Truck parts and car parts are necessary to keep vehicles running and especially older models. What if the parts were not there when needed?

Obtaining truck parts to keep vehicles going has never been a problem in recent history. That's especially true for pickups from the major American brands. Whether new or used, you can get what you want, usually quickly and cheaply. It may not always be so...

Here's why.

As the big car companies go bankrupt and cut back, one of the results is closure of parts manufacturing facilities. These massive factories were set up to produce high volumes of parts at low prices. As the volumes produced dropped, the plant economics looked worse and worse and finally the plants are closed. This has happened quickly and in many locations. Likely more closings are to come.

Simple solution is to just buy the parts somewhere else, right?

The question is: where is the somewhere else?

See, these closed plants required massive investments and were filled with special purpose equipment that is being cut up and scrapped as you read this. This equipment and these capabilities do not exist elsewhere.

What's more, the knowledge of how to make many of these pieces no longer exists outside of the locations that are being shut down. Plus, there's more...

The documentation that describes the manufacture of many service parts will be lost as plants shut down. It may be transferred to another location. But the engineering required to evaluate the manufacture of service parts and prepare for manufacturing in small volumes will not be done? How can that be?

Easy... Engineering staffs are being cut to save money and nobody has time to evaluate masses of information about how to make and supply small volumes of service parts for old vehicles.

What's the result? Who knows, but likely higher prices for parts for older trucks that are still very serviceable. Then eventually, parts will disappear for perfectly good, fairly late model vehicles. Talking about a waste of energy, scrapping perfectly serviceable vehicles for lack of spare parts will cost untold amounts of energy to replace those vehicles with newer ones.

It's an interesting problem that will become more obvious fairly quickly and is an open door for innovative suppliers who can make truck parts in small volumes at moderate prices.