OEM Part's

[vizail]

Pardon my Ignorance but.

What OEM stands for?

Vic

[brcorp]

Short for original equipment manufacturer.

[vizail]

Than's

Vic

[RickM]

Here's some more reference info:

"OE, OEM and OES (Factory) Auto Parts

OEM (original equipment manufactured) and OES (original equipment supplied) many times are one and the same. OE, of course, is a more generic term that refers to the brand that came as original equipment on the car. Most auto manufacturers assemble cars from purchased components and manufacture only the sheet metal components.

Therefore, the "factory part" you can buy from your dealer was most likely made by another company, sold to the car maker and then resold to the dealer for ultimate sale to you.

An important point many people are unaware of is the fact that multiple OES brands are not only normal but are actually mandated by international standards as part of the qualifications for ISO certification. Car manufacturers must have secondary sourcing (i.e., multiple suppliers) for certain types of parts in order that any problems with one supplier will not disable the car manufacturer's production and allow for substitution of the other brand for new production and any warranty replacement or repairs.

As an example, the original VDO pump may be interchanged with the Bosch unit with equal performance, the ZKW foglight may be interchanged with the Hella unit or the Norbbitt brake rotors replaced with Zimmermann....

Often OEM and OES companies cannot release OE parts for "new" cars into the aftermarket (because of licensing agreements) until a few years have passed. This restriction allows the car maker to recoup tooling costs, build in repair revenues for the dealers and justify larger OEM production runs to keep costs down.

....

The true "aftermarket" part is one that's been copied from the OE part. In many cases, this is done to offer a lower cost alternative. But in most cases the benefit of the lower price is far outweighed by its major disadvantage - it's usually an inferior product and ends up costing you much more in the end in avoidable repairs.

There are, of course, exceptions to this rule as car makers try to reduce assembly costs by going to lower cost alternatives on parts that wear out and routine maintenance parts."

From
http://www.***************/html/auto_parts_shopping.html

IMO, aftermarket parts can be of less, equal or better quality. They will also include high-perfomance replacemnets that may be far superioir to the original part.

For body parts:

Both Hansen and Van Aken use only aftermarket crash parts certified by the Certified Automotive Parts Association (CAPA). CAPA was established in 1987 as a non-profit organization designed to develop and oversee a testing and certification program for parts used for auto body repairs. Last year, CAPA certified over 2.5 million parts. Though statistics vary, they received between 985 and 1,200 complaints on those parts.

Despite the relatively low number of complaints, both Hansen and Van Aken expressed dissatisfaction, and in some cases, distrust, of CAPA parts. Hansen, though he said he has seen aftermarket crash parts that fit very well, described CAPA certified parts in general as "categorically, not as good as OEM parts. They're improving, but they're in general not as good as OEM parts." Van Aken, alternatively, said that he might desire aftermarket crash parts more if the CAPA certification "lent more credibility."

http://www.asashop.org/autoinc/jan99/collision.htm