Chinese Car Parts by VIN: Which Catalog Covers Which Badge

Why this problem appeared so suddenly

China exported a record 1,037,000 vehicles in a single month in mid-2026, around 75% more than the same month a year earlier. Chery shipped roughly 180,000 units in May and BYD about 156,000, which between them is close to 40% of everything leaving the country. Chinese brands took nearly a tenth of Europe's new-energy market in the first quarter.

Numbers that size arrive in workshops long before the trade has learned the catalogs. A shop in Mexico City, Warsaw, Istanbul, Bangkok or Sao Paulo now sees badges that did not exist in its market four years ago, on cars still young enough that everything is a first-time job. The knowledge gap is the whole opportunity: the shops that can quote a Jaecoo as confidently as a Golf are taking work from the ones that send it away.

Start with the group, not the badge

European and Japanese habits teach one badge, one catalog. Ford is Ford. Mazda is Mazda. The Chinese groups do not work that way, and this single assumption wastes more time than anything else in the process.

Chinese makers launch sub-brands the way European makers launch trim levels. A group will create a badge for export, another for its premium range, another for off-road, another for its EV line, and run them all on shared engineering with shared numbering. Omoda is not a manufacturer. It is a Chery export badge. Look for an Omoda catalog and you find nothing; open Chery and the part is there with a number that has been sitting in the system since the car was built.

The badge-to-catalog map

This is the reference most people are actually looking for. Find the badge in the bay, read across to the catalog that holds it.

• Chery: Chery, Tiggo, Arrizo, Fulwin, Exeed, Omoda, Jaecoo, Jetour, iCaur, Luxeed, Karry
• BYD: BYD (Dynasty and Ocean ranges, so Han, Tang, Song, Qin, Yuan, Seal, Sealion, Dolphin, Seagull, Shark), Denza, Fangchengbao, Yangwang
• Geely: Geely, Emgrand, Coolray, Atlas, Starray, Monjaro, Galaxy, Geometry, Zeekr, Lynk & Co, Livan, Radar and Riddara, Farizon
• Great Wall (GWM): Haval, Tank, Wey, Ora, and the Poer, Pao and Cannon pickups
• SAIC: MG, plus the related Maxus and LDV commercial range

Two group members that are not on group data

Geely Holding owns Volvo, Polestar and Lotus, and this trips people up in a specific way. A Volvo is not in the Geely catalog. It has its own system, VIDA, built and maintained by Volvo, and that is where its parts live. Polestar and Lotus sit outside the Geely catalog too.

The connection is still worth knowing, because it runs the other way. Lynk & Co and several Volvos share the CMA platform, which means real hardware overlap under the skin. When a Lynk & Co number is superseded or backordered, the equivalent Volvo assembly is sometimes the faster route to the same component. That is a cross-check, not a fitment rule, and it belongs in the catalog rather than in a hunch. The two numbers agreeing on dimensions and function is what makes it safe.

The L rule is breaking, and that matters

Every guide written before about 2024 says the same thing: a Chinese vehicle has a VIN starting with L. The first character is a region code under ISO 3780, and L is China, so the rule was reliable for as long as these cars were only built in China.

They are not any more. BYD opened its Rayong plant in Thailand in July 2024 with capacity for 150,000 cars a year, started production at Camacari in Brazil on the first of July 2025 on the site of a former Ford complex, and has plants running or coming at Szeged in Hungary and Manisa in Turkey. Chery builds in Spain through the Ebro joint venture in Barcelona. MG has been assembled in Thailand for over a decade and in India since 2019.

So a BYD Dolphin can carry a Thai VIN beginning with M, a Brazilian one beginning with 9, or a Hungarian one beginning with T, and every one of them is a genuine BYD. Concluding a car is not Chinese because the VIN does not start with L is now a straightforward way to open the wrong catalog. Read the whole VIN and let the catalog tell you what it is.

The plant matters for a second reason. Locally assembled cars are specified for their market, and the divergence shows up exactly where you would expect it: lighting, glass, cooling packs, emissions hardware, and any bracket that changes with a different fuel tank or a different battery supplier. A part number pulled from a Chinese-market listing for the same nameplate is a coin toss.

How Chinese part numbers are built

These numbers look opaque until you know they are following a national convention, and then they become the most readable numbers in the trade. Chinese part numbering derives from a standard system where the leading block names the vehicle system rather than the model. Once that clicks, a number tells you what it is before you look it up.

A few groups you will meet constantly: 1109 is air intake and filtration, 3501 is front brakes, 3701 is the generator and charging side, 3801 is instrumentation, 8202 is mirrors. A Great Wall number like 3501100-K00 announces itself as a front brake component, then identifies the application in the suffix. If you asked a supplier for a front disc and the quote comes back starting 3502, you are looking at a rear part and the conversation is over in four seconds.

