When Chinese new energy vehicles enter African markets, the discussion usually focuses on familiar topics:
price competitiveness, product specifications, and whether the vehicles are suitable for local road conditions.

What is discussed far less often is something much more basic.

When a vehicle eventually needs repair, who can accurately identify which part is actually required?

In many markets, vehicle sales have moved faster than the supporting after-sales logic.
The cars are new, but the repair environment they enter is not.

This is not a question of technical capability.
It is a consequence of real operating conditions.

In day-to-day repair scenarios, vehicles may have already experienced:

• multiple non-standard repairs

• part substitution or cross-brand replacement

• incomplete or inconsistent VIN information

Under these circumstances, system-based part identification is not always practical.

What often matters more is the ability to interpret physical clues, usage patterns, and prior repair history — sometimes with incomplete information and limited diagnostic tools.

As a result, the bottleneck is rarely the availability of parts.
It is the availability of people who can recognize the part that is actually needed, rather than the one that appears correct on paper.

This is why, in some markets, after-sales challenges emerge long before vehicle sales reach scale.

The issue is not demand.
It is interpretation.