Aftermarket ute trays: safety concern or industry smear campaign?

The car industry’s grubby little anti-consumer lobby group is at it again. So incredibly dependable…

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One of the fake-news images provided in the FCAIA’s press release, regurgitated by other so-called journalists.

The car industry is at it again with their so-called ‘Genuine is Best’ campaign, like a deleted sub-plot from Groundhog Day.

This time, it’s a good old-fashioned shit-flinging at the aftermarket manufacturers of ute bodies and trays.

This’ll be good.

Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) testing of two non-genuine utility tray bodies saw trays fail on several critical criteria. The aftermarket trays cracked chassis rails in durability testing, corroded rapidly in corrosion testing and were built with unacceptable weld quality.  There was evidence of the trays separating from their mounting points on the vehicles.

The Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries there; a leading anti-consumer lobby group in Canberra, which fellates politicians to bolster the interest of overseas carmakers. They’ve taken a grubby little swing at the local manufacturers of aftermarket trays for utes.

And, of course, the dogshit-dumb motoring press has lapped it up. (Including CarAdvice, Carsales, Choice and some relative unknown called AutoTalk - I guess you have to take what you can get).

The testing also revealed the non-genuine trays could damage the vehicle body and paint, and could cause suspension mounting failure, with the potential for the leaf springs to fall out. The chassis and suspension tune could become unstable, the tray could rip itself off and electronic aids like ABS and traction control may fail.

I’m surprised a plague of locusts didn’t appear. Or the frogs.

The FCAI is so audaciously confident in the veracity of its findings here, that they did not even mention the brands of tray tested. That’s confidence.

It’s the same level of confidence they showed in their ‘investigation’ - if you can call it that - and the seizure - if you can call it that too - of fake parts that kill >>

Have you ever noticed when there’s an actual product safety recall for a seriously defective product, say, a line of prams with shitty footbrakes, or - I dunno - rubber dogshit which catches fire or glass dildophones which shatter on insertion, the product safety regulator names and shames the brand or manufacturer, the name of the product, dates of manufacture and retail outlets?

The FCAIA has done none of this ‘transparency’ shit.

This is therefore not a public safety announcement, I’d suggest. It’s a hatchet job. And the target is the aftermarket industry, collectively. Again.

I would be very surprised indeed if I learned that those two trays were not very carefully selected - by engineering experts - on the basis of them being the worst aftermarket trays they could find.

I sincerely doubt they tested the best aftermarket trays… and there’s no word, of course, from them on the selection protocol. Make of that what you will.

If you’re in the market for a new ute in 2020, here’s my Ultimate Ute Market Buyer’s Guide to point you in the right direction >>

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Fright Vision

The grubs are calling it an ‘education campaign’. (Just like the last one >>)

But I’m calling it extreme lobby group bullshit. More extreme bullshit from them. It’s what they do.

“These parts might fit your car, but they aren’t fit for purpose. These parts can degrade a vehicle to total failure.

In many cases a cracked chassis means the vehicle you rely on is dangerous until expensive repairs are completed, if the chassis can actually be repaired.”

Spiros Katsigiannis. Image: LinkedIn

That’s Spiros Katsigiannis, a tame Toyota engineering bigwig in Melbourne. If you’re not from around here, Melbourne is basically Sydney, with better cafes, but shitter weather, no surf and no view. Oh, it does also have a road network not designed by wandering sheep, unlike the Knee of Syd.

So, here’s my first problem: We’ve apparently commissioned a Toyota wonk to investigate how well two aftermarket trays performed, compared with a genuine Toyota tray. Explain to me how this is not a world-class conflict of interest. It’s the exact definition of “conflict of interest”. FFS.

Perhaps, under this novel strategy, criminals should investigate crime, and the banks should run their own Royal Commission, paving the road for the Catholic Church to investigate George Pell.

Toyota engineers have (not actually) found fake ute trays remain defective even at night, thanks to extensive, exhaustive testing.

‘Toyota engineer reveals non-Toyota products are shit.’ Such a revelation. How could a group of grownups not decide this is a dodgy proposition before knocking it out there into the public domain?

In any case, lobby group arseholes should not purport to do scientific anything, in my view. They always get it spectacularly wrong. Scientific testing does not start with a desired outcome. Ever. It ends with a conclusion, based on how the cards fall, impartially. 

These lobby group dicks apparently did exactly the opposite of science, which is: cherry-picking the result, and making it happen. Then they tried to legitimize it with the trappings of being somehow scientific.

It’s malignant confirmation bias. And why a respected engineer like Big Souvlaki from Toyota would associate himself with this kind of bullshit, being the black hole of conflict of interest about which this dodgy campaign orbits, and knowing the spin lobbyist arseholes would put on it, that’s totally beyond me.

Speaking of bias, if they had wanted to evaluate tray design or suitability, why not get an independent lab to test the trays? Why not blind test them? As in, remove the branding, here’s test sample 1, 2 and 3, knock yourselves out, thus adding a veneer of actual scientific rigour to the process.

Below is some of the other engineering testing going on withing the FCAIA skunkworks…

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Apparently Toyota Hilux chassis can’t handle the torsional forces of an aluminium tray.

Trayed winds

This disgraceful industry fear-mongering campaign is a fully sanctioned attempt by the car industry to tar all aftermarket manufacturers of things like trays with the same bullshit brush - the one marked ‘unfit for purpose’. 

We’ve heard all this before >>

“Vehicle brands use crash test dummies. It appears some non-genuine parts are using you as a crash test dummy.”

That’s Tony Weber, FCAI CEO. SOS. FFS. Personal opinion: he never disappoints. 

Dear Mr Weber: There are no rear-biased crash tests, either officially, or under the ANCAP test protocols. Just saying. Manufacturers do use crash test dummies, certainly. I just can’t see how they would use one in designing or validating an aftermarket tray for a ute. Was that the best he could do? 

