If you’ve ever replaced your car’s brake parts before, there’s a good chance that you’ve run into brands like Centric, StopTech, or Raybestos. Collectively, these brands have been around for over a century and have provided OEM-quality or upgraded brake parts. But now, the brake repair world is about to get a whole lot sadder as all three of these brands are about to disappear.
Back in September 2025, our Thomas Hundal wrote about how First Brands Group, the owner of huge names in the car parts, maintenance, and DIY space, had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization. First Brands had a little bit of everything under its umbrella, from Fram oil filters and Trico wiper blades to Draw-Tite trailer hitches and Autolite spark plugs. First Brands owned so many different names across several car part categories that if you’ve purchased a third-party part for your car at all, chances are you have a First Brands product on your car. Automakers also rely on First Brands to supply parts they do not make themselves.
The implosion of First Brands runs deep, with the company racking up over $10 billion in liabilities. As part of its attempt to keep itself afloat, First Brands put itself and its brands up for sale. According to Automotive News, Ford, General Motors, and other First Brands customers got court approval last week to fund a $48 million cash infusion into First Brands to keep their supply chains running. Unfortunately, even with help from its customers, some brands under the First Brands umbrella aren’t going to make it.
If you’re only just learning about the failure of First Brands, I’ll give you a primer on what happened.
The First Brands Spiral
In 2014, Cleveland-based Crowne Group LLC purchased wiper blade company Trico. Five years later, the company expanded by purchasing Fram. These brands all fell under an umbrella called First Brands. The acquisitions then took off to a mind-boggling degree in 2020, as First Brands scooped up Raybestos-owner Brake Parts Inc., Luberfiner manufacturer Champion Laboratories, and brake parts company Centric, all in 2020. The Centric Parts acquisition also included Centric’s C-TEK, Posi Quiet, and StopTech brands.
First Brands stayed on the gas and acquired Horizon Global in 2023. Horizon was home to nine towing equipment brands, including big names like Tekonsha trailer brake controllers, Draw-Tite trailer hitches, and Reese hitches. By the end of it all, First Brands owned names in practically every part of the supply chain but tires.
First Brands didn’t have the kind of money necessary to buy so many companies in such a short order, so it turned to financing. Then, like a house of cards, it all fell apart, from our report:
Those sort of huge acquisitions require serious cash to close, and most companies don’t have eight or nine figures in the bank earmarked for expansion. Instead, they often rely on outside financing to raise funding, and debt’s modest cost of capital keeps financing cheap. However, if that debt can’t be paid back within a prescribed timeline, that’s when things go really wrong. Earlier this month, cracks really began to show. On Sept. 25, the Financial Times reported that First Brands’ financing vehicle Carnaby Capital Holdings had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in Texas.
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Allegations of financial opacity aren’t good, and it gets worse. The Carnaby Capital Holdings filing claims that this group of special-purpose financing vehicles tied to First Brands holds more than $500 million in assets and more than $1 billion in liabilities. If that’s just a subsidiary, what are things looking like for the crown jewel?
It turns out we didn’t have to wait long to find out how ensnared First Brands Group was in debt. Just a few days after Carnaby Capital Holdings filed for Chapter 11, First Brands did the same. As Reuters reports, “First Brands, which filed for bankruptcy in the Southern District of Texas, disclosed assets exceeding $1 billion against more than $10 billion in liabilities.” The outlet reports a total of around $6 billion in debt to be restructured, a sum that’s simply unfathomable to many.
If you thought all of that was bad, things got worse, as First Brands then sued its founder, Patrick James, alleging that he had pilfered at least $700 million from the company’s coffers. From Bloomberg:
Lawyers for the company — now run by restructuring consultants at Alvarez & Marsal — alleged that James borrowed funds on fraudulent terms, only then to “routinely and regularly” divert cash for himself and his family, according to a Southern District of Texas filing dated Nov. 3. More than $700 million was funneled from First Brands directly to James and his affiliated entities from 2018 to 2025, they claimed.
