Archive for December, 2008

The most important car in 100 years was the comment from James May, the host of Top Gear as he road tested the Honda Clarity. Not because of how it looked or how it performed, but the fact it was able to perform exactly like a normal family car for the same cost but deliver zero co2 emissions, was the bit that just blew him away. The Honda Clarity is an Electric family car, but rather than running from batteries, it has on board its own electricity generating unit delivered by compressed Hydrogen. The idea of recharging batteries and then using these to power a car will now be put in a draw with the rest of the “Seemed like a good idea at the time” file as the performance of this vehicle makes power generation far more convenient and usable.

The news that in volume, this car can be built as cheap and with compressed hydrogen currently as cheap as gas, it is likely that economies of scale and competition will drive costs, even further down. Of course taking away a whole fuel driven engine, together with the entire bolt on car parts, may mean that the car parts industry will change forever. In fact we may see electric engineers replacing motor engineers and electrical suppliers replacing engine manufacturers.

It’s worth mentioning that the motor that drives the Honda has only one moving part, reducing the chance of failure, compared with the hundreds of parts in a modern fossil fuel driven engine.

At the moment the Honda Clarity is only available in California for hire only, as they claim this is the only place that can support the running and development of the vehicle for now.

We often have discussions at CarSpareFinder regarding the relevant demand for car parts across all makes and models. Often the answer is based around how good our marketing against your demand for car parts for the car you own. There are some makes for example that have a reputation for good reliability from say BMW to Honda. Sometimes models of these cars don’t need replacement car parts either until they get to a specific age or have had an accident and are deemed as a salvage project. Of course we serve all needs here at CarSpareFinder.

But their is one make that seems to have a huge reputation for reliability, so much so that the makers Toyota have made an advert to promote the point with a bit of humour. So we ask you the question would you offer roadside assistance if you saw a Toyota broken down at the road, with a beautiful lady needing help?

Watch the video and enjoy.

As far as motoring news has been concerned recently in the USA, has been the talks with the big three car manufacturers with congress to get a so called $36b loan to save the American car manufacturing market. The big 3 are of course Ford, General Motors and Chysler, who’s presidents arrived in Washington to give their arguments, to receive American tax payers money to save their organisations.

Watching some USA news channels on the events are clearly different to here in the UK. One channel chose to criticise the Presidents of these corporations, claiming a lack of preparation to the talks and they should not assume that those outside of Detroit, had the same passion to save the industries as they did, as every State had their own job loss worries and why should car manufacturing be any different.

Another channel had polls of whether you would buy a car from a manufacturer who could go under, the results were pretty much half and half, some saying it was a way to save jobs, other were worried if they bought a car, there would be limited car parts availability and what would the warranties be, of there were no legal organisations to honour them.

What is sure is that even though Barrack Obama states, these corporations must not die the American public as a whole have just too many other issues going on, to consider this the only financial worry.

It is unlikely that the car parts for these vehicles will be in short supply as they are often manufactured by third parties, these smaller businesses are sure to want to sell these car parts to the general public. As for the warranties, well this is a different matter.

Over the last week I have been fortunate to send some time in Florida, unfortunately working with Mickey Mouse far away in my mind. During that time I spent time going form breaker yard to junk yard as they are called over there, speaking to owners on another matter.

The first thing to notice is that they do not have national or should I sat State operated car parts comparison sites like CarSpareFinder like here in the UK, yet without exception the phones in these places seemed never to sop ringing.  Many yards had guys sat at the desk with wireless headsets, answering one car part price request after another, constantly looking at their computer screens, with little time to speak to me. One reason for the excess phone calls must be the distances motorists have to drive to get their car parts from their so called local Junk Yards.

The good news is that most yard have inventories, they take time to enter their cars and parts to an online database that is shared by the breakers either State-wide or even local states. This means that even when they don’t have the car parts in stock, they had access to other yards database, which they would ring up, add their own profit margin plus shipping on.

Good news for finding the parts, but with 2 sets of profit added plus shipping, not exactly cheap. For many hard working Americans, this is the ideal solution, but for the guy who wanted parts for his 77 Cadillac, a $200 door just seemed too expensive, because it needed locating from a yard in Atlanta.

I wonder what would happen, if we had a system like CarSpareFinder out there, where customers could get prices of several car parts from several yards rather than prices with 2 sets of profit margin added on.

If you own a classic Datsun you may be interested in the following video. Before you start looking through the car part websites, you may want to consider repairing your cylinder head. This video on the Datsun 260 Cylinder head will show you the process of a rebuild. Enjoy and learn.

Do you have a young driver in the house who owns his first car? Well I do and was surprised that for Christmas this year he asked for some car parts. Well that was not exactly true, he in fact asked for an engine for his Nissan Pulsar. These are items that are just too expensive to buy new and this case too much for the value of the car.

It brings out the question why many don’t consider buying car parts as a Christmas present if it means the difference of getting that car off the drive and on the road. We are talking a Gift of practicality here, rather than that aftershave or games console.

Second hand car parts may appear to something trivial and almost embarrassing to buy as a present, but once you get over the stigma of buying second hand and start to understand the benefits, to can make perfect sense in many cases.

You are buying genuine parts that are often what the manufacturers use when building new, you still will get a warranty and in many cases the saving on new makes the purchase worth while, versus the value of the car. In my case the engine may have had to be imported fro the USA or Japan, but using CarSpareFinder and on Boxing Day, I am sure he will be borrowing my tools to fix it.