OEM vs Performance or Aftermarket Parts

If you haven’t heard the term OEM before, it stands for Original Equipment Manufacturer, and it’s the parts that your dealer mostly sells. They are the parts that your cars manufacturer chose to you use when assembling your model of car. If this sounds a little bit confusing to you, don’t be. Your car was once designed and then it was someone else's job to find out how it can be built, within the budget of course.

Ok, so where are we going with this? The budget of making the car is not without limits, so the manufacturer lets other companies, like our local Cami plant for example to make one or more of the components. These part manufacturers send all the parts that the car is made of to the assembly plant to be assembled and turned into the car that you are driving. Therefore, these parts met the quality level required by the maker. So that is what an OEM part is, and it’s simply put “good enough” for your car.

So what’s an aftermarket or performance part? This is a part made by another company that replaces your OEM part with a part that is equal to or wait for it… better. So it’s gotta be at least as good or better, so why not give it a whirl? They are usually more affordable and can be found at places like Top Gear. And if you want to exceed your manufacturers specifications, we have those parts too.

Using parts that exceed your manufacturers specifications will not only increase your vehicles performance, or efficiency (depending on the parts you choose) but can also increase your vehicles life *when used and maintained correctly of course. That being said, aftermarket parts that are simply made better that don’t improve performance are just as common and are the parts that we tend to advise. We just can’t help ourselves when we start talking about performance. :)

Another thing worth mentioning is just like anything else in life, you can also buy cheaper and worse quality aftermarket parts, but if you come to us we won’t let that happen. It’s all about who your mechanic is and whether you can trust them or not. Some places that don’t try to build lasting impressions will sacrifice your welfare and sell you cheap and poor quality parts just to keep the tab low and impress your pocket book. So as always, be cautious when getting service done from someone you don’t know or trust.

Next time you have some car problems, come into Top Gear parts and service and our specialists will help your car, save you money and treat you in a, let’s say “aftermarket” kind of way ;)