Originally published on Medium.
More than 211,000 counterfeit automotive parts were seized by U.S. Customs in 2024 alone, which is nearly double the year before. Federal agencies issued emergency safety warnings in 2025. The parts most likely to be fake are the ones your life depends on most: airbags, brake pads, and seatbelts.
You just bought a new car, or had yours serviced. You drove off the lot feeling safe. But here is something the dealership almost certainly did not tell you: the automotive parts supply chain in the United States has a counterfeiting crisis severe enough that the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration issued a federal safety advisory specifically warning consumers and repair shops about the surging distribution of fake safety components. These include airbag inflators, airbag modules, seatbelt pretensioners, and other supplemental restraint system parts that are, under the hood, virtually indistinguishable from genuine components.
The numbers behind that advisory are alarming:
- 211,000+: Counterfeit automotive parts seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in 2024, which is nearly double the prior year.
- ~500: Shipments of counterfeit airbags intercepted at U.S. borders in a single year, with each shipment potentially containing hundreds of units.
- $2.2B: Estimated annual global loss to counterfeit automotive parts, a figure that represents only documented cases.
- 81,000: Vehicles in Michigan alone repaired following airbag deployment in two years, with each representing a potential opportunity for a counterfeit airbag installation.
Enforcement agencies routinely estimate that for every shipment seized, many more pass through undetected. They enter the supply chain through online marketplaces, unauthorized distributors, and repair shops that have no reliable mechanism to verify the authenticity of the parts they install.
The part that should concern you most is the airbag, because it is the component you are most likely to never think about and least likely to ever inspect, right up until the moment you need it to save your life. The Automotive Anti-Counterfeiting Council, a nonprofit comprising 11 of North America’s leading vehicle manufacturers, has been explicit: counterfeit airbags will fail to deploy correctly. Not may fail. Will fail. Testing conducted by A2C2 member manufacturers consistently finds that counterfeit airbags closely resemble OEM products in both appearance and packaging. However, they either fail to deploy at all in a crash, deploy with incorrect force, or in some documented cases contain unapproved explosive devices that detonate unpredictably. California’s Bureau of Automotive Repair was moved to develop emergency regulatory proposals specifically addressing airbag safety after the scale of the problem became impossible to dismiss.
“Counterfeit airbags will fail to deploy correctly, highlighting a life-threatening risk. Within the last two years, an estimated 81,000 vehicles in Michigan alone were repaired following airbag deployment. Each represents an opportunity for a counterfeit component to be installed.”
— Automotive Anti-Counterfeiting Council (A2C2), 2026
Brake pads are the second category that should keep you up at night. Genuine brake pads are engineered to precise friction specifications, which supply the exact force required to bring a vehicle traveling at speed to a controlled stop under specific temperature and load conditions. Counterfeit brake pads are made to look like genuine ones, but they are not made to stop your car. Independent testing has found counterfeit brake pads filled with compressed cardboard, plastic fillers, and in some cases basic sawdust. These materials perform adequately under light braking conditions and disintegrate catastrophically under emergency braking loads. A fake ball joint, which is the pivot connecting your steering system to your wheels, can snap when you hit a pothole or take a sharp turn. When a ball joint fails at speed, the driver loses steering control instantly without any warning.
The Parts Most Commonly Counterfeited and What Happens When They Fail
- Airbags: Fail to deploy in a crash, deploy incorrectly, or contain unapproved explosive devices. Federal agencies have issued emergency safety advisories. California is developing a regulatory prohibition on the installation of non-verified airbags.
- Brake pads: Filled with cardboard, plastic, or sawdust. They perform adequately under light braking and fail completely under emergency load. A $12 counterfeit brake pad that costs $50 in genuine replacement is the most common entry point for fakes into the aftermarket.
- Ball joints & tie rods: Made from weak metal alloys. They snap under road stress, causing immediate loss of steering control with no audible warning before failure.
- Seatbelt pretensioners: Included in the PHMSA federal safety advisory. Fake pretensioners fail to lock in a collision, removing the restraint function that keeps occupants from contacting the steering wheel and dashboard.
- Wheel bearings & control arms: Degrade faster than genuine parts, creating progressive instability that worsens over months. They are rarely identified as counterfeit until failure occurs.
The online marketplace problem is where the risk enters your car most often. The rapid growth of e-commerce platforms has made it structurally easy for counterfeit sellers to list fake automotive parts alongside genuine ones. They often use identical photography, comparable pricing, and fabricated brand markings. Federal agents described the situation in 2025 as a flood, with counterfeit parts operations producing components that are, in appearance, virtually indistinguishable from legitimate ones. A repair shop sourcing a part through an online marketplace at 50 to 80% below market rate (a discount that should immediately signal a counterfeit) may not know what it is installing. The technician who installs it does not know, and you, the driver, have no way of knowing.
A South Gloucestershire trading standards operation in early 2026 raided a self-storage facility being used by an illicit parts trader and uncovered counterfeit components with a market value exceeding £100,000. These were fake parts from major manufacturers including Toyota and Stellantis. The operation required enforcement teams from eight car manufacturers to identify and authenticate the seized components. If it takes eight OEM engineering teams to confirm a part is fake, a mechanic working under time pressure at a repair bench has essentially no chance.
“United States federal law enforcement agencies are intensifying their efforts to stop the flow of counterfeit automotive parts, warning that fake parts operations are producing components virtually indistinguishable from legitimate ones in appearance but with dramatically inferior safety characteristics.”
— The Auto Wire, February 2025
What you can do is limited, but it is not nothing. If a price on an automotive part seems too good to be true, it is. Purchase parts only through authorized dealers or verified OEM distributor networks, not through third-party marketplace listings regardless of the platform. If your vehicle was recently involved in a collision and an airbag was replaced, ask your repair shop to provide documentation of the airbag’s provenance: the manufacturer, the distributor, and the lot number. If they cannot provide it, that is information worth having before you drive away.
The deeper answer, which is the one that the industry is slowly and inadequately moving toward, is factory-locked component identity that cannot be counterfeited. A part whose unique digital identifier is assigned at the moment of manufacture, correlated to a verified manufacturing event and supply chain record, and readable by any authorized party at any point in the distribution chain, cannot be fraudulently represented as something it is not without generating a detectable discrepancy. The automotive supply chain has 211,000 reasons per year (documented, seized, and discarded) to build that infrastructure. Until it does, the part in your car may not be what it claims to be, and the only way you will know is if it fails.
About Aeroz
Aeroz engineers the world’s only No-Encode workflow for item-level digital identity, allowing manufacturers to assign factory-locked, cloud-verified product identities to every unit at the moment of production. A component that carries a verifiable digital identity from manufacture cannot be counterfeited without detection. The automotive supply chain’s counterfeit problem is a product identity problem, and Aeroz exists to solve it at the source.
Aeroz, Making Authenticity Undeniable. Visit aeroz.io to learn more & get in contact with our team via info@aeroz.io.
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