Meet the Team

Automotive experience. Recruitment expertise. Immigration confidence.

Thorne Automotive Solutions brings together two women whose experience, values and understanding of people are perfectly aligned.

Penny Thorne and Sandrine Savarit share genuine automotive industry backgrounds, strong commercial experience and a highly personal approach to recruitment. Together, they provide employers and candidates with one connected journey—from identifying the right opportunity and making the right match through to immigration guidance, relocation and settling into life in New Zealand.

Both are also mothers with families at different stages of life. Sandrine is now an empty nester, while Penny has a beautiful blended family of four children, ranging in age from five to eighteen. This shared understanding of family, change and major life transitions is especially valuable when supporting people relocating their careers and families to a new country.

Penny Thorne
Founder & Director | Thorne Automotive Solutions

Penny brings more than two decades of automotive experience across dealership, distributor and senior leadership environments in New Zealand and Australasia.

Having worked at every level of the industry—from frontline dealership operations through to national sales leadership—Penny understands the commercial realities facing automotive employers and what it takes for someone to perform and succeed within their business.

She leads TAS employer relationships, workforce strategy, candidate assessment and automotive-specific matching. Her approach looks beyond the CV to consider technical capability, performance, brand alignment, communication, cultural fit and long-term employment potential.

For Penny, recruitment is not simply about filling a vacancy. It is about understanding the business, recognising the right person and creating a placement that delivers lasting value for both.

Sandrine Savarit
Independent Associate Recruiter | Licensed Immigration Adviser

Sandrine brings a rare combination of automotive sales experience, international recruitment capability, legal-sector knowledge and licensed immigration expertise.

Before establishing her career in New Zealand, Sandrine worked in automotive sales with Peugeot and Renault in France. This gives her a genuine understanding of the industry, the people within it and the qualities required to build trust and succeed in an automotive environment.

As an Independent Associate Recruiter with TAS, Sandrine supports international talent acquisition, candidate engagement and placement. Separately, in her regulated capacity as a Licensed Immigration Adviser, she provides immigration advice and manages visa pathways for candidates and employers.

Sandrine is also an accredited translator and interpreter, works across French, Italian and English, and brings more than 20 years of combined experience within the legal field.

Perfectly Aligned

The team behind TAS are united by their automotive backgrounds, commercial understanding and belief that successful recruitment is built on relationships, honesty and care.

Their complementary expertise gives TAS a genuine point of difference: automotive-led recruitment supported by licensed immigration expertise and a personal understanding of what it means to move not only a career, but a life and family.