It’s a common practice that car manufacturers will use suppliers to provide many of the components that go in their cars. Things like alternators, fuel pumps, radiators, etc. are made by an independent company and they will be the Original Equipment Manufacturer. But if you’ve ever shopped for parts, you’ll find that the same part is available under many brands. Bosch may have been the OEM for your fuel pump, but you can find compatible pumps made by many other suppliers.
How do those other suppliers know the specs for the parts that they didn’t make? Do they get one and reverse engineer it? Or does the car manufacturer provide the detailed specs? Some things would be easy to figure out from reverse engineering (where the bolt holes go), but internal and intrinsic capabilities would be harder to get right from just examining the part itself.
Reverse engineering is one way; another is that some parts are actually quite standard. Yet another is that the parts made by a non-OEM supplier may have some specs which are identical to the original and others which are not: measuring a piece is a lot easier than figuring out its exact composition, and there are many uses for which the exact composition isn’t really needed. And yet another is by being the subcontractor of the subcontractor of the subcontractor of…
in addition to what Nava said, a lot of times once a car/part is out of production and the OE no longer supplies factory service parts, they’ll sell the tooling and production hardware to another company to make parts. This is also why every so often you’ll see e.g. motorhomes and UPS trucks with headlights and taillights which are recognizable from a production car.
Like it is in the medical device world, there is likely a process for a car manufacturer defining an approved supplier, and that would include the manufacturer providing the specs. That process would be manufacturer-specific. Other than approved suppliers, other suppliers may use the same specs, if they could get them, or they can definitely reverse engineer the part.
I have a car that is 54 years old, and many parts on the market are reverse engineered. It is left to “tribal knowledge” to know the good suppliers from the bad. Being active in the car clubs is valuable for this reason.
ETA: ninja’d by Nava and jz, and they’re saying similar things.
Another possibility for some of what you may be seeing is re-manufactured parts. Companies obtain returned or salvaged parts, clean them up, test them, remove the OEM markings and re-sale them.
I work for an automotive supplier and I see our parts all the time with our brand mark removed, and occasionally someone else’s brand added. Most of the time there are features that I recognize that indicate the part definitely originally came from one of our plants.
I have also seen some of our parts only marginally modified and marketed by a 3rd party as ‘performance’ parts for 10x markups. Often the modifications are only cosmetic compared to what we sell to the vehicle plants.
Reverse engineering of original ideas is mostly illegal in Aus.(Unlike the USA) However, most car parts embody no original ideas at all: Everybody knows what they do: apart from that, they just have to fit.
And many times, those different brands all came off the same production line in the same factory – just put into boxes with different labels. That’s a fairly common sales technique.
One of my clients was a paints factory. One day we had a meeting with the research people and one of them walked in chortling to herself. Her boss asked her what’s up. The samples a client had sent asking them to reverse-engineer, and that she’d asked to handle because they looked familiar? They happened to be her designs, part of a new line. The client had scrapped them off somebody else’s product and, not knowing what was the source, sent them for reverse-engineering to that very source.
Of course they didn’t tell the client that. Custom orders were more expensive than catalog, what with the need for reverse-engineering… (where is my :halo:?)
So for the parts that are reverse engineered, what’s the process for that? Do they buy a car, remove the part, make their own, install it, and try it out?
We don’t really ‘reverse engineer’ any parts, but we keep up with what the competition is doing. There is no need to buy a whole car. Someone just walks into a dealership and buys a part. We are very careful not to step on any patents or steal anything, you just have to be aware of what the competition is doing. And because we are already in the business, we have all the tools to test and measure the part without a car.
I’m not sure how common reverse engineering is in the auto-parts business, except for maybe very old (greater than, say, 15 years) or classic cars. For any part, we are generally the only supplier of that specific part, no other companies make the exact part, and the vast majority of the parts are sold directly to the car manufacturer or one of their sub-suppliers. A small (comparatively) volume of parts are designated ‘service’ parts. Service parts wind up in dealerships or retail parts stores and are sold to the final customer under a variety of brand names in different boxes, but its all from us.
The economics just don’t really support ‘reverse engineering’ except for a classic car or something very niche. The margins are razor thin in manufacturing, and you’re just simply not going to make any money by investing in the facilities, equipment, engineering, etc, only for the aftermarket… and if you’re going to sell to the vehicle manufacturer, they are going to make sure you have the engineering specifications and requirements to be able to make it without any reverse engineering.
I can’t say anything about testing, but as for taking cars apart to study parts, there are companies that specialize in disassembling a car, measuring it, cataloging it, then selling the data to other companies.
And, of course, we all do that ourselves, too. Every time someone tells me to look at some A8 teardown data, though, I wonder what they’re looking at that we’ve done that they envy?
Does that mean that 3rd party parts are not usually tested in the car itself? I’m sure they do some standalone tests of the part in the factory, but it sounds like they bring parts to market without ever having installed it in the vehicle to ensure it works properly.
It seems Ive seen parts for my cars that look a bit different from the original it replaced. I assume (correct me if Im wrong) that replacement parts are often approximations that will fit several cars. For example, if a part has to be fitted on a bracket, the replacement part will be designed to be interchangeable, and will match either bracket.
Sorry to cloud the waters. I meant ‘we’ specifically. Certainly a 3rd party that has their own design would have some on-vehicle testing, whether they buy a car or contract it to a niche company that does it for them.