Where parts

Video showing the savings from Green Parts – good for the earth, good for your wallet, good for your vehicle.

A regularly-appearing automotive industry news magazine program – produced by the National Independent Automobile Dealers Association (NIADA).

At this years Business Innovation Factory, Local Motors CEO, John Rogers gives insight into his company and how to fix the American automobile industry.

As a major part of the auto body, auto glass takes up about 3% of the gross mass of the vehicle. Auto glass is mainly used in the new vehicle manufacture market and the maintenance market. Therefore, the demand of auto glass is closely related to the production, sales and reserving volume of vehicles. In 2009, the sales volume of the global auto market reduced by about 4.2%. Influenced by the global auto demand decline, the growth rate of the global auto glass industry is slowed down. Nevertheless, the steady growth of the vehicle retain volume provides a huge development space for the auto glass after-sales market. The global auto glass market is highly monopolized. Asahi Glass – the world largest glass manufacturer – occupies over 1/4 of the shares on the auto glass market. Moreover, giants in the glass industry (Saint-Gobain, Nippon Sheet Glass, etc) also occupy a large part in the global auto glass market.

In 2009, Chinese auto production totaled about 13.79 million, rising by 48.30% YOY; the sales volume came up to 13.64 million with the growth rate of 46.15% YOY. In 2009, China surpassed USA for the first time to become the global Top market of new vehicles. China is one of the few markets in the world that maintain growth in the financial crisis.

With the high-speed development of Chinese auto industry, the demand volume in Chinese auto glass industry increases with the average growth rate of 20% annually. In 2009, the scale of Chinese auto glass market exceeded 70 million m2.  Read more...

The increasingly strict requirements of various countries on auto exhaust emission propel the development and production of auto oxygen sensors. In 2009, Chinese production and sales volume of vehicles totaled 13.79 million and 13.64 million, rising by 48.30% YOY and 46.15% YOY separately; both ranked the first globally.

However, different from foreign sensor industries, Chinese auto sensor industry does not have a complete industry chain. Chinese auto parts industry has begun to introduce foreign technologies and production equipment since the 1980s. However, parts produced by these technologies and equipment can only meet the requirement of small-batch and low-end auto models. As auto sensors are second-level parts for whole vehicles, they can only be used for the whole vehicle production in the form of systems. They will be imported along with electronic engine control systems to China. Chinese local oxygen sensor industry is on low technological level with insufficient market strategies. As a result, the sensor market for Chinese auto OEM production is occupied by transnational enterprises like Bosch and Denso.

Nevertheless, in the auto after-sales service (maintenance) market, many clients will choose oxygen sensors of small and medium enterprises considering the price and some other factors. Because of the application of universal plugs, a small variety of universal oxygen sensors can replace large quantities of original oxygen sensors.  Read more...