According to information presented by MacKay & Company at Heavy Duty Aftermarket Dialogue in January, the average life cycle of a heavy-duty clutch and transmission in 1982 was 171,000 and 182,000 miles, respectively. Last year, those two life-cycles had more than doubled and tripled, MacKay & Company says, to a staggering 391,700 and 585,900 miles.
And aftermarket parts life cycle improvements aren’t limited to those specific components, either.
MacKay & Company says the average mileage for diesel engine overhauls during that same period has grown from 276,000 miles to astonishing 771,000 miles. Even heavy-wear parts have seen improvements, MacKay says, as brake shoes and oil filters have seen their life cycles grow by 45 and 35 percent since 1982.
The advancements in the lighting market have been equally impressive, says Mack Gregory, OEM/Aftermarket sales manager at Peterson Manufacturing.
“With LEDs we now have lights that are now lasting 6 to 10 times longer than incandescent bulbs used to, and in some cases it can be even longer than that,” he says. “There are lamps in the market now that can outlast their electrical connections.”
And those improvements haven’t been missed by customers, says Bryan Martin with 4 State Trucks.
“The quality today versus say 12 to 14 years ago is just night and day,” he says. “With so many of these [aftermarket] manufacturers being ISO certified and using such stringent quality standards, the quality of their products have really, really improved.”
The impact these life cycle changes have on a distributor or supplier’s bottom line can be found through simple arithmetic. Truck owners don’t need replacement parts as much as they used to.
But while component sales per unit are down, suppliers say that doesn’t mean overall sales volume numbers need to drop.
Like the life cycles of the components inside them, the number of Class 8 trucks on the road today — MacKay & Company says there are nearly 3 million — also are at an all-time high.
And more trucks means more new sales opportunities, both with existing and new customers.
Just because a lot of trucks have one piece of equipment doesn’t mean they all have it, says Steve Hansen, director of corporate accounts at Minimizer.
“You would think at some point everyone would have every part they need, but this industry is not like that,” he says. “The cycle is always turning.”
But that moving target hasn’t stopped Minimizer and its distribution network from striving for total market coverage, Hansen adds.
“We are not even close to total market saturation,” he says. “We’d love to saturate it, but at this point we’re still not close.”
Suppliers also note that even if a customer doesn’t need to replace a product due to breakdown, that doesn’t mean they’ll never need another one.
“For us, we want a truck owner to buy a heater when he buys a truck, and then when he sells that truck and gets another one, he buys another heater for that trucks as well,” says Josh Lupu, director of marketing at Webasto.
Adds Hansen, “We usually don’t see people take [fenders] off one truck and put them on their next truck. That’s great customer loyalty, but that’s not really the way customers act.
“Most of the time that first set [of fenders] will remain on the first truck and then the customer will buy another set for his next truck.”