I stumbled across a post about the EQB recall here. My children's daycare teacher is leasing an EQB and will hit two years on Tuesday, 5/19, which is the threshold for Washington state lemon law. She was already quite unhappy with the car. She is not a native English speaker so I'm trying to help. Does anyone have any quick recommendations for actions to take?
All I see in subreddits like this are warnings to be cautious and use sourcing agents. My business is too small for that and I wanted to describe my experience of a positive outcome from a messy sample process. I reached out to 3 vendors for a custom wiring harnesses for an aftermarket automotive project (edit:typo). One (found through made-in-china.com based on existing similar products) has proven very competent and I ultimately ordered 200 units from them. It's not impossible that I could get scammed there but given their apparent very high competence (they immediately pointed out mistakes I made in drawings, developed a new equivalent connector with a third-party supplier, and made perfect samples that were better than what I drew), this would be an elaborate scam.
The experience I wanted to talk about here is what happened with the other two vendors. First, a lesson learned: on Alibaba I was also trying to contact vendors who already made similar products, but I was unfamiliar with the interface and accidentally created an RFQ. That was a mistake.
Still, I ended up weeding out lots of companies who had no idea what they were doing and paying ~$130 each including DDP shipping for a few samples from two Alibaba suppliers who seemed at least vaguely competent. They asked reasonable clarifying questions and seemed to understand my drawing.
However, the first samples from one were disastrous. They used two female connectors and a wire-to-board male connector mated to female where my drawing called for a wire-to-wire equivalent of the male connector on one end. They wrapped wire bundles completely wrong despite clear instructions. The sample looks like a mangled octopus instead of a Y-dongle as drawn.
They offered to fix it, but I already had perfect samples in hand from another vendor and had no hope of even vaguely useful samples from this company. They began asking clarifying questions that clearly should have been asked before samples were made.
I proposed that they refund me shipping and keep most of the sample fee for their time. This seemed like a win-win, where no one would waste any more time. My drawings weren't perfect so I had some responsibility. They rejected this solution for days, after many back-and-forths. I decided to just run out the clock. They had no way to make good samples before the invoice deadline without feedback from me.
Finally today, over a month after ordering samples, with 26 days left to ship, and about two weeks after I told them the sample they showed me was not correct, they finally agreed to refund me the shipping cost + $5.
tl;dr: found a good vendor; another Alibaba vendor made a monstrous sample and ultimately agreed to cancel the effort and refund me $42.31 (shipping + $5), so I'm only out $74.20 and no more wasted time on a hopeless vendor. The process worked. That's a cost I'm perfectly willing to pay for information about who to trust to make my product.