity it takes to run a Tesla engine. The cars will be sold for between US$260,000 to US$500,000.

“At the end of the day, I believe muscle cars will never phase out, but going down the electric engine route is self-preservation,” Kencevski said.

“Every year for the last five years, we’ve shown year-on-year growth thanks to innovation. We’re now shipping to over 100 countries worldwide. People refer to Speedmaster as the Apple of car parts. It’s not about building parts or custom or electric cars, it’s the way we do it that’s the aim.”  

Speedmaster has three core pillars that drive the business: people, products, approach. The company has over 460 staff globally, with a 25-person R&D and manufacturing team in Sydney, and a 50-person team running a 75,000-square-foot distribution centre in Los Angeles. The rest of the team works in developing and mass-producing parts at the company’s facility in China, where 60 per cent of Speedmaster’s parts are made.

But as the car manufacturing business takes off, Kencevski hopes to bring some manufacturing back to the US and Australia.

“This is just another byproduct of moving forward and being agile,” he said. 

 


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