What Kind of Auto Parts Is Your Insurance Company Going To Put On Your Car?
Car accidents bring a lot of headache. Whenever you get into a serious collision, there will most likely be the necessity for doctor visits, numerous calls with your car insurance company, and many people don’t have CA car insurance coverage for rental cars, so of course you’ll have to be doing all of this in someone else’s back seat. Think your done? You’re not. There’s one more thing to worry about, and you probably thought it was all taken care of.
You have to figure out whether you want OEM (original equipment manufacturer) parts to be used to repair your car, or aftermarket parts.
Is there any difference?
Car insurance companies and others who use the aftermarket parts claim that there isn’t much of one. It’s no wonder that they do such a job of promoting the good of aftermarket parts, considering that non-OEM parts are a lot cheaper than the OEM parts. As a matter of fact, they’re about half the price. Car insurance companies can play dirty about this, and often do. Normally, if you want to get OEM parts on your car, you have to pay the additional price. So if the aftermarket part costs $400, and the OEM part costs $800, you have to pay $400 of that OEM price. It can come out to a considerable chunk of change.
If you’re with a car insurance company that is considered to be on the expensive side, then you might not have any problem, nay, be encouraged to get OEM parts. However, most car insurance companies will give you trouble.
One of the big reasons to avoid aftermarket parts when you make a car insurance repair claim is that they make your vehicle’s value go down because you are putting parts that are not made for that exact vehicle into it. When you repair a BMW with a part that isn’t from BMW, it cheapens it. Therefore, if you want to sell it or trade it in, you’ll get less money, since dealers and even buyers often look into the background of the vehicle they are purchasing to see what parts it was repaired with.
The big problem is if you have a rental car. If you get a rental car repaired with aftermarket parts, you might lose most or even all of your security deposit. The reason for this is that with aftermarket parts it is considered to not be in the same condition as the one it went out in.
Some also claim that aftermarket parts aren’t safe. They say that these parts have not gone through the same safety crash tests as the OEM parts have, and thus cannot be trusted. However, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), one of the big crash testers, debunks this myth, saying that there’s no reason to believe that aftermarket parts would perform any different in crashes than OEM parts.
At the end of the day, you choose what parts are used on your car. If you are worried about saling or trading in your car for a good price, you might want to go with OEM parts. However, if that doesn’t bother you so much and you’re a little strapped for cash, it isn’t such a bad thing to go with aftermarket parts. But if you do choose aftermarket, you should the Certified Automotive Parts Association to make sure that it is up to standard. And remember, most of all, that the repair shops will ask you what kind of part you want. You have to tell them, or you have no right to complain.
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