I’ve often mentioned that I prefer to install original Toyota parts in my car, but this certainly comes at a price. Sometimes I’ve paid up to 4 times the cost of an aftermarket part that is otherwise considered to be good quality. There’s always this nagging question inside of me, though: is it worth it?
I once bought a front engine mount for my old Honda, and the holes for the bolts literally did not line up where the bolts were supposed to go. I had to use a long, thin file to expand the holes in the directions they needed to go before I could actually install the mount. Not only was this not fun, but it was also concerning, as I wasn’t sure if the part I was installing would even perform its job. How you can you trust something that wasn’t even designed properly to fit?
Several years ago on my current car, I had to change the vehicle speed sensor, which bolts onto the top of the transmission. I bought the part through a local parts store. When I went to install it, the plastic bezel that clicks into the plastic receiver was about 1mm too long, preventing it from clipping in correctly. I had to use a larger, flat file to grind this down so that it fit. Mind you, it’s been working just fine for 3 years now, but seriously?
However, Toyota sway bar links have a common problem: in order to bolt them on, there is no backing nut you can hold onto so you can tighten the nut down, there is only the space for a hex key on the front which can be used to hold it in place. But as the bolts tend to get pretty rusty, this key slot will very easy strip out, something I learned the hard way on 3 of the 4 struts when I changed them a year and a half ago (always research your projects before you start them!). For this reason, I would never install OEM: they self-destruct. And when you consider how easy they are to change, I really couldn’t care less if I have to replace them at $25-30 a pop every few years, but this isn’t a part that’s prone to failure, either. But what I don’t want to do is buy one of those crappy aftermarket links that have to be greased once or twice a year. If I see a zerk fitting, forget about it.
Oh, and while I’ve replaced most of the parts in my front suspension with OEM, and occasionally wondered if this was necessary, I did replace the struts with aftermarket, and with less than 10k miles on them, one side started going bad and making a thunking noise over bumps. When I finally verified this was the culprit, I was a bit exasperated to note that these were in fact aftermarket. It makes me want to buy OEM for everything, because failure at less than 10k miles is a joke. Seriously?!
Buying OEM is like buying Apple products: you generally get a product of higher quality, but not proportionally to the amount you spend. Apple has made a monopoly on its hardware, meaning it doesn’t allow “aftermarket” manufacturers to install its operating system on their own. This is what allows Apple to charge much higher prices. In a similar way, automotive manufacturers, as I understand it, have contracts with manufacturering firms for parts, but have a monopoly on those parts [most of the time], which allows them to charge much higher prices. Are those prices worth it to you? That’s the question. Maybe, maybe not.
It was funny to me when I changed my steering rack, which started with investigating whether the inner tie rods were bad. OEM inner tie rods are like $170, while the (presumably) highest quality aftermarket inner tie rods are like $45. But the whole rack was $650, so buying the two OEM tie rods would have been roughly half the cost of the entire rack! Before I realized the seals inside the rack were bad, I decided that $90 for the aftermarket was good enough: I really didn’t want to spend $340 on tie rods. In the end, I ended up with OEM anyway, but I think at something of a discount for getting the entire rack with them, so I’m not too hurt about that. Makes me wonder if, on older cars, it makes more sense to just replace the whole rack anyway, since those seals are going to go bad before too long. Oh, I know. $650 is a lot of money. But that was a fun project, and I can’t quite describe the intangible satisfaction of having a brand new, clean steering rack. I guess I’m strange like that.
But this is small stuff compared to axles, which is the real purpose of why I’m writing.
I’m not happy with my aftermarket driver’s side axle. It seems to be holding up well enough, but if you put the car on jack stands and turn the steering wheel back and forth, you can hear the pleats of the outboard boot rubbing. Not cool. And the boots on the original OEM axle on the passenger side are very worn. I’ve thought about rebooting them, but if the axle is the original, I have to question how much longer the joints are going to last.
