The workshop Oman's electric cars were missing.

Five things, all of them electric: high-voltage battery and drive-unit work, programming and software, mechanical, body and paint, and insurance repair. The one that surprises people is programming — a car brought into Oman privately arrives with menus, maps and charging profiles set for another market, and putting that right is software, not spanners.

Because we repair before we replace. A battery pack is the most expensive thing on the car, and a great many packs written off as dead have a handful of bad cells and a cooling fault behind them. Working at cell and module level is slower and needs better equipment — it is also the difference between a repair bill and a new pack. Muscat is humid and sits on salt air; an hour inland at Nizwa the heat is dry; up on Jebel Akhdar it is cool enough to need a jacket. A pack driven over one weekend can see all three, and each of them stresses a different part of it.

Whether you are bringing a car in or looking at an EVS franchise, the starting point is the same conversation: what the car is doing, or what the market needs. Owners reach us from Muscat, Seeb, Barka, Sohar, Nizwa and Sur, and the mobile unit covers the Capital Area.