A Message From Chairman Charlie Hogarty
An open letter to members
CLAREMONT, CA--This is one of those letter which I knew I would be writing somewhere down the road.
It always was planned that between the Board of Directors and me, we would let you know the reasoning behind our thinking as it pertained to both distributor and product certification and the options we felt would be in our collective best interests.
That is an awfully tall order when one considers that we were facing the specter of having to fulfill requirements for a wide range of distributors, from our very largest member to our smallest. That is quite a range.
Then, too, all of us were aware that the already established program would question our motives. We knew there would be areas subject to a great deal of misinterpretation.
But, it is the responsibility of this organization’s Board of Directors to formulate those policies which we believe will serve the greater good. To that end, last November in Las Vegas, our Board felt uncomfortable with some of the answers we were receiving to questions as it pertained to certified product under the existing program.
For years, we had asked the established organization to look at bumpers and bumper reinforcements. They had not. For years, we heard about a distributor certification program. It was never launched. And when the Ford patent issue took stage front and center, the major product certification organization on which we rely said it would no longer certify any parts which held design patents.
Behind all of this was the specter of our industry taking a pounding. While we did not know to what level the damage would arise, the fi rst report by an I-CAR instructor at that November CIC minute was the impetus behind a mad rush to disparage not only the offending structural part but all independently produced aftermarket parts.
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