Archive for the 'international' Category

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.

Because of the success of CarSpareFinder we have been looking to see if we could capitalise on other areas of the world. Of course we have to consider the USA and their car parts market out there. Of course they say “Auto Parts” and in fact so many other terminologies are different for example

Gas is Petrol

Hood Is Bonnet

Trunk Is Boot

Fender is Bumper

And many more examples from a country that we thought spoke the same language.

The car parts market in the USA is huge and is at least 6 times greater in size than here in the UK, but doesn’t just focus on cars parts but also spares for RV’S (recreational Vehicles), pick up trucks, (for many years the Ford f150 was the best selling vehicle in America) and of course before the recent petrol rise, most cars over there are far bigger than here back at home.

We are currently working on a plan that may see a car parts adventure in the USA, with us attempting to set up an American Auto Parts site, to see how things go. We do know that most used car parts over there are sold through Junk yards our equivalent of breaker yards, so the process is probably the same with shipping likely to go right across the States, but with different local taxes and laws within each State.

It is not a definite yet, as we still have along way to go putting you in touch with the sellers of  car parts in the UK, but it is on the drawing board, so watch you guys who have American cars and want to buy car parts from across the pond.