James “secretly pilfered some of the Company’s assets to fund his and his family’s lavish lifestyle. In short, he lined his pockets at the expense of First Brands and its creditors,” according to the document. The plaintiffs drew on data from more than seven million documents, as well as bank records and a collection of devices from employees.
In the 35-page document, lawyers paint a picture of James’ luxuriant spending habits, pointing to a fleet of at least 17 “exotic cars” and a celebrity personal trainer. In some cases, payments to James and his family were made directly from First Brands accounts, including at least $3 million in rent paid over 2019 to 2024 for a New York townhouse and about $500,000 paid to a private chef in 2025.
Thankfully, First Brands remained operating while all of this happened. But there was a clock running. First Brands had only so much time before funds would fully dry up. According to a January 8 report by Automotive News, First Brands claimed that it had $190 million in cash on hand and would run out of money by late that month. In an effort to stay afloat, First Brands offered itself for sale as a whole or in parts.
The Closure Of Major Parts Brands
First Brands warned that if its dive could not be arrested, it would have to shutter some of its brands. Unfortunately, the end of the month came, and First Brands was still in a dire condition as no buyer was found for the many brands that were for sale.
On January 26, First Brands announced the closure of Brake Parts Inc., Cardone, and Autolite. On February 5, Brake Parts Inc. announced that it was shuttering its McHenry, Illinois, facility. 332 employees were laid off that week, and an additional 57 employees were retained to assist in closing down the business. They will be laid off when that process is complete. I live down the street from this facility, and it has been rocking the community as many locals had worked at Brake Parts Inc. for years.
On that same day, First Brands also announced the closure of Centric Parts, which affects Centric-brand parts as well as C-TEK, Posi Quiet, and StopTech parts. Carlson brake hardware, Autolite spark plugs, and Cardone remanufactured parts were also caught up in the whirlwind of closures. Yesterday, Motor1 reported that all of these brands are ceasing operations.
Just a few days later, on January 29, the United States Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York, announced charges against former First Brands execs Patrick James and Edward James. According to the press release, the former execs are facing charges of “conspiracy to commit wire fraud and bank fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and multiple counts of wire fraud and bank fraud, in connection with various schemes to defraud lenders regarding the liabilities and financial condition of First Brands.”
The closure of these companies will mark the end of businesses that have been household names for a long time. Raybestos, for example, was founded in 1902 by Arthur H. Raymond and Arthur F. Law in Bridgeport, Connecticut, as the A.H. Raymond Company. In 1906, Raymond and Law were credited for the creation of a woven asbestos brake lining. In 1916, the company would change its name to Raybestos. Parts from the company would aid in both World War efforts, and Raybestos was heavily involved in racing for six decades. Along with brake kits, Raybestos was known for OEM-quality brake parts.
Centric Parts was founded in 2000 by Dino Crescentini, who had previous experience in imported cars and their parts. In 2013, Centric picked up StopTech, a brand that’s been around since 1999. While Centric’s whole deal was to provide OEM-quality parts, StopTech’s business centered on racing, track days, and street performance. StopTech was known for selling big brake kits, aero rotors, calipers, lines, and performance pads. If you do track days, there’s a chance you’ve seen StopTech brakes on someone’s car, if you already don’t run such a kit on your own car already.
The good news is that, reportedly, existing Centric, StopTech, and Raybestos stock will continue to be sold. As of publishing, you can still buy these branded parts at your favorite retailers.
Unfortunately, it’s unclear what’s going to happen once the stock dries up from these companies. As of publishing, the Raybestos website isn’t even online anymore. Thankfully, these companies weren’t the only names operating in these spaces. There are plenty of brands out there to buy brakes and brake parts from.
Still, it’s sad that these once huge names in the car parts world are going away. A bunch of people are losing their jobs, and soon, there will be a little less variety out there on the parts marketplace. I hope the people displaced by the failures of First Brands land on their feet and that this isn’t only the start of a greater fallout from First Brands.
Top graphic image: Raybestos
And nothing of value was lost.
Seriously, you couldn’t pay me to install any parts associated with these brands on my vehicles.
