Changing a car tire nowadays!!! Should it be this hard??

Those are indispensible when working with LARGE fasteners. How else do we get a human being putting 3000lb ft on a fastener? Used to use them when rebuilding large hydraulic demolition hammers for excavators.

 

I have trust issues with auto shops for sure. The root is in how the employees are paid. The system is stacked to make money for the shop first, the tech second while delivering the lowest acceptable standard of work to the customer. Both of them take the hit when there is a problem that requires any extra time, or worst case, re-work, so they throw up a wall of plausible deniability (often via bureaucracy, or customer ignorance/obscurity) whenever possible. Nobody is incentivized to save the customer any money in the long run, or minimize the vehicles average time in-between repairs, that's for sure. Combine that with the fact that most customers don't plan for proactive maintenance and a $500+ repair is a financial emergency for many, and you can start to put together why many opt to not own a car outside of warranty.

There is one group here that does not use the flat-rate system, hires experienced dealer techs for most of the Japanese makes, and only works on those cars. They aren't the cheapest shop around, by far, but if I have a job that's outside of the scope of what I'm willing to do in the driveway, they are the ones I use.

 

The repair industry has itself to blame for the state it's in and flat-rate pay for technicians should be illegal. There's my hot take for the day.

If your shop is open from Mon-Sat, 9-5, has 10 techs and you bill >480 hours of labor in a week's time, that's fraud IMO and should be prosecuted as such.

If manufacturers had to pay actual time for warranty repairs, assuming the tech doing the work has been "factory trained" to the OEM's standards, they'd be incentivized to make the product durable and easy to repair, along with investing in the skills of the people working on the cars. With nobody to blame for the "lack of skilled technicians" other than themselves.

 

Funny thing about that, is the job is sold to you on that exact promise, of being about to double your time. They forget to mention that the service manager and the often the writer are working against that principle by, best case, equally distributing the s*** work and worst case, foisting it off on the guys that won't make a complete s*** show out of it.

Stars align is the right analogy as that only happens on days that don't end in Y.

Working in a mower/equipment shop, they tried to convince us flat-rate was the way to go. There was a conversation about no more techs helping with deliveries, looking up parts for work orders, unloading trucks (forklift work), and the sales department would have to generate a work-order for every new machine prepped by a service tech. The idea was dropped pretty quick as it would have meant a minimum of 3 new hires assuming sales was willing to just pay the shop to prep equipment. My opinion was it would have destroyed the small-biz, tight knit team we had going where everyone pitched in and helped the business move forward by pitting everybody in the shop against each other and making it difficult to help other departments. Eventually it would have run off many of the techs too that would literally starve all winter after making decent money during the growing season. Snow was good, but not THAT good. THAT was the reason for wanting to introduce flat-rate pay. The business was having to carry the best/most expensive of us over the winter and we had a couple where we just didn't get much snow.

 

I wonder what the mix is today of techs that have formal training (beyond high school) vs all on-the-job? A couple formal automotive schools have gained a reputation of just turning out diplomas and not technicians.

 

Listen carefully to what this young man has to say about working.

“can’t get 55-60 hours a week”
“Manufacturers cut the warranty hours whenever they fee they’re paying too much”
“You’d charge a customer 150% of book time for that job…”