Re: Fram oil filters good enough?
As a manufacturer I can assure you that it is all played on a profit/loss spreadsheet. If an inferior part can save a company 200000 bucks and the increased warranty costs are just 100000 dollars be assured that part will be in that product.<br /><br />Tires on a car are a great example. The OEM tires on a car are almost never the best tires for that vehicle. They are typically noisy, are not particularly durable and if you look at trends, are supplied by one maybe two manufacturer's. Ford now uses continental on almost all their vehicles. It used to be Firestone. Continental is now the best tire manufacturer? Why does GM use Goodyears?<br /><br />As for bulk packing filters to the big three for original installation, the savings could be as much as 5-8%. For those of you who haven't heard the term, it is called accountant driven engineering, and it is for real.<br /><br />Companies are driven by the quarterly sales report and the stock price. The three and five year relationship with the customer is not what they are concerned with. The CEO is only as good as his last quarter and if it is ugly, it all runs downhill. The customer is the one at the bottom. Quality is job one is a slogan not an operating principal.<br /><br />When the liability of cheaper parts outweighes the profits, this includes lawsuits, scratch one vendor off the books. See Firestone lawsuit. It was the ford spec right? Why did ford put it off on Firestone and vice versa. How about all the recalls that occur. These are typically spec'd parts that occured during a CIP. (cost improvement program)<br /><br />Most every component can be improved. Brakes, tires, injection systems, sound insulation, exhaust, stereo, steering, suspension, hardware. Our vehicles create emotional attachments, but they are commodities to the mfg, nothing more. GM would stop making cars tommorrow if they could make bikes and boost profits and the stock price. Sad but true.<br /><br />This is not to say that the vehicles are poorly made or designed but do not underestimate the profit motive. Does anyone remember the pinto, vega, citation, omni/horizon. The Japanese came along and handed the big three their head's on a plate. Remember the chevy tracker is made by suzuki, then why apply a chevy name? It's cheap. Does GM have control over all suzuki's vendors and design changes/modifications, that occur on a weekly basis?<br /><br />All I am saying is don't get caught up in the OEM hype. Some OEM replacement parts are better than the ones they put on the vehicle off the line. Why might that be? 10 bucks on 250,000 units and guess what you have? 2.5 million dollars right to the bottom line. Plus the cost adder for the replacement parts. 10% on 50 bucks is 5, 10% on twenty bucks is 2. What a deal. It is not that they don't care about their customers, they just care about their stockholders more.