Edit – Did not see that Centric and Stoptech were on the list. That’s gonna hurt.
its not just those brands, this whole situation has big retailers like Walmart scrambling to find different oil filter suppliers for both on the retail shelf and out in the vehicle service shop, so just a heads up if you own a vehicle that requires the Fram 6607, 9972, 10060, 12060, 3387A, 3506, 3614, 4967, 9688, and others, inventories will be a little tight until the new shop filters start being manufactured and shipped in because we have been directed to leverage the retail side to keep our operations moving in the shop.
You work for Walmart TLE? I did a 9 month tour there back in 1998. Was the software dev of one of the systems used out in the work bays
I bet you worked on the old Ignition bay system; that system was a little clunky but was dead nuts reliable. the new app based one we’re using now feels half baked because they keep trying to cram more and more features in without fixing any of the bugs.
I designed/coded the Visual Basic (4?) touchscreen app that sat between each bay. It was definitely a clunky UI, but had to be due to the not-so-accurate touchscreens from IBM. I think it had about 150k lines of code, but there was a lot of repetition (like error trapping routines). Part of our testing was pulling the power cable, and it had to reboot and open the app back to the exact same spot it was at.
I was there when we had it in our pilot stores, but left before full rollout. I may still have some of that code 🙂
I have a ton of friends from college who are still working at Walmart. The new campus looks 1000x nicer than the old HQ when I worked there
This story has been developing for months, as the fraud is multi-faceted and on a huge scale. Some properties were used as collateral for loans multiple times, which is illegal and leaves the loans unsecured.
Nice write-up, as it covers everything and brings it to an audience who will be directly affected.
Hopefully these companies will be bought and kept alive. Otherwise, there will be few options for quality parts, other than Chinese knock-offs.
I had somehow missed that AutoLite was tied up in the First Brands mess. I guess this includes their glow plugs as well as their spark plugs? Glow plug production was moved overseas 9 or 10 years ago, and quality dropped so much that my company paid for testing to find out what had changed from when the plugs were made domestically. The material changes were concerning to say the least.
The few times I have cheaped out and bought any of those brake parts brands I have regretted it, ESPECIALLY Centric – utter garbage. Decent parts cost more than $20. And those wiper blades are crap too.
Ultimately, any of these brands that have value will be bought by other companies and continue one way or another.
Speak for yourself. Centric rotors have been solid for me. Maybe not the best out there for hard use but under spirited driving, no issues to speak of.
My 2016 Mazda6 chewed through some Centrics pretty quickly but I honestly think they just overheated in the Smoky Mountains on a family trip due to my own inexperienced driving. The Raybestos’ I put on after that have been fine for 60,000+ miles now including another trip to the Smokies.
Solid for me so far on Centric for Brembo brake systems. but it has been a few years now, so maybe it went down hill since?
this sucks. these were individually profitable companies that gets swallowed up by a conglomerate and then the conglomerate mismanages money and debt and the individual companies suffer. consumers suffer, and people are now jobless. what a shame.
A story as old as time: Greedy people in power abuse the system and shuffle money around for their own personal gains. When the house of cards falls, they land on the top of the pile and walk away while all the working people lose their livelihood and everything else they worked hard for. We need to Tax the rich and the corporations they manage and blow apart private equity funds and other leeches like them. My heart goes out to the 400+ people who are now jobless in an economy that doesn’t offer many jobs with *actual* living wages.
So long as the exec’s get their golden parachutes.
The Goodfellas business model… “You get a guy like Paulie to take over a place… You get a guy to be the front… Then you buy as much stuff as you can on credit… And when the credit ran dry, then you have the insurance fraud kick in. Cover the place for insurance, burn it down, get the insurance money.”
So many former high quality brands gone, but to be fair the quality was gone in a lot of those brands before they were acquired by First Brands. I’ve used 75% of those brands, mostly back in their heyday.
On the plus side since many of those brand had their production outsourced that capacity is going to be available but it will take time for others in the market to make the deals and get those parts flowing.
Yes, most of the old Allied Signal brands are in there, which were once quality. My question – why own so many brands selling the essentially same, competing product? Anco AND Trico. Reese AND Drawtite. 3 different brake parts lines?
