Here’s How SEMA Will Give the Aftermarket a Major Boost

• Now fully operational, SEMA Garage Detroit will welcome SEMA’s 7000 member companies to test their aftermarket products and navigate the bureaucratic maze of emissions certification.

• The facility will give member companies access to scanning services, a training center, 3D printers, and other advanced tools and equipment.

• SEMA is keeping an eye on the restomod market, convinced some classic car owners will want to convert their vintage Camaros to battery-electric power—a notion of heresy to many.

When shopping online for aftermarket goodies for your car, it might seem like the wild west while cruising the internet for rims, tonneau covers, floor mats, lift kits, running board lights, and more horsepower. It’s the mission of the Specialty Equipment Market Association to maintain some order in a world where any part you want can get shipped to your house within a couple days.

A recent expansion beyond SEMA’s home base in Diamond Bar (east of Los Angeles, the hub of all things aftermarket) puts the 501(c)(3) non-profit organization in metro Detroit, close to major automakers, their product-development labs, and—equally important—their component suppliers.

It’s been a long journey to Detroit: The SEMA team started researching the idea in January 2019, and by year’s end the board approved expanding to the new facility. The process was moving along in early 2020 until the COVID-19 pandemic put the whole plan on the backburner in March of that year. Shopping in Detroit for the right location would have to wait.

It was about a year later that SEMA President and CEO Mike Spagnola and his crew found (and purchased) an ideal location in Plymouth Township, northwest of Detroit amid a growing cluster of automotive suppliers and technology startups.

Within three miles of the new location, Spagnola has identified 83 Tier 1 automotive suppliers or SEMA members with operations. Cast a broader net and the potential audience is massive.

It took 16 months to gut the Plymouth building and turn it into SEMA Garage Detroit. As of this month, it’s operational.

This 45,000-square-foot research and validation facility will welcome SEMA’s 7000 member companies to test their aftermarket products and—on the powertrain side—navigate the bureaucratic maze of emissions certification so those products can be sold to car enthusiasts.

This work has been done for the past nine years at SEMA’s facility in Diamond Bar, but there’s a backlog of at least three months’ worth of emissions certification projects there, which is exactly why this new facility in metro Detroit became essential. It’s three times the size of the Diamond Bar lab and has SEMA’s first four-wheel-drive dynamometer, capable of 2500 hp. (Diamond Bar has a 2WD dyno.)

The California Air Resources Board recognizes the emissions lab in Diamond Bar, and in February SEMA will submit final paperwork to CARB for approval of the new Detroit operation. Once approved, aftermarket companies eager to introduce new superchargers, intake manifolds, or exhaust systems can have those products tested and validated for sale in California and all other states.

Since opening in 2014, the Diamond Bar lab has helped manufacturers secure more than 600 executive orders from CARB—more than any other testing facility. Without an executive order (“EO” as they’re known in SEMA-speak), a product can’t be sold. It’s like a golden ticket, and extremely difficult to obtain.

“If every T wasn't crossed, every I dotted, the applications got rejected,” Spagnola told Autoweek. For many years, aftermarket companies couldn’t find labs to do the certification work, or the process would be cost prohibitive.

But you don’t want to bypass the legislative process and start selling products that haven’t been certified: “The fines for not getting that work done is $37,000 per part sold,” Spagnola says. “And so our manufacturers were being sued by EPA and CARB and with major fines. So they were really, really, in a bad place with this process.”