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What offends me is people throwing around rumors about a brand based on nothing more than hearsay or less. To my knowledge, no one on Zpost has posted anything about a failing alternator form Autozone, so to give a recommendation to someone suggesting that that has happened is patently false.
A single link showing that an alternator failed on a 3 series, of which there are many millions in circulation and thus probably hundreds if not thousands with duralast alternators installed, does not make a trend. I'm sure I can find stories of BMW alternators failing prematurely as well, but they don't represent the overall population of those alternators unless you can show that a significant percentage of those in circulation are indeed failing. Given how few Z4s there are around, if there was truly a problem with Duralast alternators for Z4s, chances are very high that we would have heard about it on this forum by now.
If you want to buy all OEM parts, thats fine, and there are certainly areas of the car on which I would use nothing else. Or to stay away from anything sold at Autozone based on some poor personal experience, that makes sense too.
BUT, the fact is there are no more than a handful of automotive manufacturers left in the world for any given component, so to suggest that an alternator is junk solely because it was sold by autozone is ridiculous, because it was probably made by the same company that makes the alternators sold at your favorite indy, at Napa, at higher end auto parts stores, and perhaps even by BMW. You can say the same thing about batteries, tools, etc.
For a poster who says, what do you think of autozone?, a reply that you think they are crap is fine, he's asking for your opinion and thats all. But to attempt to steer a purchase decision by submitting incorrect information based on some personal bias, without supporting facts, is just not appreciated.
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