It's a known fact that car parts are expensive. We've been reading all your over-the-top love letters and we feel your poverty-stricken pain. We know all about the long, endless hours you spend slaving away on overtime, packing away the dollars you so desperately need. But, what if we were to tell you that you could find a set of brand new TEIN springs for sixty bucks, a GReddy blow-off valve for only twenty-five bones and a TRD oil cap for fifty cents? Would that grab your attention? We know it got ours.
If you spend any amount of time on the amazing techno-innovation known as the Internet, you'll find yourself swimming through a sea of car parts. A simple search with the words "TEIN" and "springs" returns more than 235,000 website hits. Now, unless TEIN has ramped up manufacturing to near-Nike levels without letting us know, some of those vendors aren't really selling the right springs. That is, if they're actually selling products in the first place, and we don't mean out the back of an unmarked van.
The nature of marketing and branding is not lost on the automotive world. Distinctive shapes, colors, logos and designs make the products of certain manufacturers easy to spot, and easy to remember. The hard part comes once your product hits the market. A set of uniquely colored baby-blue springs can help you set the world on fire, but you can't stop someone else from making their own baller blue springs. Piracy though, is the point at which an exact copy is made, or when a product is passed off as another company's invention.
Thousands of parts are sold each year bearing strangely hilarious and slightly unoriginal names such as CWest-style, Greddy-style, and K&N-style. The resemblance to the real product is often uncanny at 50 feet, but obviously inferior at two. For some buyers, it doesn't matter that these products don't have any real research and development behind them, and that their only design mantra is the almighty bottom dollar. Besides, when you don't have any money and you want to go fast, a $5 air filter starts to look pretty damn good.
But all is not what it seems on the surface, and one must be careful. Would you risk damaging a $7,000 car by using a $5 part? $7,000 isn't exactly pocket change, and no car is ever so cheap, that it can be considered disposable. So be wary out there, it's a jungle of crappy products, and you don't want to be tangled in that mess.
Real R&D
The most obvious, main purpose of any car part is plain and simple function. You buy a shifter bushing because it says it'll tighten up shifts, and when it arrives, that thing better shift like butter. That's why all the best parts on the market are rigorously designed and tested, undergoing multiple revisions before hitting the market. Computer-aided design is just one of the tricks used by such manufacturers as Stillen, Cosworth and Brembo. Skunk2 Racing takes it one step further, using a multi-axis robotic arm to take precise measurements of every car that undergoes development.
TEIN USA's R&D department disassembles and tests each new suspension before it hits the market, often tailoring spring rates and damping curves specifically for the US market. Even air filters such as the venerable K&N six-layer cotton gauze unit and AEM's more recent DRYFLOW filter design didn't just spontaneously pop out of a Chinese manufacturing plant. They were designed, redesigned and then redesigned again to make sure they were the best that they could be.
There's a reason that the products of certain companies are duplicated for sale, they work. Development of a part is not cheap, but it ensures that the product will do the best job that it's designed to do. Knock-off parts are often just cheap imitations slapped together by slave children with shackles around their ankles, and that's not real R&D at all.
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