If you’re like many Americans and you’re feeling a bit of a pinch in your pocketbook, you may be tempted to try shaving a little bit off your yearly expenses by getting your Toyota serviced with cheaper, aftermarket parts. Well, my advice is, resist this temptation because you’ll only be hurting yourself when you cut corners on car maintenance.  Just the way that the country suffers when infrastructure maintenance is put off or is done with substandard materials, your Toyota car or truck will suffer if you install anything on it except genuine factory parts from a Toyota parts center. Although I don’t always get my car serviced at the Toyota dealer’s garage, I always insist on getting genuine Toyota parts from a reliable and reputable Toyota parts dealer. As the economy is getting worse, there are more and scam artists out there on the Internet and in the brick and mortar world. One of the tricks that sleazy garages and repair shops use is to charge consumers for genuine new factory parts when they’ve cut corners by installing either a used part, a counterfeit part, or a part from an aftermarket manufacturer that may fit on your car but isn’t built to the same exacting specifications as a Toyota part. When it comes to new and replacement parts for your precious Toyota car, truck, or SUV, don’t be bamboozled! Insist that your mechanic only uses genuine Toyota parts for your vehicle, even if you’re just going in to get your air filter changed. Personally, I’m pretty fanatical when it comes to buying only Toyota factory parts for the safety features on my car, such as the brakes, the lights, the airbags, the seatbelts and any other safety feature that I’ve failed to mention. Keeping your vehicle safe and well maintained isn’t just a good idea. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the only idea. Don’t mess around with inferior aftermarket parts, and don’t buy your Toyota parts from just anyone. Be sure you check out the store or website you’re ordering parts from. The number of counterfeit factory parts is on the rise, so you need to be vigilant. When you’re checking out a new garage or auto parts website be sure to check with the Better Business Bureau to see if there are any complaints lodged against this business or vendor. If you learn that there’s a consistent pattern of doing shoddy work or supplying substandard parts, then you need to take your business elsewhere.

It would be nice if everyone was honest, but unfortunately, not everyone is, and that problem seems pretty common in the auto parts and repair industries. Shady operators will assume that their customers don’t know much about cars or car parts and will try to pull scams on you, including deliberately damaging your vehicle during an inspection to make you pay for additional repairs to your vehicle that you didn’t need when you came in. Unscrupulous parts suppliers may try to swindle you with substandard parts that are advertised as coming from the Toyota factory, but were manufactured somewhere else from inferior materials under conditions that will practically guarantee they will fail before a genuine Toyota part would. You can be taking your life in your hands if you install counterfeit Toyota parts on your car or truck. It’s no joke! So take my advice and thoroughly check out the reputation of any garage you use, and be sure that you get your parts only from a reputable supplier of genuine Toyota parts. If you ask me, there’s no substitute for the world-renowned quality of Toyota vehicles and Toyota replacement parts.