Well there are the “buy market share” and “if you can’t beat them buy them” business philosophies.
And its worse than that since I’m pretty sure the Michelin is a 3rd wiper brand. In the towing/trailer space Fulton, Bargman, Bulldog, Wesbar and Tekonsha all have product overlaps between themselves and/or Reese and Draw-tite.
Exactly. Where I live, there were two welding/gas supply houses. The independent has now been bought up by the chain company.
Food and beer companies do this all the time. Buy the upstart, keep it running for a few years, then close it down. How many great beer brands have you seen just fade away after a few years?
The same thing is happening in the funeral home industry. The generations-old family business gets bought by a national company, they keep the name and old faces so no one notices, and raise the prices so the local business pays off the cost of having been acquired.
A monopoly without it being too obvious.
It doesn’t matter if they’re competing or not if you aren’t planning on selling products long term, just leveraging assets to take out more debt and give yourself a nice bonus. Thinking of it as a business upon which actual people rely for parts, services and employment is a mistake that leads to empathy, and we can’t have that now can we?
While it won’t bring the world to an end, it’s worth noting that Trico-Anco were the only makers of windshield wipers for classic cars (or at least the only name-brand ones). For those who still dare to take their classics out when there’s more than a 1% chance of rain, this will be a notable loss.
I would suggest that people with classic cars do some rock auto shopping and maybe buy up a lot of close out stuff for their specific ride.
Things like master cylinders and calipers made from Amazon brand chinesium suppliers is a total crapshoot whether any of it will work out of the box.
It is, tragically, fathomable. And the lawsuits are going to fly fast and furious. With 6B of liabilities against 1B of assets, somebody got lied to. The auditors lied to the banks (like JP Morgan Chase or GS) that brokered the acquisitions, or the company lied to the auditors, or the acquisition targets lied to their auditors during diligence.
This can end with criminal charges (the Iron Mountain / Autonomy / HP case was a big deal in my industry that likewise dealt with accounting shenanigans).
I am hopeful somebody competent will purchase the tooling and logistics elements and keep manufacturing up; while I don’t use any of the brands mentioned, but competition is always a good thing, and I don’t know that there’s enough slack among the other vendors to fill the gap.
Not in the same league of course, but as a Ford guy, I’m sad to see Autolite come to such a (likely, per Matt Sexton) final bad end.
The overall story is fascinating, and even though Ford got rid of it decades ago, I always enjoyed that the brand was still around in the market. Think of any total-performance-era Ford race car, and you can see that iconic decal in your mind.
I have a four corner StopTech BBK on my S4. (From before their first acquisition.) I’ve been happy with it but, yeah, fewer options for replacement pads and rotors is worrying.
Tommy Boy was a fuckin warning, a damn prophecy
We should have listened
Patrick James makes Ray Zelensky seem like a saint by comparison.
For real
Why wouldn’t they sell these brands off to pay for reimbursement for the billions of dollars lost?
They tried, but found no buyers (see the article, above.)
Also, the value of the brands is less than the money owed.
It seems that even with less value than owed it would still reduce what is owed to get some people paid.
Wow! You’re definitely the only special guy who ever thought of this, why don’t they hire you!??? This is the problem with your generation, no critical thinking at all just ‘I know better, everyone else is dumm’ when really you’re the dummy
“…There are plenty of brands out there to buy brakes and brake parts from…“
Not good ones, there aren’t…Those were pretty much the only decent brands at rockauto. I won’t cry for cardone, but raybestos, stoptech and centric all together is like the three tenors retiring at the same time.
Sorry Rock Auto isn’t a quality source IMHO. Just their site alone that will offer any car part let alone a part that doesn’t exist. It is the capital C of Click bait and tells me we have knowledge of computer search terms but nothing about cars. You could search for a 3rd row seat on a McLaren race car and they will promise you they can get it. It’s why all these computer companies can’t build a car.
This is false at so many levels I won’t even get there.
Good thing no one cares about your honest opinion. I would actively do the opposite of whatever you suggest for nearly anything
First step is not buying crap from Rockauto.
Blanket meme-level bullshit.
