The Goodyear Gatorback serp belt I put on my truck 13 months ago failed catastrophically yesterday. (Goodyear Gatorback is now sold as Continental Elite.)

My son called me late yesterday afternoon to tell me the truck overheated and when he looked under the hood the serp belt was shredded and hanging in pieces. As I said the belt was only 13 months old and the truck doesn't get a lot of miles these days. I'll update this when I get home tonight but I'm guessing it's not more than 7,000-8,000 miles on it.

My first thought was that a pulley had seized, causing the belt to come apart. My son and the truck are 200 miles away from me so once the truck cooled down I had him check all the pulleys. Everything seemed good. We thought about having the truck towed to the house where my son is living but decided instead to get it towed to a Rovers-only shop in Wilmington called Euro-Tek so that someone more experienced could look over the truck and confirm whether or not there was anything else wrong.

Euro-Tek called this morning to confirm all the pulleys, etc. seemed good. The still-original water pump was fine too. They put on a new belt, topped up and bled the coolant and took the truck for a drive. All seems fine now.

I bought the Continental Elite belt (then called Goodyear Gatorback) based on the marketing that it was a superior design. I'm not impressed.

 

Sorry to hear of your troubles.
I have the same Continetal belt due to numerous excellent online reviews that I found about them.
I'll reexamine my belts.

 

I've never used the goodyear serpentine belt because no one ever had em in stock. I've always just used Gates or Dayco serpentine belts with zero issues.

 

I bought mine off Amazon, where I will be leaving a review tonight.

 

Well, my estimate for the number of miles on the belt was pretty good. I said 7,000-8,000 and the actual miles were 7,652.

 

Why is it that so many of us seem to have issues with parts bought from Amazon? I had to return at least 4 Bosch o2's 2 MAF's and the worst one was the Cardone re-manufactured brake booster!
Makes me wonder if if the stuff on Amazon in terms of parts is second class stuff.

 

I don't see why we'd blame Amazon for any of the defective merchandise unless it's Amazon-branded.

If I went to NAPA or Advance or O'Reilly's or AutoZone or Pep Boys or anywhere else and bought a Bosch O2 or a Bosch MAF or a Goodyear belt and it failed prematurely I wouldn't blame the store that sold it to me.

 

Unless that store strong-arms the supplier to sell at a lower price, and the supplier decides to make inferior parts just for that store, like home depot, lowes, and walmart do..

 

I might understand that argument if the part numbers were different, had a suffix, etc.

 

Dayco and Gates have always been good for me too, I always use them on my D2, D4 and the Pajero. Never yet had any problems and the D2 is the original belt still after 14 years.