When you hear the word aftermarket, you might think of the workshop down the road where you take your car after its warranty runs out, or perhaps a specialist that tunes imported Japanese cars. Perhaps you think of the technician with a tow-truck that dragged you out of trouble that time the car wouldn’t start, or you think of the accessory shop on the edge of town with a window display that’s always oddly filled with cheap plastic wheel trims.
All of these examples are true, but there’s much, much more to the aftermaket. Across the UK, the sector employs more than 350,000 people, and apart from the 25,000- odd general independent garages and one-make specialists, there are tens of thousands of people employed in the complex supply chain of parts and tools. Plus, there are more people than you might think working in component manufacturing, as well as in software engineering.
Every market town has an industrial estate somewhere with three or four trade-only motor factors, usually locked in deadly competition with one another, while that battered-looking accessory shop probably delivers the majority of its orders directly to local garages and is likely a member of a much larger (and possibly international) parts-buying group.
Behind the scenes
Despite this, it would be wrong to suggest that franchised dealers, if not the vehicle manufacturers themselves, don’t work with the aftermarket. In point of fact, your local main dealer may use the aftermarket more than you realise, particularly for jobs that require a lot of specialist tools and knowledge or, crucially, jobs that would fill a ramp in the dealer’s workshop that could be more profitably used to carry out routine service and repair jobs.
Complex diagnostic jobs, where the dealer’s expensive scan tool doesn’t provide a conclusive answer, will often be farmed out to a local specialist. (Tip: odd wiring faults are more often than not down to nesting mice chewing through the loom. There’s no fault code for that.)
Glass replacement, which now often include recalibration of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), is regularly done by a specialist third party, as are minor body repairs and some other ‘problem’ jobs, such as pulling and testing diesel injectors.
Block exemption
However, the vast majority of work in the aftermarket takes place away from the dealership. The right to have your car serviced and repaired where you choose is known as BER and has been a right hard won by the sector over decades.
Under BER (correctly known as the Block Exemption Regulations 461/2010), you can have your new car serviced outside of the dealer network. It must be done by a “competent person” working according to the manufacturer’s service schedule and use parts of “matching quality” to the originals. The manufacturer is obliged to provide access to repair and maintenance data, both from the car itself via the diagnostics port and to your garage’s computer tool, using tech known as pass-through.
