I can find the most rare part for my 1952 chevy everywhere. But attempting to find simple parts for my 89 Trans Am is impossible. Yes l know about Hawkes motorsport and Ecklers. Everything I look for is out of stock or discontinued. If you do find a part, the prices are 3 times of what it's worth. My door cards were taken off by a body shop, not correctly. Parts of the back of the door card were ripped off and lost. So are parts for the interior door plastics are missing. The guy discarded the parts as he broke them. He reimbursed me and I thought I could find broken parts and some illustrations. Was I wrong. I thought that if I can find 1952 chevy parts it would be easy to find 1989 firebird parts. No way.

 

Yep, all those era cars are basically 'discontinued', lol. GM just dropped all parts. I have a friend that works at a dealership, he's a Buick Grand National guy. He said he saw the landscape years ago. GM would discontinue parts all the time. He stocked up on some GN parts while he could at the time. Now it's reproduction, used, or duct tape😆

 

My understanding is once is got to be 10 years old they had no obligation to make parts. The aftermarket apparently doesn't see the money in it, so we get very little. What we do get is usually poor. I don't honestly know, they could be right, maybe we wouldn't make them any money.

 

Auto manufactures are under no obligation to make replacement parts for cars except for recalled parts. There has never been any 5 years or 10 years or so many years after that car ended production that they had to make replacement parts for. People think that but it has never been true.

Insurance companies total out cars all the time now because there are no replacement parts to repair the car. "JIT" Just In Time part manufacturing has ruined everything. There will never be any NOS parts to be bought on eBay or anywhere else like it is today for older cars for newer cars. Modern cars are disposable BIC lighters. You use them up and throw them away.

The shortcomings of JIT were exposed during Covid-19.

The New World Order is that "You will own nothing and be happy!"

 

Hit the junkyards, work on your own car. You'll avoid these types of problems.

 

Improvise! I too had some door card issues when I bought the car and some 3M black extra adhesive duct tape, plastic epoxy and some Doorman push style fender clips and I was able to get mine back together. As the OP said, there isn't alot of $ in the aftermarket parts for our 3rd gen F-bodies so we get the short end of the aftermarket schtick.

 

Ten years ago I used to buy whole Trans Am cars just for a few parts I needed but the days of finding a $500 roller are long gone. Bummer ☹️