I Bought A Load Of Temu Car Parts: You Can Probably Guess How That Went

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll have heard of Temu. The Chinese online marketplace seems to have spent an astonishing amount of money on marketing lately, so it’s been hard to go online without being bombarded with its befuddling ‘shop like a billionaire’ slogan and promises of ultra-cheap products.

Given the breadth of what’s offered on the platform, it’s no surprise that there are plenty of automotive-related bits and pieces amongst it all. But are they any good? We spent around £90 on a total of 12 items for the Volkswagen Golf Cabriolet we’ve been running for the Car Throttle YouTube channel, and in the video embedded below, you can see what happened when we unboxed everything and fitted it.

Admittedly, we might have erred towards the more comedy-value end of the spectrum, but still, it gave us a good chance to judge the quality of what’s offered by Temu. 

Here’s a rundown of each thing we bought.

Exhaust trim

This cost £7.86, which feels like about £6.86 too much. The quality of the welds is pretty shocking, and one of the mounting brackets snapped off when we first tried to install it. Regardless, we did still manage to get it on, and it’s still there…

Seat covers

Considering these are made from thin material with shoddy-looking stitching, they might just be the worst-value items we bought at around £20 a pair. You don’t have to spend much more than that to get a full set of sturdier-looking covers from a big brick-and-mortar motoring store like Halfords, and they’ll likely fit better than ours. You probably won’t get anything featuring cats and sunflowers or dolphins, though.

Steering wheel cover

Is it bad that I quite like this? The fluffy steering wheel cover was from Alex’s batch of parts and accessories, so it wasn’t one of my choices, but I’ve grown weirdly fond of it, and it seems reasonably well made. It was not too expensive, at £9.47, although I found similar-looking products on Amazon at similar prices.

Neon lights

Initially, I was pretty impressed with these. They’re reasonably bright, and via an app, you can choose whatever colour you want, and pick from different loads of different lighting sequences. The adhesive on the light strips is poor, though, and the front and rear set (both of which we fitted at the front to save faffing with cable routing) both fell off after only a week fitted to the car. The side ones are probably only still on thanks to the Gorilla tape I plastered over the ends. They cost £17.09, so at least they weren’t that expensive.

Ambient lighting

The bare bones of these are similar to the neons (it’s just a few strips of LED lights), but they were significantly cheaper, at only £6.36. Plus, unlike the neons, these came with a little remote control (albeit a pretty rubbish infrared one that only works if you point directly at the control module), and the lights work nicely.

As with the neons, though, the adhesive is poor. We’ve had one strip fall off completely and others starting to lift at the edges, which is less forgivable than it is for the neons, considering these ones are protected from the elements.

Badge

I mean, it’s a badge - there’s not much to say. The quality seems good enough, and it’s stayed on the boot with no issues. It was cheap, at just £2.15.

German flag stickers

They’re stickers so, again, there’s not a lot to talk about. The quality seems fine and they haven’t fallen off yet, but for the best part of a fiver for two quite small stickers, they’re not brilliant value.

Glow-in-the-dark valve caps

Our cheapest item at a mere 66p, but this is one of those ‘you get what you pay for moments’. Yes, they glow, but so faintly they’re not worth even the minimal effort of fitting them.

Wheel nut covers

These seem to be fine and were cheap at £3.48. The quality of the plastic is OK, and the Volkswagen branding is a neat touch, though we’ll have to gloss over how unlikely it is that the people making these have paid the right licensing for that branding…

‘Carbon fibre’ bonnet scoop

This is a chunk of plastic with a reasonably convincing carbon fibre finish on the top. At £9.28 it feels priced about right, but it was quite scratched up in places out of the box, and the groove around the edge of the underside means there’s not a particularly good surface to stick the included double-sided tape to. On that subject, it was difficult to peel the protective covering off the tape, but it’s still clinging on well after a couple of weeks on the car, at least.

NOS air freshener

At £3.97 this was a good chunk cheaper than similar (if not exactly the same) products on eBay. The quality is OK and does function just fine as an air freshener, but the included freshener block smells like something that might be used in a public toilet.

Should you buy from Temu?

For simple things like stickers, badges and novelty air fresheners, you’ll probably be fine to do so. For anything else, judging by our wide-ranging sample of parts and accessories, the quality is so variable, that there’s a chance you might be wasting your money.

At the very least, everything we ordered arrived, looked like it did in the photos and was largely as described. Some of it even arrived quite quickly - within a week - while the second lot took just over two weeks. 

Concerns have been raised across the pond by the US House Intelligence Committee regarding the exploitation of data by Temu, which has alleged links to the Chinese Communist Party.

There are ethical considerations, too - the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party has warned of risks that items for sale on the platform might have been made with forced labour, although it’s worth noting Nike, Adidas and Shein are part of the same investigation into forced Uyghur labour. Temu's code of conduct for third-party sellers on its platform talks of a zero-tolerance policy for using forced, indentured, penal or child labour, but offers no information about how this is policed. 

Even if you are after something simple, you might be better off going to either UK-based sellers via eBay or Amazon, or ordering from China from somewhere more established and with a better reputation like AliExpress, although the platform’s Trust Pilot review average is only marginally better than Temu’s.

It’s not like any of the things we bought were significantly cheaper compared to similar products available elsewhere, although, if you can be bothered, there may be deals to be had by trying out the platform’s ‘gamification’ where free products or discounts are handed out.

TL;DR? As with a lot of purchases you’ll make in life, caveat emptor.