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The State of the Aftermarket
By: Scott Oldham
Date Posted 01-13-2005
Twenty-nine billion dollars is more than twice the gross national product of Turkmenistan and roughly three times what the U.S. government spends annually on AIDS research. Heck, it's even more than Kobe spent smoothing things over with the wife.
According to the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA), which is the trade organization for the automotive aftermarket, that mind-boggling figure is the annual take of its clientele and it'll be bigger next year. If in the last 12 months you bought custom wheels or a snazzy set of floor mats, or any other accessory for your ride, and chances are you did, part of that $29 billion was once in your bank account.
Yup, things are looking good if you're in the business of making stuff for cars and trucks everybody wants and nobody needs. The entire automotive aftermarket industry is built on the apparently irresistible and certainly irrational human desire to personalize the look and improve the performance of their cars and trucks. And it's that desire that fuels the purchase of a $22,000 set of custom wheels for a brand-new $320,000 Rolls-Royce Phantom, a $4,000 audio system for a Ford Focus or a $200 brush guard for a Ford pickup. Cha ching, $29 billion. It's capitalism at its finest, and it's a beautiful thing.
But this party does have an ugly side, and we're not talking about that obnoxiously loud lime green Honda Civic with the big wing your neighbor's kid fires up at 2 a.m., although we think that's ugly, too. We're talking about poor build quality and the fact that some of the stuff doesn't do what its manufacturer says it does. Things like body kits that don't fit properly and performance engine parts that actually decrease horsepower aren't the norm, but they aren't hard to find either.
This is nothing new. Snake oil salesmen and Fly-by-Nights have been around since hot rodding became a business after World War II. History proves the market eventually catches up with these rip-off artists, and weeds out the worst, but of course a lot of people get taken to the cleaners in the meantime. People like your neighbor's kid.
He really thought those 19-inch chrome wheels and huge tires would make his Honda faster. The salesman never mentioned the radical increases in stress the larger, heavier wheels would have on the Civic's spindly suspension and tiny brakes or that their extra weight will actually make the car slower, ride poorly and handle like a drunken school bus.
The good news is most of the stuff works, including 19-inch chrome wheels, which do a splendid job of delivering the Pimp look, a classic style that's gaining popularity in some markets.
Like anything else, it's all about choosing the right parts for the job. Choose wisely and a Civic can handle like a Ferrari. Choose poorly, and you might as well have climbed K2 and thrown your money down a large crevasse. Had your neighbor's kid done his research, he would have purchased a set of lightweight 16- or 17-inch diameter wheels and sticky R-compound tires. Then his Civic would really fly.
But making a car faster or handle better isn't always the goal. Some guys just want to stop traffic, which is OK, too. Then it's simply a matter of taste. One guy's pig is another guy's bacon. This car show crowd, which competes at indoor and outdoor events all over the country, can twist a car so many ways it's often impossible to identify what it started out as. Is that a Civic or a Buick? Then they stuff the interior with so many speakers and TVs, it looks like an orange Best Buy on four chrome 19-inch wheels. Sometimes you wish you could change the channel.
Beyond the eye-popping colors and the chrome engine blocks, these show cars are about exceptional workmanship and the beauty of pushing a concept to the absolute extreme. We've even seen cars with aquariums in them. Tropical fish and all.
Then there are the Tweeners. Cars that don't know what they are. They wear the right speed parts, but they're also weighed down with heavy speakers and clumsy-looking body kits. These cars rarely perform better than stock or turn heads at the local hangout. They don't appeal to either crowd. They're cars without a pure mission, cars that try to be all things to all people, cars with bad cases of schizophrenia. Their owners chose poorly.
Relatively new to the scene are parts for the high-end cars, things like wheels and body modifications for Bentleys, Ferraris and Lamborghinis. Until recently, messing with such machines would have landed you on "America's Most Wanted," but pro athletes and the heavies of rap music have made it commonplace. In fact, there are very exclusive shops and product lines that cater to just that clientele. You may have seen their work on MTV's "Cribs."
You know somebody's making money when the car companies themselves get into the act. Factory accessories like key chains and crate engines are nothing new, but now every manufacturer from Audi to Scion has its own line of custom wheels. GM is even selling flashy 20-inch wheels for its trucks. You buy them at your dealer and you can even roll their price into the financing.
Some automakers have taken things even further. Scion dealers stock cold air intakes and body kits, Nissan's new Nismo accessories line has a long list of cool stuff for the Sentra SE-R and 350Z and Dodge dealers will sell you almost anything to increase the performance of your turbocharged Neon SRT-4, including a Stage 3 kit that increases horsepower to 400.
And so the beat goes on. According to SEMA, the specialty equipment industry has grown 89.1 percent since 1994, and for the fourth consecutive year, 1,100 new automotive products debuted at the massive trade extravaganza called the SEMA Show. Held each year at the Las Vegas convention center and attended by over 100,000, the event is heaven on earth if you're a car freak, and pure hell if you drive a beige Corolla.
Right or wrong, Americans want 24-inch wheels for their Escalades, fenderwell headers for their '55 Chevys and their name on custom embroidered floor mats. They want nitrous oxide kits, superchargers and front mount intercoolers. They want their Subaru WRX to be faster than yours, louder than yours and fitted with a bigger rear spoiler than an F18 Hornet. They want foglights, lower suspensions, lift kits and bedliners. They want a TV in every headrest, carbon-fiber anything and an entire '32 Ford in box. They want boost gauges, cross-drilled rotors and tachometers the size of small children. They want strut tower bars, billet grilles, turbo kits, aluminum intake manifolds, drag slicks, wheelie bars, cargo nets, shift knobs and audio systems with enough bass to break glass. And more than anything, they want wheels, the bling, blingiest the better.
My fellow Americans, the state of the automotive aftermarket is strong. Strong like ox.
http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do...ticleId=104392
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That was a fantastic article.