Cape Talk, Saturday night

Network, you literally can look around. There's Hyundai and Kia dealerships almost everywhere. The network's quite strong. But again, it boils down to, you know, in terms of your priorities. Obviously, the money in the back pocket is getting the vehicles sold. So pushing units, that's where the money is. Then I'll deal with after sales and part supply. And generally speaking, I mean, you've got new vehicles coming out, right? You use

Been selling these vehicles in other markets, so you should know what generally goes wrong with them and you'd keep stock availability on that specific vehicle. I've also run in, I had a bit of an incident with that with a vehicle. The demo vehicle, 9,000 K's in the clock, airbag light refuses to go off, send it back to the dealer, dealer tracked it down to a faulty ECU. No stock on the shelf, vehicle is parked, waiting for the warranty to say yes, change it.

Then import the part. Okay, so that vehicle now will basically sit until the repair is concluded. And from what I've seen and heard in the industry, it's not just down to passenger vehicles. There's all these Chinese trucks that have also come into the country, and guys are struggling to get parts when parts break. So I suppose it will take some time. As you said, the network.

Needs to grow. Units need to be sold. It will take some time. But yeah, there are some issues. There are some challenges. And it seems that one of the other issues that's happening is sometimes for the brand itself, whatever issue you're taking to them is the first time they're dealing with it. So there was a story in New Year's 24th, someone who bought BYD Sea Lion 5 after six weeks, 2,500 kilometers, so brand new. This car suffers a major drivetrain failure.

It has to be towed back to the dealership. After weeks, the part needed to come from China. But the other problem is BYD said: as this is an early life failure on a low-mile vehicle, BYD does not consider this typical or expected behavior. It is not a pattern we have identified elsewhere in the sea lion population in South Africa. And so they said their international and local teams would need to investigate the root cause to try and figure out if this was an isolated incident.

Or that it needed broader attention. So here you have an issue, you take it to the manufacturer, and they say to you, Do you know what? We haven't seen this before. This is new to us, too. Yeah, I don't know about that, Dave. Look, the manufacturer, at the end of the day, they built the vehicle, okay? They've got an army of programmers, army of engineers. I hear them saying, Look, this is a first-time failure. But from what I believe is

They could not code the electric motor to the car. There was a problem in terms of coding, and because of that, they ended up giving the client their brand new vehicle. Now that vehicle will obviously get taken apart, investigated so that they can find out what the problem is, and then it there'll be some sort of recall on the models going forward if it's a systemic problem, and they'll address it and fix it that way. Look, these things do happen, especially with a brand new vehicle.