What are your experiences with GM vs Napa Replacement Parts? Would you hesitate to use Napa parts on your Camaro, or are you comfortable with Napa's quality?

 

I'd use NAPA's high end stuff without hesitation,they're the only outside the factory supplier I trust.
Many auto repair shops use NAPA almost exclusively because they sell quality parts,shops don't like working for free so if they warranty their work they want good parts that won't fail.

 

There are several brands that I trust outside of buying directly from a dealer. I often use warranty lengths as a measure of a company's reliability. If a part has a limited lifetime warranty, that usually means that the company that made it is competent enough that their parts don't often need replacing. It also means that, if the part does fail, you get your moneyz back!

Many parts won't have that long of a warranty, regardless of the manufacturer. If you compare the manufacturer's warranty to GM's warranty for their part, that should be a good indicator.

 

I could not anwser this across the board. It all depends on the part. I don't buy standard GM brakes parts, Secondary ingnition parts, engine internals or most automatic trans parts. Of course there are exception to those rules. I also have no problem with some remanufactured parts. I will buy OEM. Remember GM makes very few parts. Most are made by other companies. When a manufacture is the OEM he has gone through all kinds of testing and reviews to make sure there is as few defects as possible for a resonable price. He will also have part testing inplace. OEM has all the orginal GM specs on how much the mating part are allowed to vary. Non-OEM need to make educated guesses.

Knock offs are just that. Someone figured out what they think the part should be and they make it. With some parts OEM is not important like a wheel bearing. If the OEM was SKF on a wheel bearing I would have no problem using a Timken bearing cause I trust Timken. I would not buy a wheel bearing in a white box that said "Bearing" on it.

I was a manufacturing engineer for OEMs of many parts. As a general rule once we design a high speed process for making a production automotive part it does not change over the life of the part. I have put parts in GM boxes and boxes heading for Pep boys on the same day off the same line. I will get more money from the Pep boys sale then I do for the GM parts but the GM parts will cost you 2 to 3 times as much as the pep boy ones. I just used pep boys as a example generally we sell parts to distributors.