Commentary: No Free Lunch When It Comes to Parts
Rolf Lockwood
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Rolf Lockwood
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Counterfeit, will-fit, or knockoff truck parts remain a serious issue, and you should be concerned. There’s a difference between those three, but in the end, one old rule applies: You get what you pay for. And when you see a brake drum or a trailer light or even a wheel fastener that’s cheaper than normal, cheaper than it ought to be, your too-good-to-be-true antennae should be picking up a signal.
Some cheaper parts, usually made offshore in places like India and China, might well be worth your money, but this is definitely buyer-beware territory. And an out-and-out counterfeit is potentially a source of real woe, not to mention the illegal side of it that robs the legitimate manufacturer of rightful profit and can mar its good name.
If you’re doubting me here, just think about this: Hundreds of people have been killed over the years in air crashes blamed not on storms or terrorists but on “unapproved parts.” The Federal Aviation Administration keeps track of such things, of course, and as of a few years back it blamed nearly 200 airplane accidents on poor-quality counterfeit or knockoff parts that just weren’t up to the manufacturer’s design criteria.
The problem was big enough that the FAA established the “Suspected Unapproved Parts Program Office” to deal with the issue.
I know of one truck maker caught in this way, having bought wheel fasteners from a cheaper-than-normal source for use on its assembly line. The wheel nuts in question had been correctly marked, but metallurgically they were not what they pretended to be. They’d been bought offshore, in good faith of course, but the quality was sufficiently low that they caused a wreck and killed a four-wheeler in the process.
I happened to be in the plant manager’s office when he took the call, informing …Read the rest of this story
