Spark Plug Question

There are a lot of counterfeit plugs. I would stick to dealership or solid/reputable auto parts place. The latter i find to be just a reliable and 30~40% cheaper (than dealership). I believe spec of plug is revised btw; check with dealership to verify: SC16HR11 is the revised plug, which is slightly hotter.

 

You can follow along in this thread here for more than you might have wanted to know about the counterfeit car parts situation. It includes, among other things, the link to an Australian study finding 60% of online-purchased spark plugs to be counterfeit. I haven't found the corresponding figure for the US, but the Australian figure is pretty sobering; your chance of getting fakes is better than flipping a coin. (If your buying choices are biased toward the lowest prices you can find, then you are likely further increasing your chance of getting counterfeits.)

What goes wrong with the counterfeits can be highly variable. Lucky is when they just don't last as long (say, claim to be iridium and aren't). Less lucky is when the electrodes or ceramics break off inside the cylinder.

 

And for something you do every 12 years or 120K miles?

 

I have never heard of a $10 part being remanufactured. I have replaced plugs once over two Prii and close to 400k miles and never had a plug induced missfire. So trying to save $25 on something you are not likely to touch again makes little sense.

 

If you are a AAA member, you can get about 20% off at NAPA autoparts which makes it only a few dollars more than any counterfeit plugs you might get off of eBay.

I just went through this after getting some sketchy Denso iridium plugs from an Amazon seller with high reviews. Returned them after going to NAPA and comparing the plugs side by side. It's amazing how close the counterfeit plugs are to the originals, but if you know what to look for, there are subtle differences.

Posted via the PriusChat mobile app.

 

Australia is very close to SE Asia where counterfeit parts thrive. That 60% number is likely way lower in the US... I've bought the cheapest plugs on Ebay a 1/2 dozen times and they've always been legit. Ebay sellers do everything they can to avoid negative ratings from buyers. If someone was actively selling counterfeit plugs on there they wouldn't be doing so for long.

 

eBay's ability to make that so is kind of limited by their own structure, though.

Yes, sellers are motivated to avoid negative ratings. But everyone understands eBay ratings to be a pretty noisy metric; nobody is sorting through how many negs are coming from customers who didn't like the packing or the seller's voice on the phone, and how many are because the product was actually counterfeit.

Next, when "sellers do everything they can to avoid" those negs, usually it comes down to sending the customer's money back and saying "hey, because I'm a nice guy, I won't even ask you for the merch back" (why would I want that counterfeit merch back anyway?).

And eBay's problem-reporting system officially considers that a completely resolved problem. If you've ever tried using their report-a-seller forms, once you answer 'yes' to "did they refund your money", there is no report submission possible.

So if a seller has an active practice of selling counterfeit merch and happily sending money back to the n% of customers who notice (which they can easily price in to the business model), eBay's only real way to discover that would be from a repeating pattern of the same kind of report from multiple customers. But that's a report that each affected customer is prevented from filing, because the seller sent their money back.

 

The ebay counterfeit sellers have costs around 10% of their listed prices. Many of them are now stocking in the US for fast delivery with slightly higher overhead since they have to pay USPS shipping. When confronted with a "not as described" claim they don't want to pay the much higher residential return shipping.

 

Sounds like you're kind of making stuff up as you go along? Why not provide a valid reference to back up all the claims you're making up? Specifically, ebay policy: "We don't allow counterfeit items or unauthorized copies to be listed on eBay. Items that bear a company's official brand name or logo can be listed, as long as the products were lawfully made by, for, or with the consent of that company." Counterfeit item policy | eBay

Also this article lists the 10 most common Ebay scams and there's no mention of counterfeit items:
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/5-ebay-scams-to-be-aware-of/

 

Did more of that in older threads, some reachable from links above.

Showing that they have such a policy on the books is kind of an answer to a different question. It would be pretty unthinkable for them not to have those words in their policies, but the question remains of what mechanisms they have for enforcing that policy at scale.

The enforcement part on that same policy page says "We may remove listings if we receive buyer complaints that the item is not authentic."

Which sounds great, but if you as a buyer have ever tried to submit any "buyer complaints that the item is not authentic", how far did you get?

What I wrote about the way their report-a-problem forms work is exactly the way they worked the last time I tried. That was a few years ago. If you are saying they have changed how those work since then, that's great. Is that what you're saying?

 

I got some "genuine Toyota" centre caps once. With some Dremel trimming I was able to get them to work, but definitely a knock-off product. I went to the listing, could find no way to make this known. I'm not that E-Bay savvy, but should it be that hard??

 

Sometimes the listing "Report" button is just off screen to the right depending on your device. One easy counterfeit clue is when the price is half or less of a dealer.

The following is an unsubmitted mock up with no direct knowledge about this seller's goods:

 

Remanufactured plugs can not be a thing?!

 

They probably us a glass beader to clean them up and make them look new.

 

Keep the old plug and bring it with you. Compare the writing on the plugs the color the clarity the intensity and the sharpness. And the look of the Iridium pads. Use a magnifier. China has hard time replicating all that.

I wouldn't buy a plug these days from anyone but a Toyota dealer. Buy online.