The Modern Auto Parts Market: A Data-Driven Analysis of Online vs. In-Store Sourcing

In Pomona, California, under the September sun, a 1941 Willys pickup was being celebrated. Bathed in a deep blue paint job by Mick’s Paint, its polished chrome reflected the crowd. The truck, a project started by the late Bob Bauder and completed by Veazie Bros. Fabrication, is a specimen of meticulous engineering. It features a blown and injected LS3 motor, a custom-fitted ’46 Chevy truck bed, and an interior by Ron Mangus. For this, its owner, Larry Jacinto, was awarded 'World’s Most Beautiful Truck', a title that came with a $12,500 prize.

In another part of the country, in courtrooms and boardrooms, a different kind of automotive story was unfolding. First Brands Group, a critical supplier of the very guts that make vehicles run—brands like Fram, Raybestos, Autolite, and Cardone—was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The filing listed liabilities somewhere between $10 million and $50 billion.

These two events, occurring almost simultaneously, are not unrelated. They represent a fundamental and increasingly dangerous disconnect in the automotive industry: the widening chasm between the gleaming, high-visibility spectacle and the corroding, low-visibility infrastructure that supports it. One is a beautiful story. The other is a balance sheet. Only one of them is predictive.

While the Industry Watched the Chrome, the Numbers Bled Out

Anatomy of a Failure

The financial distress at First Brands Group was not a sudden event; it was a slow, measurable bleed-out visible to anyone watching the numbers. The core metric here is Days Beyond Terms, or DBT, which tracks how late a company is in paying its bills. In the auto parts industry, the average DBT sits in a relatively healthy range of 9 to 14 days.

By June of 2025, First Brands Group’s DBT had ballooned to 55 days.

Let’s be clear about what this figure represents. It is a mathematical signal of profound operational distress. It means the company was, on average, nearly two months late on its payments. The problem compounds. By February 2025, the situation had deteriorated further. Over half of its bills—to be more exact, 57.45%—were more than 91 days past due. I've analyzed hundreds of corporate filings, and a DBT figure like this isn't just a red flag; it's a distress flare, signaling a critical loss of liquidity. For a financial analyst at Creditsafe, Ragini Bhalla, the conclusion was simple: Chapter 11 was the company's "only option."

This isn't an abstract corporate drama. First Brands is a keystone supplier of OE aftermarket parts of car for an enormous swath of the vehicles on American roads. When you search for `car parts near me` to find a filter, a brake pad, or a spark plug, the odds are high that the component originated from a First Brands factory. They produce or license replacement car parts for everything from Ford parts to Toyota car parts. The failure of such an entity doesn't just ripple; it creates a tsunami through the supply chain. Independent repair shops, the lifeblood of vehicle maintenance for most consumers, will face shortages. The result is an inevitability: longer wait times and higher repair costs for everyone. The infrastructure that keeps daily-driver sedans and work trucks running is now demonstrably fragile.

And this is the part of the report that I find genuinely puzzling. The broader industry pressures are well-documented, from increased material expenses to U.S. import tariffs on components from China and Taiwan. These are not secrets. Yet the public-facing narrative of the automotive world, as exemplified by the Pomona show, remains focused entirely on the chrome.

Ignoring the Arithmetic for the Anecdote

The Signal and the Spectacle

John Buck, the owner of the event’s production company, described the truck show as a place for "amazing trucks, SUVs and vans of all kinds under one roof." He is not wrong. The craftsmanship is undeniable. Bob Matranga’s 1968 Chevy C-10, which won the Chip Foose Design Achievement Award, was described by the designer himself as “bitchin’.” It is a perfect artifact of its subculture. But here we must perform a methodological critique. We are measuring the wrong thing.

The health of an ecosystem is not determined by the condition of its most prized, exotic specimen. It is determined by the stability of its foundational elements. Celebrating a $100,000+ custom build while one of the primary suppliers of basic car parts for sale collapses is like admiring the penthouse garden of a skyscraper whose foundation is cracking. The Willys pickup is beautiful, but it is an outlier, an anecdote. The 55-day DBT of First Brands is data. It is the signal.

The Pinstriper Charity Auction at the show raised nearly $20,000 for the Volunteers for Veterans Foundation. This is a commendable outcome. But it also serves as a useful point of scale. That $20,000 is a rounding error against the low-end estimate of First Brands' liabilities (a stated liability range between $10 million and $50 billion). We are celebrating thousands while a system valued in the billions falters.

The discrepancy exposes a dangerous blind spot. The enthusiast world, with its focus on aesthetics and performance, creates a powerful narrative of innovation and health. But this narrative is entirely disconnected from the brutal economics of mass-market parts manufacturing. The person who needs a new set of Raybestos brakes for their Honda Civic to get to work doesn't care about the custom Ron Mangus interior in a show truck. They care about availability and cost. And the data shows, with clinical certainty, that both are about to get worse. The stability of the system that serves the many is being sacrificed, or at least ignored, while we applaud the bespoke creations available only to a few.

A Failure of Measurement

The core issue is a failure of measurement. We are tracking the wrong metrics. The headlines are dominated by auction prices and design awards, while the crucial data—supplier payment terms, logistics efficiency, materials sourcing stability—is relegated to trade publications and bankruptcy filings. The story of the 1941 Willys is a celebration of what is possible. The story of First Brands Group is a warning about what is probable. One is aspiration; the other is arithmetic. In the long run, arithmetic is undefeated.

Reference article source：

• O’Reilly Auto Parts 2025 Grand National Truck Show selects ‘World’s Most Beautiful Truck’ - Old Cars Weekly
• Auto Parts Supplier's Bankruptcy Spells Potential Trouble for Loads of People Who Own a Car, Truck, or SUV - MotorTrend