The trucking industry has never been short on suppliers willing to sell you something cheaper. Cheaper materials. Cheaper components. Cheaper brakes. And today, cheaper than ever thanks to a flood of low-cost imports from China that have quietly worked their way into distribution channels, onto parts shelves, and underneath the [...]
If you’ve been in trucking long enough, you’ve seen this movie before. Foreign manufacturers flood the U.S. market with suspiciously cheap parts, domestic makers struggle to compete, and quality slowly gets squeezed out of the supply chain. Right now, this script is playing out in real life in the heavy-duty [...]
We build brake linings for a living. We know what goes into them, what it costs to do it right, and what corners look like when they get cut. So when we watch cheap Chinese friction material enter the American heavy-duty truck aftermarket with almost no regulatory pushback, it’s not [...]
Something is wrong in the American heavy-duty truck brake market. It’s something we’ve been watching build for years, and we’re done staying quiet about it. As one of the last independent brake rebuilders in America, we know this market, we know what quality looks like, and we know what it [...]
There’s a moment every truck driver dreads. Traffic ahead suddenly stops. A curve tightens faster than expected. A sporty little convertible pulls out in front of you. With little to no time to react, the only thing matters in that split second is whether the brakes work. Not the load. [...]
There’s a battle waging in the American trucking industry, but it isn’t a public spectacle. Nor is it something that's covered on the front pages. It just plays out quietly – one purchase decision at a time – in fleet offices and parts counters and online shopping carts across the [...]
Here’s a topic of conversation that rarely comes up these days in the heavy-duty trucking industry. There’s talk about price. There’s talk about brand names and part numbers and whether a brake fits a certain application. But rarely will there be a conversation about what’s inside the friction material – [...]
