Factory Parts versus Aftermarket Parts

Toyota, Lexus, Subaru and Honda make good parts, and that’s what we want to use. Our biggest suppliers of parts are the Toyota, Lexus, Subaru and Honda dealerships. Our next biggest supplier is a company that sells us the same parts made by the original suppliers to these manufacturers.

The result is that the vast majority of the parts we use either come from the manufacturer direct (through a dealership) or from the original suppliers of the factory parts. To give you a Toyota example, Nippon makes Toyota’s fuel filters. The Nippon fuel filters look identical to the Toyota filters, and in fact, if we care to peel off the strip of black tape that Nippon has applied to the filters they sell us, underneath the tape is the original Toyota parts sticker with its Toyota part number.

It’s the exact same part whether we buy it from Toyota or from Nippon. Same way with clutches. A company with the name Aisin/Asco makes clutches and water pumps for Toyota.

They used to sell those same parts to us new, in a Toyota box, at a price competitive with the same thing remanufactured from Toyota. There wasn’t any question in my mind—I preferred the new to the remanufactured.

Since then, Toyota has prevented them from selling those parts in Toyota packaging, but the parts still have all of the same casting marks and look identical, except the water pumps have had the word “Toyota” ground off and replaced with other company markings.

Again, I have a strong preference for factory parts. I’ve just seen too many poor quality alternatives. As a side note, it’s not an uncommon strategy for some aftermarket suppliers to offer a lifetime warranty on their products. This is strictly a marketing tool and usually seems to have no relationship to the quality of their product. Over and over I’ve met people who have gotten stuck with poor quality parts that repeatedly fail prematurely, and eventually they would get worn out with doing repeat repairs and decide that the better quality factory part was the better deal after all. Other times the lifetime warranty was handled in such a slippery fashion and it was so difficult to manage their way through the hurdles set before them that the lifetime warranty was effectively a lie.