GUELPH, Ont. — You finally take time to climb under your tractor to check your brake slack, you find everything’s okay; you’re merrily on the road home and then oops…you feel the fade.

Something’s gone terribly wrong.

The brake pros at Haldex are betting that you might be the unwitting owner of some imitation automatic brake adjusters, which, Haldex says, are flooding the North American market and making our trucks and roads unsafe.

To help fix things, Haldex has issued a warning about the knock offs.

“These imitation ABAs are made with low-grade materials and they are manufactured using sub-standard process and inferior quality-control methods,” Haldex said in its warning statement.

The company has conducted thousands of hours of life cycle and environmental tests on imitation ABAs — putting the fakes through the same rigorous processes they put their own products through — and here’s what they found:

Imitation ABAs have worm shafts and worm wheels that completed only five percent of the cycles before they failed; They also tend to have clevis pin bushings that completed only 10 percent of the cycles before failing; housings that completed only four percent of the cycles before failing; and, finally, imitation ABAs had a 100-percent failure rate in corrosion testing, which means completely failing every test conducted, says Haldex.

These failures can cause loss of braking or excessive brake chamber strokes, which lead to dangerous conditions, risky performance, reduced durability and out-of-service violations.

That’s why Haldex is advising fleet owners and owner-operators to avoid the risks that come with imitation ABAs.