Chery inverts the emphasis and leads with the platform. T11-3501080 reads as platform, then system, then item, so a Tiggo brake part is legible on both axes at once. Geely leans on longer numeric strings without an obvious separator, and MG numbers are usually a plain eight-digit block, with older MGs still carrying Rover-era numbers from the marque's previous life. BYD generally prefixes with a model or platform code before the system digits.

None of this replaces the catalog. What it buys you is the ability to sanity-check a quote, spot a transposed digit, and tell at a glance whether a listing on a marketplace is even in the right neighbourhood.

Same nameplate, different car

Export naming is a marketing decision, not an engineering one, and the mismatch is wider here than anywhere else in the industry. The BYD Atto 3 is a Yuan Plus at home. The Seal U is a Song Plus. Names get reused across platforms, retired, and revived for a different vehicle two years later.

It runs deeper than a rename. A group will sell one nameplate in two markets on two different powertrains, and occasionally on two different platforms, because the export version was engineered for a market that wanted a hybrid where the domestic car is a pure EV. Everything downstream of that changes: cooling, mounts, wiring, the entire high-voltage layout in some cases.

Which is why the VIN, not the name, is the only input worth trusting on these cars. On a fifteen-year-old Corolla you can get away with model and year. Try it on a Chinese SUV whose nameplate is four years old and has already been through two facelifts and a powertrain change, and you will be buying twice.

Why the free route runs out here

For an old Passat, the free path works. Aftermarket cross-reference sites have had twenty years to compile fitment data, forums have documented every variant, and a dozen retailers will confirm a number for nothing.

None of that exists yet for a car launched in 2024. Aftermarket catalogues are compiled from years of accumulated fitment records, and there are no years yet. Marketplace listings for Chinese parts are largely copied from each other, which means one early error propagates across hundreds of listings and starts looking like consensus. Forum threads are thin and often describe a domestic-market car that is not the one on your ramp. The manufacturers themselves publish little publicly outside their dealer networks.

So the factory catalog is not the preferred route on these vehicles. It is usually the only route, and that is a real change from how the trade is used to working. The gap will close eventually, the way it closed for Korean brands over the 2000s. It has not closed yet, and the cars are already here.

The EV layer underneath

Several of these makers are EV-first, and BYD more than any of them. That moves the critical parts into the high-voltage system: battery modules and their thermal loops, inverters, on-board chargers, DC-DC converters, and the contactors and fuses that make the whole thing safe to work on.

BYD is worth singling out because it manufactures its own cells, its own power electronics and much of its own semiconductor content rather than assembling bought-in modules. There is no independent supplier network behind those parts to fall back on. For an internal-combustion car you can usually find an OE-supplier equivalent to the dealer part. For a BYD traction battery module you generally cannot, so the catalog number is the entire answer.

The practical consequence for a workshop is about scope rather than sourcing. Correctly identifying which module has failed, and what else the factory ships with it as a set, decides whether a job is a service item or a job you refer on. Guessing at that in front of a customer is not a position anyone wants to be in.

The badges nobody covers yet, and what to do

Being straight about this matters more than the sales pitch. Five catalogs cover a large majority of what is exported, and they do not cover everything. Changan and its Deepal, Avatr and Nevo lines sit outside them. So do Dongfeng and its Voyah, Forthing and Nammi badges, FAW with Bestune and Hongqi, plus JAC, Leapmotor, Xpeng, Nio and Li Auto.

If one of those is in the bay, the honest workflow is different. Decode the VIN to establish the exact build and plant, identify the assembly by its system group digits, and work through the importer or the brand's regional distributor, who does have catalog access even when the public does not. Take the number they give you and check it against the physical part before it goes on the invoice.

Coverage moves as these groups formalise their export operations. It is worth rechecking rather than assuming a brand is permanently absent, but nobody should buy a subscription today expecting a Leapmotor catalog to be in it.

What this looks like on a good day

The Jaecoo from the top of this page takes about four minutes once you know the map. Jaecoo is Chery, so you open the Chery catalog rather than searching a badge that has no catalog of its own. The VIN resolves the build, including which market it was specified for, which on a bumper assembly decides sensor apertures and the trim that clips into them.

The exploded diagram then does the part people forget. A front bumper is never one part number. It is the cover, the absorber, the reinforcement bar, the brackets each side, the grille and its surround, and roughly a dozen clips that are single-use and will not be in your drawer. Quoting the cover alone and discovering the rest on strip-down is how a profitable job turns into an apology.

That is the whole argument for catalog access on these cars, and it has nothing to do with being thorough for its own sake. It is that the alternative, on a vehicle this new, is guessing.