First step is figure out what is not crap, second step is check Rockauto first.
And they do not list parts that they do not have in stock. 1978 is just throwing out nonsense.
Ditto
My time has more value than Rockauto would save me. And God help you if you ever have to return anything to them, plus inevitably when I have tried to buy stuff from them, they want to ship from multiple warehouses and the shipping gets stupid fast. So nope, can’t be bothered. BTDT, got burned. I guess if you are buying for something that doesn’t have good specialist support, or is super common with lots of cheap junk parts available, they serve a purpose – but not for my European cars that I maintain correctly. Simply better places to buy parts for them by far.
Again, blanket level stuff – if I’m not like you, it means I’m doing it wrong and I maintain a junkbox. Ok.
I also maintain a German. The truth is that rockauto usually can’t beat fcpeuro on price (they are marginally lower but not overwhelmingly so). So fcpeuro it is, for that one.
When I find original Hyundai balljoints at rockauto for $20 a pop instead of $97 – I get them there, with all the hassle accepted.
How precious YOUR time is matters little to me. If you have time to maintain a car yourself and you’re not doing it as a hobby – not using rockauto is your absolute right, but being dismissive of others who do it is not mensa material.
If you want to buy crap parts from a third rate supplier with customer-unfriendly policies – you do you.
I’m sure I brought up that I find and buy original manufacturer’s parts at RockAuto in my previous post, but I won’t hold it against you for not knowing how to read while insisting on writing. Cheers.
Still a third-rate source with lousy customer service, but as I said, you do you. You will get burned by them eventually, everyone does.
It’s amazing how otherwise solid companies that produce good products people are happy to pay reasonable prices for get forced out of business by the MBA vultures.
The ironic thing here is it looks like the vultures are complaining they’re the ones that got screwed over. Serves them right.
Damn straight. We were promised computers would improve the world. They didn’t now we got a snot nosed kid at MM&J typing in data but no idea how a car works or what parts do.
Your generation failed us, clearly
God, I hate this stuff. They should make very highly publicized examples of these shysters. Put them in state prison and start a rumor that they’re on Epstein’s list. That, of course, won’t do a damn thing for the people who are losing their jobs. I don’t know how you can make this right for them.
Nobody will ever notice this missing $700M. Not only was this guy an incompetent criminal, but incompetent as a CEO. What they should do to these wendigos is seize all their assets and black list them from working, make them homeless in perpetuity as punishment for their greed and let no homeless shelter take them in. Let them rely on the goodness of their fake friends, see how long they make it. Of course, what will probably really happen is that he has a fund hidden somewhere that he will use to bribe his way to freedom after serving a few months in an easy prison.
Ah, America! The ultra wealthy win again.
RIP. Loved my StopTech BBK. Had zero trouble or complaints with it for years on the track and street. Good old centric blanks were also my go-to replacement rotors.
Better stock.up on replacement pads and rotors now. Once stock runs out, its a.new BBK kit for you.
Thankfully, I sold the car last fall. Stock Brembos for me now; hopefully I’m safe there!
Consolidation once again proves how great it is for consumers, what a win for everyone.
I just bought some shitty rotors and pads for my beater BMW e36 from Amazon. The company was literally called “Callahan Auto Parts”, just like in the movie Tommy Boy. Even the logo was the same.
Well, sounds like in the alternate ending to Tommy Boy, Ray Zalinsky got his way.
Vulture Capatalism at its finest, sick
This was plain old fraud. Just sell the earnings from future invoices, factoring, 3 or 4 times. No vultures needed.
This is probably exactly what any prospective bidders wanted, the chance to just pick up trademarks disconnected from physical assets like plants and tooling
Also disconnected: employees.
Another huge loss brought to us late stage capitalism. This company was too big and never should have been allowed to buy all of these brands. Especially if the owner is able to steal $700 million. Seemingly every single industry is dominated by this kind of thing now where that illusion of choice is happening.
This is only mid stage capitalism.
Another case where anti-trust legislation should have been invoked, but too many people thought they were making money.
We’re at end-stage capitalism. It’s all going to come crashing down soon.