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Dana makes the parts that let vehicles move and stop, selling axles, driveshafts, and drivetrain systems to car and truck makers.
Dana is a parts supplier for the companies that build vehicles. When a truck rolls off the line at Ford or a Jeep leaves a Stellantis plant, odds are good that some of the metal underneath — the axles that carry the wheels, the driveshafts that spin them, the gears that multiply the engine's twist — came from Dana. The company also makes the systems that let four-wheel-drive vehicles shift power to the wheels that need grip, and it builds thermal parts that keep batteries and engines from overheating.
The business splits into two broad halves. One serves traditional cars and trucks: axles, driveshafts, and sealing products sold to big automakers, plus a steady aftermarket where people buy replacement parts for aging vehicles. The other serves off-highway machines — forklifts, mining trucks, agricultural equipment, construction gear — through brands like Spicer and Brevini. Dana also sells to commercial truck makers, a market that swings hard with freight demand. Customers pick Dana because it has been engineering these parts for over a century and can supply them at huge scale, though it competes with giants like Eaton and American Axle & Manufacturing. The awkward part of Dana's story is that its core products are built for combustion engines, and the industry is slowly moving away from them. Dana's answer is to sell the same skills into electric vehicles: battery cooling plates, electric axles, and motors. That bet has been expensive. Dana borrowed heavily to buy an electric-vehicle parts maker and then found the EV market growing slower than expected, which pushed it into losses and forced a hard reset.
In 2024 the company began selling off chunks of itself to pay down debt, and it cut costs aggressively. The plan is to become a smaller, leaner supplier focused on the parts that actually make money. It's a familiar story in the auto-parts world: the companies that survive are the ones that adapt their factories and balance sheets fast enough when the car business changes underneath them.
Saved answer · last researched 29 Oct 2026