Tony can smell a fake bonnet from 10 clicks.

I’d love to see a crash test of a Hilux with a genuine tray loaded to three-quarters of its payload capacity with bricks or gravel, perhaps a concrete mixer and an oxy-propane cutting rig, couple of jerrys of petrol, towing a bobcat, at 64km/h straight into the offset deformable barrier. It would be most entertaining.

You’d need to find a Hilux with a DPF that wasn’t shitting itself, obviously. But I double dead-dingo’s-donger dare you to crash test a Hilux in this way. It’d be great. We could sit there, together, at some minimum safe distance, and hold hands. Perhaps we could all sing Ricky Martin’s Livin’ la vie da loca. I’d enjoy that. 

And afterwards, nobody would be in any doubt whatsoever as to why the death rate in utes and vans is relatively high.

Certainly, FCAI lobby group dicks can go out and cherry pick a couple of dodgy aftermarket trays to ‘prove’ (if that’s the right word) their bullshit vested-interest hypothesis that aftermarket trays are shit. And then they can issue a press release which the press - which has its head so far up the car industry’s arse it’s not funny - will lap up. Mission accomplished.

Meanwhile, back in reality, I suspect one could also find several - possibly most - reputable aftermarket trays which performed as well as (or better than) the genuine ones. As well as some which offered better features and/or greater functionality.

I’m not saying genuine parts are bad - they’re usually quite good. What I’m saying is: when you see this story reported elsewhere, assess for yourself whether the underlying motive for putting it out there is to protect you, the consumer, from some malignant influence, or is it just so that carmakers can put the squeeze on Aussie businesses making quality aftermarket parts here, onshore. 

I’d suggest it’s the latter, and this latest tacky exercise simply emphasises (at least to me) the grubby lengths that this organisation will go to, to push the automotive industry’s barrow.

I’m sure businesses like The Ute Shop, Norweld, MRT, HiDrive, Ironman 4x4, Silverback and many more would share an opposing view to the FCAIA here.

If you’re buying a ute for the first time, check out my virgin ute buyer’s guide >>

My two top recommendations for utes remain: Mazda BT-50 >> and Mitsubishi Triton >> based on reliability, affordability, customer support and practicality.

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Digging in dirt

These are the same arseholes who have steadfastly opposed the introduction of rollover protection regulations for quad bikes - despite the stark death and injury toll associated (six people a day in emergency departments).

50 per cent of people killed by ATVs are asphyxiated after being crushed beneath them following a rollover. That’s a 10-year average.

“Farmers reported that the uptake of CPDs was being impacted by the quad bike manufacturers’ negative public statements regarding the effectiveness of and purported risks associated with CPDs … the major barrier to adoption is the disputed arguments regarding the effectiveness of CPDs that continue in the public domain.”

That’s from a report by Dr Tony Lower and Dr Mark Trotter for the Precision Agriculture Research Group, in June 2012. In October last year, crush protection, which had been spearheaded by the ACCC, was finally legislated, with farmers getting two years to comply with the new rules.

That’s 26 more deaths on the house, in other words - and 4000 more hospital cases. Quite a bit of leeway - compared with, say, the current zombie apocalypse.

In my view the FCAI and the quad bike manufacturers have a great deal of blood on their hands over this. And, frankly, they seem callously unconcerned about it. In fact, they’ve been whinging about safety regulations it for years now >>

“There is no conclusive scientific evidence that CPDs (crush protection devices) improve safety. In fact, new independent data shows they can cause just as many serious injuries as they may prevent.”

That’s the FCAI’s chief ATV apologist (in my view) channelling the most reprehensible communications strategies of the tobacco industry, attempting to obfuscate the dangers of smoking.

The FCAI seems consistently unconcerned about your safety to me: in fact they’ve actively worked against safety rating tests >> carried out by University of New South Wales and Traffic and Road Safety (TARS).

And I must confess I have a latent soft spot for local fabricators. Because they’re a valuable economic resource. And a threatened species. Making shit here in Australia is hard. Because people don’t want to live in poverty. And this is something the car industry has proven beyond doubt it cannot do.

Nobody is subsidising a tray manufacturer with millions from the taxpayer. These dudes are toughing it out on their own. #respect

The zombie pandemic has proven to me how utterly reliant we are on fragile supply logistics stretching back to China, where manufacturing is increasingly outsourced because of the low cost.

It is therefore flat-out reprehensible, profoundly un-Australian and certainly against the national interest for the car industry to attack vestigial local manufacturers of anything - in this disgustingly cherry-picked way. Doing so is shameful.

If you actually wanted to make trays safer - great idea. Work with Standards Australia to develop a voluntary standard for ute tray performance. But of course the car industry would not do this because it would not shit-can the competition. Their objective is to become a cartel.

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See no evil

Far more dignified, I think, for the car industry to promote the benefits of genuine accessories - the factory engineering integration, etc. I’m fine with that, and manufacturers certainly jump through additional hoops to certify their accessories internally. They should rightly champion this.

But to shit-can competitors implicitly in this grossly underhanded fashion, using this so-called test - it’s completely unacceptable.

To Tony Weber, and Horst von Sanden, who runs the Three-pronged Suppository as his main gig but (in his spare time) sits at the head of the FCAI’s round table, not unlike an anti-consumer King Arthur (personal opinion) I’d suggest, with all due respect, which would be ‘none’, that struggling local fabrication businesses, currently beset by the zombie pandemic, under extreme commercial pressure, do not deserve a well funded, co-ordinated attack by professional arseholes.

The collective car industry in Australia is the FCAI. And thus the industry itself should be well ashamed of sanctioning this reprehensibly un-Australian conduct.

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