Aftermarket axles do not have a good reputation, especially remanufactured axles. New, not OEM axles have a slightly better reputation, but many people on the interwebz have stated that it’s kind of a crap shoot: you either have a good experience or a bad experience. Not everything manufactured in China is low quality, but because wages there are so low, there’s lots of money to be made from even poorly manufactured parts, and this is what gives it a bad reputation. People are cheap, and want to buy things cheaply, so there’s a huge demand for dirt cheap parts. China is really good at filling that demand, so many parts are made in China. And it’s annoying, because as long as the part lasts for a few years, people don’t really care. America is swimming in a pool of shitty parts because that’s what they demand. Unfortunately, as I stated, OEM parts are a monopoly and are priced accordingly. You end up paying for “peace of mind” – a fluffy marketing term – more than anything else. But it’s often difficult to bridge the gap between the highest quality aftermarket part and OEM quality. And Aisin isn’t selling any aftermarket transmissions, I’ll tell you that.
Aftermarket axles for my car run $70-130 at stores and $40-80 online. OEM is around $500 for one side and $580 for the other side.
Oof.
What’s odd is that Tacoma and 4Runner axles cost less than $200 on the Toyota parts site, and those are much larger vehicles. I don’t know if those are OEM remanufactured axles (an odd category that occasionally exists), but $580 for mine?! What the HELL?
So there are two things here: on the one hand, it’s nice to replace a part and never replace it again. That saves time and hassle. That’s worth something. But it’s also true that if you’ve invested in DIY skills, these things become easier over time, and you should technically be more capable of performing a task a second time. I mean, what’s the point of having the skill if you aren’t going to use it, right? So in that sense, you should be able to replace a part two or three times, if absolutely necessary, as a result of buying a cheaper part. And this what really gets me when I think about whether it’s worth buying OEM if the price is 5x or 6x higher than the aftermarket price. Like…is that really worth it? 1.5x, 2x, easy decision: OEM, as even if you have to replace the part one extra time, the higher quality easily pays for itself to avoid that. 3x? 4x? 5x? Starting to feel the pain.
I tried to deep-dive some things on the aftermarket industry yesterday. See, aftermarket parts are difficult to track down: many brands actually source their parts from common manufacturers, and there’s a lot of rebranding shenanigans that happens which obscures everything. Fortunately, most parts stores, on their websites, list the manufacturer’s serial numbers, so you can use these to look up who the real manufacturer is.
Advance Auto parts sells a line of axles that is sourced from the manufacturing company GSP North America. Autozone’s Duralast line is sourced from Diversified Shaft Solutions, Inc. Napa’s in-house brand is sourced by TrakMotive, as is O’Reilly’s Import Direct line. Both Napa and O’Reilly sell remanufactured axles, which are sourced by Cardone. The OE supplier appears to be a company called TDF Corporation, and they don’t appear to sell anything to the aftermarket.
What’s odd is that there are many forum posts cautioning against Cardone remanufactured axles, but many forum posts extolling Cardone new axles. Most of the time, this was accompanied with an encouragement to buy from Napa, which apparently sold rebranded Cardone for its in-house line. However, when I did the research, the in-house line appears to actually be sourced from TrakMotive, not Cardone. What gives?
Well, Cardone was acquired in 2019 by a company called Brookfield, a global asset management company. And I’m guessing, and this is only speculation, but I’m guessing, that this asset company decided to try to milk as much as it could from the company by driving down quality and trying to float on the brand name. But because the quality decreased, Napa started getting a lot of warranty claims, until they decided they were done with that crap and switched to TrakMotive. You can still buy Cardone new on Amazon and RockAuto, but no major parts store uses their axles unless they are remanufactured, probably because that’s a difficult thing to do and they might be the only legitimate supplier of remanfuctured axles.
And this is what makes doing the research so difficult: these companies are competing on price, and the only way to do that is balance the price with longevity. You probably couldn’t stay in business making axles that last 10-15 years because people are cheap-asses and don’t want to pay for that: if it lasts 3 years, they won’t think anything about it. So you have a world of aftermarket axles that don’t have great quality. Companies get acquired, they change their names, new management switches the priorities, etc., etc. Famously, Craftsman brand was sold and started being manufactured in China, and many people swore that the quality went down. Just another sad case of a company milking a revered brand after lowering its quality. How true it is, I don’t know, but it’s a common strategy, so I have no reason to doubt it yet. My craftsman tools were from before the switch, I believe.
