Tis all the news... Lots of links to it on google.

Lots of people think its nothing and they will recover, but if you look back at Apexi's bust a few years back, they were never the same company afterwards, their skunkworks , "AP Engineering" was dissolved and with it a lot of new innovation and products, along with lots of contributions to some pretty famous one off cars, like scoots 4 rotor, ap did the power FCx2 configuration for them. Their event sponsorship has fallen off alot as well. They also narrowed back their parts coverage to only things that made them decent profits.

Talking to some friends pretty deep in the Japanese tuning shop business, some are doing ok, some are starting to hurt.

The main reasons seem to be :

1) High fuel prices

2)Globally produced knock offs

3)increasingly tighter emissions and fuel standards on new cars

4)Mail order bulk parts houses

Discuss.

The money crunch, fuel prices, etc, etc... the list goes on places like greddy are going to have to change their business model and with that their target customers. No longer is high volume on tight margins going to be feasible. It's going to be low volume with huge profit margins, why? Because the only people that going to spending the money on greddy type parts are gonna have enough money not to give a **** about prices both fuel and parts.

your list looks pretty good.



id say here locally its a little different



1) cars too old!

2) the people that own them now, are n00bs and buy

3) chinese knockoff crap

4) and then dont have gas money either



dont see too many modded rx8's, likely because you cant put a muffler on it, and make 20more hp

I've seen this coming for a while now.

actually one other key thing is the police. kalifornia is basically ocupied territory, its gotten better lately (cause theres no moneys), but my s13/14 peeps get pulled over and hood popped regularly. anything that doesnt look stock to the officer goes to the smog referee.



so if you have an SR20, or even just a stock car, you get screwed.

Greddy and the likes, operate in a different reality than companies here, and people over there have a different mindset. The Japanese really don't mind paying for quality parts, and they are fiercely patriotic when it comes to national brands. It was always a luxury to just have a car in Japan, since ownership costs so much there, but the big jumps in fuel costs by global crude price increases, and the added taxes this year by the government just proved to be the tipping point for a lot people to part with their weekend hobby car, which alot of Japanese had, and those cars were rx7's, supras, evo's etc etc.

The reality over there is as well, the public transportation systems is so damn good, you really don't need a car.

I dunno about the low volume, high profit scenario, low volume increases production costs, so your product just gets knocked off by someone that is willing to sacrifice quality and or operates in state with a lower business tax regime. The small specialty tuning shops are on that model currently, and look what happens to their product, it gets relentlessly knocked off by someone willing to make an inferior product to an equally cheap captive audience, and we all know who that is.

People complain about the cost of Japanese parts, but really, their stuff is a bargain for the amount of handcraft effort that is put into.

Moving stuff offshore is no guarantee either, lots of American companies have done that , and are taking a beating because their product has become junk, and now European and Japanese products are preferred even though the cost is higher. It often pays to do something expensively once, than cheaper 5 times I guess..

Its a funny global economy right now for sure.

Myself, I turn over the product to see the label, if it says Mexico or China on it, I don't buy it, if I actually have a choice in the matter. Not that my one man consumer protest really does any good but it helps me sleep at night.

my friend just put an ls1 into a volvo v70 wagon (super easy swap btw), and the water pump went bad (along with a bunch of other stuff on the motor)



ac delco water pump is $200 wholesale, and made in china.



thats expensive cheap crap!

well other than their titanium exhausts their products lately at least for rx-7s have been fairly average....now i need to go get one of their racing 3.75" titanium exhaust on clearance! https://www.nopistons.com/forums/pub...R#>/tongue.gif

Let me say this.



**** name brands (for most things). There's no reason an exhaust or CAI should cost so much... I never pay name-brand prices when I can but a cheap knockoff, usually of just-as-good quality, for half the price. Oh, but the R&D costs! Well, let me tell you, I made my own CAI for my Focus for <$40, including the filter. Why is an aftermarket one $200+? It's a ******* tube. It wasn't even hard to figure out the routing. My DD's exhaust, a stainless, mandrel bent, 2.5" cat back exhaust, cost me all of $212.. SHIPPED! Some name-brand ones were twice that. For what? What kind of R&D is necessary making an exhaust?



Engine internals, oil and fuel system components I won't **** around with though, as there actually IS a lot of R&D invlolved in that, and a failure could be catastrophic, even possible fatal.

dont worry dude, with thinking like yours there will be no more companies making quality products, THEN all the cheap people will have to make thier own crap.



Who knows maybe one day those cheap crap people will come out with thier own line of crap just to have someone else copy it and make it even cheaper!



You buy and think cheap- you get cheap PERIOD



Dont worry how much R&D and marketing costs go into something, keep buying from ebay people who dont have to pay payroll taxes, property taxes, unemployment taxes, business taxes, liability insurance, cost of going to trade shows, advertising, etc..

all they have to pay is the measly ebay fees while they operate out of thier basements selling on small margins because they have no overhead to cover and dont have to pay anyone with half a brain to come out with new products.