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Source: Haldex announcement
LANDSKRONA, Sweden — The second brand from European brake and suspension manufacturer Haldex is Grau. That German brand of ABS valves, which was originally acquired in the 1990s from Echlin’s Midland-Grau Heavy Duty Systems, now stands for a good-quality range of all-makes parts for not only trailers but trucks too.
The ambitious current nature of Haldex’s expansion plans means that if customers are not yet familiar with Grau, they will be soon. Today, key Grau parts include brake pads, brake actuators and, coming to the market at the end of the year, disc brake rotors.
This new range has been some time coming, for all the right reasons, explained Alessio Paiusco, Haldex European sales manager for other brands.
“For all Grau products that we launch, we want to be sure about the quality,” Alessio said. “We are not rushing but we are following the standard quality procedure, tests and processes that we do for our Haldex products.”
This is a key difference from other suppliers on the market, he added.
“There are lots of brands in the market, but probably 65 percent of the other brands in the market are just trading companies. They buy from China or somewhere else. They don’t control [assess] their products, because they don’t have the tools to do so. They rebrand the units and make sales; that’s all. Our difference is that we spend the right time to be sure 100% that the quality is okay,” said Paiusco.
Even though in a like-for-like comparison, a Grau part will be less expensive than Haldex, that does not mean it is low-quality. So equivalent are the brands that a customer could install a Haldex brake actuator on one end of an axle and a Grau one on the other, Alessio emphasized.
To achieve that requires an investment in supply chain verification.
“The quality tests that we usually do are not about the first batch, nor [just] at the beginning when we have samples and when we launch new products. Our tests are also carried out during subsequent deliveries that we get from suppliers. We do it all the time,” said the sales manager.
Historically, Haldex supplied mostly trailer parts. That began to change in 2018 when the brand began to also offer spare parts for the truck market based on products already in the marketplace.
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Now, Grau pads and discs will not only fit other brands of axle and other brands of disc brake caliper, but also all of the main OEM brands of trucks (including IVECO, MAN, Mercedes-Benz, Renault, Scania and Volvo).
To view the entire announcement, click HERE.