So I’m kind of torn. If OEM axles were $300, roughly 3x the aftermarket price, I would already have them. They’d be installed right now. No questions asked. But $500 and $600? That makes me a little queasy.
But why?
Well, like most Americans, being a cheap-ass is partly ingrained in me. Spending $1,200 on two axles is a drop in the bucket of what I’ve managed to save up over these many years, but spending $600 on one axle…I’m afraid of looking like a fool, honestly. “Look at this chump, paying all that money for an OEM axle! What a loser, I paid $100 for mine and it’s working just fine”. But then on the other side of things, I’m afraid of buying cheap now and regretting it if the part fails on me, or even just goes bad in a year, forcing me to wonder if I should have just bought quality the first time around and never had to worry about it again.
Fear, fear all around!
It is true that I now have far more time on my hands than I do money (from a budget perspective), so I have more than enough time to change things once or twice. It’s also extremely uncommon for even OEM axles to cost more than $400, so I really wondering if the quality is worth 6x or not – that just seems extreme to me. But man, it’d be really nice to just have that trust, if only I could get over the need to, I don’t know, prove to the world that I’m sufficiently ‘cheap-ass’ enough to call myself frugal, or something like that.
And that…is very interesting.
One of the dangers to writing a blog about money is that you come to identify with the subject to some extent. And this is not bad in itself, I love writing and thinking about this stuff. But it can be hard to separate yourself from that identity because you have something to “prove” about yourself. “Aha! I am very serious about saving money. Look at me save all this money! I’m so good with money”. But that’s not always true. I’m constantly learning, constantly refining or even wholly changing my mind about things. I don’t have all the answers.
The truth is, I could have bought a new car awhile ago, and there’s nothing wrong with new cars, but I didn’t. I could have bought a sports car, or a Lexus, or even a bubba truck. I could have spend $60k+ on some toy, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that, either. But I didn’t take that route. I stuck with a 10+ year old sedan. I’ve invested in learning more and more. In fact, I love learning more. And instead of buying these other things, I decided to take care of what I have by paying extra for quality parts. And sometimes…I question this, because it’s not the most “cheap-ass” thing I could do. Like, if I were more “cheap-ass”, would that make me more legitimate? Which is dumb, because my car is probably in better shape than most cars on the road, and I’m proud of that, but it doesn’t fit that image that so many people admire.
It’s like Scotty Kilmer, who was a YouTube personality even before YouTube. I like his channel, don’t get me wrong, but he has this particular shtick about having never spent more than $7k on his vehicles, but he’s only talking about the purchase price, not the parts and labor he put into them. He prides himself on being cheap, and he’s worked hard to stick to this image because…it’s the “image of the people”, so to speak. The moment you start living like a rich bastard, the plebes tear you apart, since you’re no longer “one of them”. Sure, socially competitive types tend to compete within their social groups, so you do have people buying flashy cars for this purpose, but you don’t build a large following by being flashy and expecting average people to think you’re something. I don’t know if I’m expressing this as well as I’d hoped, but I hope that makes sense.
All this to say, there are a lot of people who will think you’re a fool if you spend a lot on quality. And this doesn’t mean everything in your life needs to be quality, only that this way of thinking is ingrained in most people. Even in the church, to some extent and that is a big subject. But there is this idea that the most desirable thing is to spend the very least. And, philosophically, I don’t know if that’s actually true. But that depends on several factors.
What I’m trying to tell myself is that if I want to the assurance of quality I would get for buying OEM axles…yes, it’s expensive, but there’s nothing wrong with that. But then I wonder if the cheap axles are still “good enough” and maybe I just don’t know that yet. But both sides are being motivated by fear, hence the stalemate.
This post actually took a stronger turn than I expected. I need to think about this a little more.