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About GEAR VENDORS

Largely what makes GEAR VENDORS successful is the founding philosophy of the company. To offer the most advanced, highest quality, auxiliary transmission, with the best customer service available. Price was not then or now a part of the mission statement. There may be some market for cheap products that are not of quality, but not in the markets we serve. GEAR VENDORS are popular with RV’s, Trucks, High Performance and Racing applications. These are vehicles which are not retired even when they are very old unless damaged. It just doesn’t make sense to put anything less than the best product in vehicles this valuable.

In order to be the Best we had to have the best product. The product design is ultimately the most important aspect and it is known worldwide as one of the best designed transmissions ever. GEAR VENDORS did not invent overdrive or the original patents on our product. DeNormanville (maybe the most famous transmission designer ever) created the original product which, GKN (a 6 billion dollar/year public automotive conglomerate) acquired to produce overdrives for Ford and Volvo. GEAR VENDORS became a licensed manufacturer for GKN in 1979 and started applying racing expertise to the original products. With those improvements in materials, manufacturing techniques, and racing development came renowned success. Now (30 years later) we have bought out GKN’s overdrive division and all rights to the DeNomanville designs to gain ultimate control of quality and production.

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The highest honors in the industry were won by GEAR VENDORS in 1981 with SEMA’s Best Engineered award and again in 1989 (this unprecedented 2nd award for the P type configuration is the only time SEMA has given the engineering award twice on the same product by a manufacturer). No competing product has even won such award.

One of the big factors in our success is that our customers know exactly what benefit they get from our product. You interact with a GEAR VENDORS, turning it on and off. When it is “off” it is just like the vehicle was stock, so our customers get a “before and after test” every time they drive. This makes our customers our strongest salesmen for the product and is why we have dealt with many customers on five or more different vehicles over the course of the last 20 years. Today, many new Truck and Motorhome dealerships put GEAR VENDORS in prior to the customer even taking delivery of their new vehicle because the customer or dealer felt they needed one or the customer had one on the trade-in and wouldn’t be without it.

Prior to the factory overdrives becoming available many vehicles in the 1980’s and early ’90’s came factory equipped with the GEAR VENDORS as either optional or standard equipment. These manufacturers included Allegro, Fleetwood, Monaco, Executive, and Rexhall motorhomes, GM’s Callaway Corvette, Volvo passenger cars and Ford Diesel Transit vans. Between GEAR VENDORS and GKN’s production more than 2 million new vehicles have come factory equipped with our product and the lighter duty earlier version. No manufacturer has ever equipped a vehicle with any other auxiliary transmission that you can buy.

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The Founder and CEO of GEAR VENDORS is Ken Johnson and his primary directive year after year is customer satisfaction. Many policies at GEAR VENDORS relate to this commitment. Our products have always been the DeNormanville designed reaction planetary and roller clutch. These components are of such quality that the same unit we sellfor an RV or Truck goes to Drag Racers with 1200+ horsepower. This component design also means many reliability features for the consumer i.e: you cannot get stuck in neutral as you can with other products. GEAR VENDORS also has the best warranties in the industry up to twice as long as competing products. Automatic transmission equipped vehicles not used commercially get a 2-year unlimited mileage warranty. Many of our commercial customers put on more than 200,000 miles per year so we limit manual transmissions and all commercial use to 1-year unlimited mileage. (See warranty for details).

All customers get a 30 day money back guarantee (see warranty for details) so you can drive it and know you got the quality you paid for. GEAR VENDORS customer service personnel are knowledgeable in every aspect of use and installation and available to you free of charge whether you purchased our system 2 weeks ago or 2 decades ago. Also, as an extension of our customer service, should you own the product long enough to need a replacement, any customer who owns one of our units can replace it for 1/4 the cost of new. This kind of commitment to the existing customer is unheard of in most businesses today, but not at GEAR VENDORS.