Bright spark: Luxury car dealer Martin Roller on EV charge

You know it’s time to get on board the electric vehicle rollout when former Brisbane luxury car deals Martin Roller starts selling them.

Martin Roller now has EV dealership in Brisbane

You know it’s time to get on board the electric vehicle rollout when Martin Roller starts selling them.

The luxury high-profile car dealer and business partner Marvin Burke spent more than three decades building a $250m business that sold some of the world’s most expensive petrol-driven cars – from luxury Lamborghinis and Ferraris to BMWs and Rolls Royces.

Now after a brief stint selling upmarket caravans, the partners along with veteran auto executive Anthony Alafaci are back in the car business as Brisbane dealers for new Chinese electric vehicle marque Leapmotor.

These days instead of cashed-up executives Mr Roller is targeting motorists with more modest budgets. Leapmotor’s C10 model being introduced into the Australian market this year sells for under $50,000 and is aimed squarely at suburban mum and dads.

When Mr Roller and Mr Burke sold their remaining stake in their Valley-based business to Malaysian multinational Sime Darby in 2019, few thought they would retire to the golf course. Mr Roller, who has been in the car game for more than 35 years, took over the city’s BMW dealership in 1999 and grew it five-fold into a colossus with about 250 staff.

The partners, who expanded the business to include Ferrari, Alfa Romeo, Fiat and Volvo, sold the initial 70 per cent of the business for $85 million to Sime in 2014 before exiting entirely five years later. “We counted our money for a little bit, but that was boring,” Mr Roller said. “We were still too young to hang up the calculators but we had to sit out a non-compete clause that was part of the deal with Sime.”

Martin Roller with partners Marvin Burke, and Anthony Alafaci.

He said selling cars in his DNA and it’s not surprising he is back doing what he does best. “We are car guys and we like looking after customers,” he said. “We’ve built a pretty good reputation in town. A lot of people know us for the right reasons, not the wrong reasons. We haven’t left a trail of destruction behind us. That’s why we got out of caravans, because the manufacturer’s approach to building a quality product and then standing behind it was non-existent, which left us holding the baby when customers would come back and say, look at all these defects. They’re manufacturing issues, these are not ours.”

Mr Roller said petrol-driven cars are not going to go away anytime soon, but he conceded the EV market was only going to get bigger. “There’s plenty of chatter about EVs - that sales are going up or down,” he said. “But we thought there’s plenty of Teslas and BYDs being sold. So we started talking to a few (car manufacturers), got wined and dined, and taken to China by one group that wanted to position their Chinese product alongside BMW or just under.”

Mr Roller said he didn’t think a Chinese product in the Australian buyer’s mind could command a premium price. “So we started talking to Leapmotors and their product just resonated,” he said. Hangzhou-based Leapmotor this year formed a joint venture with Stellantis, the maker of Fiat, Jeep and Alfa Romeo, to market the brand internationally. “They’re car people, we’re car people, and the investment required probably wasn’t as much as some of the others were asking for,” Mr Roller said.

The dealership will be based at Stafford with plans for a pop-up store at Westfield Chermside to display the new C10. He said the shopping mall store was a new way of selling cars and a shift away from the high-street showrooms of old. “We’ll have a couple of cars in the car park that we can do a demonstration and or they can make an appointment to come to our showroom,” he said. “So we’ll adopt some new ways of finding customers and getting in front of people because it’s a new brand. They don’t know what a Leapmotor is, but when they walk past in the shopping centre, they are going to love it, love the colour, and think it’s in the 70 grand range. In a shopping centre environment, we’ll see a lot of people and we mightn’t sell them a car today, but it’s all about brand recognition.”

Martin Roller in his BMW days.

Mr Roller said the customer experience at Leapmotor “will be every bit as good as customers that bought a million dollar Rolls Royce from us.” “We won’t lower our delivery of customer service just because it’s a 45 grand car and not a million dollar Rolls or Ferrari,” he said. “We will deliver that same customer service to those people. The car business has changed, but some things haven’t changed. Looking after customers, building a good team is really important.” He said growth in EV sales was being driven by government support, and he is eyeing the lucrative leasing market as well as showroom sales.

The Australian EV market is expected to reach $6bn this year and $9.6bn by 2029, with an increasing number of government incentives and infrastructure developments supporting its growth. “This is a very big market with government benefits such as Fringe Benefit Tax (FBT) exemptions on full electric plug-ins,” he said. “That whole electric space, has been, fuelled by government incentives.”