Remanufactured parts rant.....

Blofgren, I’m at about 170k clicks. Voltage regulators are cheap and fairly easy to replace. Seem like a common failure point in my recent interwebs searches dealing with this yesterday. Also seen a bunch of accounts of the vr spiking and killing other electrical systems.

^Rofl Shiner. Dodge dealer wanted $360 for a 5.9 water pump when I changed mine.
Told the guy I didn’t want it changed and a coolant flush too....He assured me the only labor I was paying for was for him to get off the stool and go get the part!

I know it’s marketing like anything else, for car parts, but I start recalling the movie Tommy Boy every time I have to buy an auto part!

Here is a another rant of some sorts about another reman part.

Years ago when I was a area sales rep, I was on location at one of my customers that needed a water pump on his Cummins powered 3500 at his shop over an hour away from my dealership. My company is a Cummins distributor and offer Cummins engines in the medium/heavy duty trucks we sell. I had the genuine Cummins pump in stock at my dealership, but it would have to wait for the following day to be delivered. My dealerships cost was around $40 for the pump and we sold it for around $60.

My customer needed it ASAP so I decided to call a local light duty Dodge dealership to see if they had the part. I gave the parts man the Cummins part number based on engine serial number and he crossed it to the Mopar part number. I almost spit out my coffee when he told me it was almost $200. Since this dealership was about 5 minutes away from where I was, I decided to take a look at this $200 water pump. I got there and it was in the same Cummins box with the same Cummins part number that I had on my shelf for $60, but with the Mopar part number sticker over it for $200.

I told him that my dealership can get this pump for around $40 and I assumed that they had to pay more through Mopar which us why they sold it for a much higher cost. Nope, the only got it for about $55. Of course my customer decided to wait for mine to be delivered after telling how much it would cost if I got it from the Dodge dealer.

I was a bit curious and decided to call another Dodge dealer to see if it was just this dealership that was trying to screw people. Nope, another Dodge dealer in the city quoted a slightly higher price than the other small town dealership did for the same exact part.

Same here. When I was running the shop, I had a ton of remand starter and alternator failures. Remans are fine for getting back on the road, but for my personal cars I just buy new OEM-grade parts. Worst one was the AC compressor on the van. Original got oil started from a tiny pinhole leak where a loose line rubbed the firewall. Went through a couple of remans before finally putting in a new Denso compressor. It's a big jump in price, but since you have to replace the filter/drier each time, the reman gets more expensive fast.

Couple years ago alternator in my 2001 Ford gave up 1500 miles from home. Picked up a NEW one at O'Reilly's in Gillette WY with a lifetime warranty. Working fine so far. You can bet they will get it back if I have issues.

I’ve had failures of reman Napa alternators too. I put a new (not reman) Bosch alternator in my wife’s 2005 Acura MDX almost 3 years ago and so far so good. I bought it from Lordco and the guy at the counter said they rarely see those come back but not so for the reman units. I paid about $100 more for it but I really don’t want to change it again.

I think my 2001 GMC Yukon is on the original alternator at 265k kms though........:(

Sadly have to agree. Napa used to be the professional place to go. Parts might cost more but they were the gold standard. Now they're junk like everyone else and the stores are often a mess and poorly stocked.
I guess it's what they had to do to compete with the other cheapo parts stores.

Yeah, not all remans are the same. It depends on their tier. For example, we carry Bosch starters and alternators in many of our locations, but branded under our own label. There are different tiers of products that Bosch offered us in our private label line from a very good quality that very closely meets production specs to lower quality products that did not replace everything and/or did not use as good of parts were used. Being that our private label is our "value" line meant to target price sensitive customers, we opted for a tier closer to the bottom.

We do have a premium private label line that uses tier 1 product meaning that it comes from the same factory and quality that the OE gets it from. It is the exact same part that you would get from the OE for considerably less which tells you how much of a markup the OE puts on these parts.

There is also a difference between a "production" spec part and an "aftermarket" spec part for many parts manufacturers. A production spec'ed part is what is sold to the vehicle manufacturer and an aftermarket spec'ed part is what is sold to the public. Generally, production parts have to meet more stringent quality standards(tighter bell curve) than aftermarket parts even if it is an OE part. This is why the stock OE parts on your vehicle will usually last longer than the very same OE replacement parts.