Hi friend,

I was catching up with a good friend this week — she's a reader of this letter, so hi, you know who you are — and she mentioned, completely casually, that her husband bought his car online. Not from a dealer. On AliExpress. A BYD Leopard 8, ordered the way you'd order headphones, shipped to Dubai, cleared through customs, registered, insured, plated. All through the normal legal channels. It's probably parked outside their place right now.

And that's the second time in a week someone told me this. A viewer from Abu Dhabi left a comment on my last video saying people here buy Chinese cars straight from Chinese websites "without a second thought" — his words — because the same car often costs meaningfully less that way than at the showroom down the street.

Nobody in this story did anything wrong. The import was legal, the registration was legal, the car is legal. And that's exactly what makes it worth writing about: the system let a family in Dubai order a car from a marketplace in China and drive it a few weeks later, and the whole thing worked like ordering anything else online. Ten years ago that sentence would have sounded made up. So this week I'm pulling on that thread — what actually comes attached to a car bought this way, and what doesn't.

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Talk soon,
​Jamilia Grier

The Fine Print

When a car arrives through an official distributor, a bundle of arrangements arrives with it quietly. What I'm genuinely curious about is which parts of that bundle travel with a self-imported car and which don't.

Three things I want to find out:

How does the warranty work? Every new car comes with one from the factory. What I don't know yet is how it gets honored when the car lives 6,000 kilometers from the market it was built for — does the local network service it, does the buyer deal with China directly, is there a third path? I don't know, and I'd love to.

What does the software think? These cars are computers. A China-market car runs China-market software and expects a Chinese phone app. My friend's husband clearly has it working — so how much works fully, what needed workarounds, and how do updates find a car parked in Dubai? Possibly the most interesting question of the three.

Where does the data go? A connected car collects roughly what your phone collects. The official version sold here handles that data under whatever arrangement the local distributor set up. A self-imported one presumably handles it the way the home-market version does. Neither is wrong — I just want to know which rules apply to which car.

The price gap is real, people are doing the math, and the cars are arriving. I'm working toward a video on this — starting, if he'll let me, with an actual owner's answers to those three questions. If you or someone you know has imported one of these cars, hit reply and tell me how it's gone. I read everything.

For the Investors

Here's what self-imports tell you that sales charts don't: demand is running ahead of distribution. When people happily go around the official channel to get a product, the appetite is bigger than the pipe. For the Chinese carmakers, that's demand they aren't fully capturing yet — no local margin, no service revenue, no customer relationship. Which is exactly why the official partnerships in this region exist: they're the attempt to turn order-it-yourself energy into a channel someone owns. Watch whether official prices here start closing the gap with the import math. That number is the tell.

into the comment section

Comment of the Week

Shout out to @Lazyemirati, who put the whole story in one comment: everyone he talks to driving a Leopard, a Zeekr, a Xiaomi, or a NIO says the same sentence — "never other than Chinese cars ever again." That's the sound of a market deciding.

Leave a comment on this week's video — the best one gets featured here next Saturday.

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