Family Pays Credit for Chinese Car in Repair Limbo

A family from Ufa has been waiting for months for the repair of a car they gave to an official dealer. The family believes the vehicle is sitting in the workshop simply rusting, and blames the dealership — claiming it is deliberately holding the car. However, as the dealer himself explained, he too is caught in an unpleasant situation, but it is not up to him. UFA1.RU looked into the matter.

Dmitry and his wife Yulia in 2025 considered buying a new car. They chose the SWM G05 Pro — a Chinese crossover that started production in 2019. The main plant is in China, and in 2023 another one was opened in Kaliningrad at the Avtotor facility.

In May, the family bought the car on credit. Under the bank agreement, they must pay 70,000 rubles ($778) monthly.

However, a few months later the brand-new crossover was involved in a serious accident. Fortunately, the car was insured, so the family filed a claim with the insurance company, which suggested sending the car for repairs to a partner auto shop on Tramvaynaya Street in Ufa. But there they soon reported that there were no spare parts for this car, not only at their shop but anywhere in the country.

So the insurance company suggested the Ufa residents find a repair service themselves, promising to pay for it. That«s how Dmitry found the official SWM dealer — Perfecto Auto dealership. The car was sent there in mid-August, a month and a half after the accident.

“There were two and a half months of waiting. We called the dealer every day asking: ‘When are the parts? When will the repair be done?’ The answer was always the same: ‘We are waiting for delivery.’ On 5 September the insurer approved the work order in full for 921,600 rubles ($10,200). On 22 September they paid the bill. The family is waiting. The repair hasn«t started, nothing is happening, the car is sitting in the workshop rusting, we continue paying the credit for a non-working car, we have paid 313,500 rubles ($3,500) to the bank for a car that cannot be used,” Dmitry laments.

According to him, the dealership does not have key parts: headlights, bumper, grilles, brackets totaling about 170,000 rubles ($1,900).

Dmitry and his wife contacted the dealership, but as the man insists, they received no clear answer. Although at some point he began communicating with the mechanic working on his car. However, the mechanic was allegedly later forbidden from contacting the client. Dmitry provided a correspondence where the mechanic says: “The management called me out. So I have a request, purely human: don’t just come to the service like this to chat anymore. If there are questions, handle them officially by phone or appointment. No hard feelings. I got in trouble for off-the-chart relations,” the mechanic wrote to Dmitry.

Since the repair never started, Dmitry, acting on behalf of his wife (the car is registered to her), sent a pre-trial claim to the dealership on 23 January. He also sent it to the SWM plant in Kaliningrad, but says he has not received any responses yet.

The Perfectro Auto dealership is owned by Astra Group LLC from the Moscow region. According to Kontur.Focus, the organization was registered in August 2024 and is engaged in car sales and maintenance.

The director until October 2025 was Anton Butuzov, who now has his own dealership in Moscow. Currently the company is headed by Galina Kharitonova, who previously had no business management experience. At the end of 2024, Astra Group«s revenue was 102.5 million rubles ($1,138,900), and net loss was 684,000 rubles ($7,600).

As Konstantin, the head of service and maintenance at Perfectro Auto, told UFA1.RU, Dmitry’s wife did contact them. For the insurance company, they compiled a list of parts and services needed for the car’s repair (including radiator, bumper, spoiler, etc., totaling 921,000 rubles ($10,200)).

“According to this list, say, about 70% of the parts have already arrived. The remaining 30% we don’t have, and those are exactly what is needed to start assembly — brackets, fasteners, bumpers, radiator grilles. We have done everything that depended on us. Without the parts that the factory does not supply, we cannot start the repair,” the service manager reported.

However, he knows that the necessary 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 factory is located, the parts will be taken to Kaliningrad, to the Russian plant, then to Moscow and Ufa.

The parts are supplied by the Russian subsidiary of SWM — Shinerei Motors Rus LLC. According to Kontur.Focus, the company was registered in the Moscow region in 2021.

The director is Vyacheslav Galuzinsky, who previously owned a dental clinic and a fruit wholesale company, and was associated with an official Lifan dealer.

The owner of Shinerei is the Dong Fang Xin Yuan Group company from Chongqing, China. Revenue at the end of 2024 was 9.1 million rubles ($101,100), and loss was 11 million rubles ($122,200).

Why the enterprise could not find parts for six months is unknown to the official dealer, but its representative emphasizes that everything was explained to Dmitry (which he confirms).

“Apparently, he was not satisfied with our answer and began filing complaints, although he has the right to do so. But he does not call our work number; he is now working through the media, law enforcement agencies, and so on,” Konstantin added.

We also asked about the «ban on communication.» According to Konstantin, the situation was slightly different: he was not banned from communicating with the client, but from using his personal phone for that. Moreover, our interlocutor notes, you need to see the entire correspondence to understand what happened.

Dmitry added that he also turned to government authorities. Rospotrebnadzor refused him: the repair is not being carried out under a direct contract but under OSAGO, and the service provision rules (which the applicant believed were violated) do not apply to this type of repair by law. The Prosecutor«s Office sent an appeal to Rospotrebnadzor.