Journal · 7 September 2026 · 6 min read

The Bali garage that treats scooters like art

GTA Garage is an Indonesian company with 104 bikes, its own workshop and a paint booth where a candy-red finish takes three days. A story about style, service and why the team wants the island to look brighter.

Most rental scooters in Bali look the same: grey, dusty, a sticker with a phone number on the leg shield. Then a deep candy-red Xmax rolls past a temple gate at golden hour, and you look twice. Chances are it came out of a garage in Denpasar where a team of about a dozen people has spent three years proving that a rental bike can be a beautiful object.

GTA Garage is an Indonesian company registered in Bali. It runs a fleet of 104 bikes across seven models, from the Yamaha Nmax to the Kawasaki Ninja ZX-25R, and has completed more than 3,656 rentals since 2023. What sets it apart is not the size of the fleet. It is the fact that the company owns the whole chain: the bikes, the mechanics, the drivers, and a paint shop that would not look out of place in a custom-car studio.

Three days for one colour

A candy finish is not a colour you buy in a can. It is a metallic base, several translucent layers of tinted lacquer, and a clear coat, each one sanded and cured before the next. A single bike takes the painter about three days. The result changes with the light: red turns to wine in the shade and to glass in the sun.

The paint shop started as a way to keep the company's own fleet looking new. It grew into a signature. Today the Xmax Limited line, fourteen bikes in one-off finishes, is the most photographed part of the fleet, and the booth also takes outside work: paint, top boxes, backrests and surf racks for bikes the company has never rented.

A scooter is the first thing you see in the morning and the last thing you park at night. If it looks good, the day starts differently. We wanted people to feel that.

Alex Shtefan, co-founder

Service is the product

The founders, Alex Shtefan and his partner who runs day-to-day operations, describe the company as a service business that happens to own bikes. The bike arrives at your door with helmets. A driver checks it with you, takes photos, and explains the small things: the fuel latch, the helmet lock, the number to write to if anything goes wrong. If a bike breaks, the workshop fixes it on the spot or brings another one.

• Live availability: the website shows how many bikes of each model are free on your dates, straight from the company's own system.
• Real photos: every bike in the catalog is the actual bike, not a stock image.
• Own workshop: service on schedule, repairs logged, a swap if the bike cannot be fixed quickly.
• Long stays: a month costs the price of eighteen days, and swaps are possible when plans change.

A Balinese team

Behind the paint are people from Bali: mechanics, a painter and his assistant, three delivery drivers, a sales manager and an accountant. Many have been with the company since the beginning. The garage runs on a system the founders built themselves, so everyone sees the same plan: which bike goes where, when it comes back, what the workshop is doing today. The owners check the company in ten minutes a day. The rest is the team.

Why brighter

Ask the team what they want the company to be in five years and the answer is not a number of bikes. It is that Bali looks a little brighter because of them: more colour on the roads, fewer breakdowns on the side of them, and a garage where art and service are the same thing. It is an unusual ambition for a rental company. It is also why the red Xmax gets a second look.