Family in Ufa Stuck Paying Loan for Unfixable Chinese Car
The vehicle«s damage appears minor, but the estimated repair costs are surprisingly high.
A family from Ufa has been waiting for months for the repair of their car, which they handed over to an official dealer. The family believes the car is sitting in the workshop and simply rusting, blaming the car dealership for everything — claiming it is deliberately holding onto the vehicle. However, as the dealer himself explained, he also got into an unpleasant situation, but it all doesn«t depend on him. UFA1.RU looked into what is happening.
A radiator replacement is required as part of the extensive repair list.
Dmitry and his wife Yulia in 2025 considered buying a new car. They chose the SWM G05 Pro — a Chinese crossover that began production in 2019. The main plant is in China, and another one opened in Kaliningrad in 2023 at the Avtotor base.
In May, the family bought the car on credit. According to the contract with the bank, they must pay 70,000 rubles (approximately $700 at current rates) monthly.
However, a few months later, the brand-new crossover was involved in a serious accident. Fortunately, the car was insured, so the family applied to the insurance company, which suggested sending the car for repair to a partner service center on Tramvaynaya Street in Ufa. But soon they were told: parts for this car are not available not only there, but across the entire country.
Therefore, the insurance company suggested that the Ufa residents find a service center for repairs themselves, promising to pay for it. So Dmitry found an official SWM dealer — the Perfecto Auto dealership, and the car was sent there in mid-August — a month and a half after the accident.
«There was two and a half months of waiting. Every day we called the dealer and asked: »When will the parts arrive? When will the repair start?« The answer was always the same: »We are waiting for the delivery.« On September 5, the insurer approved the work order in full for 921,600 rubles (approximately $9,200 at current rates). On September 22, they paid the invoice. The family is waiting. The repair hasn»t started, nothing is happening, the car is standing in the workshop and rusting, we continue to pay the loan for a non-working car, the bank has been paid 313,500 rubles (approximately $3,135 at current rates) for a car that can«t be used,» Dmitry laments.
According to him, the dealership lacks key parts: headlights, bumper, grilles, brackets costing about 170,000 rubles (approximately $1,700 at current rates).
Dmitry and his wife contacted the dealership, but as the man assures, they did not receive a clear answer. Although at some point he started communicating with a mechanic who was working on his car. However, that mechanic was allegedly later prohibited from contacting the client. Dmitry provided correspondence where the master says this:
«The management confronted me. So I have a request for you, purely human, don»t come to the service center just to chat like that anymore. If there are questions, then through official channels, by phone or appointment. No hard feelings. I got in trouble for unauthorized relations,« the mechanic wrote to Dmitry.
Since the repair still hadn«t started, Dmitry, acting on behalf of his wife (the car is registered in her name), sent a pre-trial claim to the dealership on January 23. He also sent it to the SWM plant in Kaliningrad, but as he says, hasn»t received responses yet.
The Perfecto Auto dealership is owned by LLC Astra Group from Moscow Oblast. According to Kontur.Focus, the organization was registered in August 2024 and is engaged in car trading and maintenance.
The director until October 2025 was Anton Butuzov, now he has his own dealership in Moscow. Currently, the company is managed by Galina Kharitonova, who previously was not involved in business management. At the end of 2024, Astra Group«s revenue was 102.5 million rubles (approximately $1.025 million at current rates), with a net loss of 684,000 rubles (approximately $6,840 at current rates).
As Konstantin, the head of service and maintenance at Perfecto Auto, commented to UFA1.RU, Dmitry«s wife did indeed approach them. For the insurance company, they compiled a list of parts and services needed for the car repair (including radiator, bumper, spoiler, and more, totaling 921,000 rubles).
«According to this list, let»s say, about 70 percent of the parts have already arrived to us. The remaining 30 percent we don«t have, and they are exactly what»s needed to start assembly — these are brackets, mounts, bumpers, radiator grilles. Everything that depended on us, we did. Without the parts that the plant isn«t supplying, we cannot start the repair,» the service head reported.
However, he knows that the needed parts will arrive in Moscow in two weeks, and from there they will be sent to Ufa. That is, from Chongqing (2,000 kilometers from Beijing), where the main plant is located, the parts will be transported to Kaliningrad, to the Russian enterprise, then to Moscow and Ufa.
The parts are supplied by the Russian subsidiary of SWM — LLC Shinerei Motors Rus. According to Kontur.Focus, the company was registered in Moscow Oblast in 2021.
The director is Vyacheslav Galuzinsky, who previously owned a dental clinic and a company for wholesale fruit trade, and was connected with the official Lifan dealer.
The owner of Shinerei is the group company Dong Fang Xin Yuan from Chongqing, China. Revenue for 2024 was 9.1 million rubles (approximately $91,000 at current rates), with a loss of 11 million rubles (approximately $110,000 at current rates).
Why the enterprise couldn«t find parts for half a year — the official dealer doesn»t know, but its representative emphasizes that all this was explained to Dmitry (which he confirms).
«Apparently, our answer didn»t satisfy him, and he started filing complaints, though he has the right to do so. But he doesn«t call our work number, he now works through the media, law enforcement agencies, and so on,» Konstantin added.
We also asked about the «prohibition to communicate». According to Konstantin, the situation was a bit different: he was prohibited not from communicating with the client, but from using a personal phone for it. Moreover, our interlocutor notes, one needs to see the entire correspondence to understand what«s happening.
Dmitry added that he also appealed to the authorities: Rospotrebnadzor refused him: the repair is not under a direct contract, but under OSAGO (compulsory motor third-party liability insurance), and the rules for service provision (which the applicant believed were violated) do not apply to this type of repair by law. The prosecutor«s office forwarded the appeal to Rospotrebnadzor.
