Have you ever gone to an auto repair shop for an oil change,
only to have the mechanic say your car needs a new transmission? Has the “check
engine” light come on, and suddenly the mechanic says you need expensive new
engine parts?
One seasoned auto mechanic is warning consumers to be
well-versed in how a car works to avoid being ripped off at the auto repair
shop.
“Joe,” who has been a mechanic for 40 years, agreed to reveal
the secrets of his trade to ABC News' “20/20” on the condition that his
identity would remain concealed.
OK. Hold on a minute. First, why does anyone that
has something important to say have to hide his/her identity? There are
problems in the auto repair trade, and just like any occupation or career there
are some bad apples too and we would like nothing better for them to get the
heck out of our trade and go away. The funny thing is when it comes to problems
in the auto repair trade and exposing them “articles” like this one actually miss
the mark entirely. If the authors really did their homework what they would
have found is the biggest issue has to do with technician competency not
honesty, and without real feedback this “article” would do more to hurt a
consumers chances of having a talented and well trained technician service
their car than it would help.
The auto repair trade
has a significant shortage of qualified technicians. There are plenty of
technicians who can handle the easier everyday services, but when it comes to
the more technically challenging work there just isn’t enough techs to go
around as compared to how many shops there still are. Now you might think this
problem will just correct itself and who knows, maybe it would if we could get
rid of all of the distractions that serve to derail the career track for the
people who choose to try and become automotive technicians and that of course is
the problem, the real problem that the authors should have been focusing on.
The career track to
take someone from being an apprentice technician to eventually be the master
technician that you the consumer needs your local shop to have in its repair
bays doesn’t exist and hasn’t existed for the last twenty or thirty years. Now
sure a few individuals have still made it but they are the exceptions and are a
dying breed. Today’s prospective technicians can hope to at best specialize in
one or two areas of service because there is simply too much for anyone to have
to learn today. The idea of becoming a master technician that can work bumper
to bumper and on all makes and models is an unachievable goal.
He said some mechanics may try to squeeze more money out of
customers by doing unnecessary repairs. What drives mechanics to cheat or push
unnecessary repairs, Joe said, is the tiny profit margin at many repair shops.
Most mechanics are honest, he said, but many are pressured by their bosses to
perform unnecessary work.
There is some truth in
the last couple of sentences, techs are pushed to perform “MPIs” which are
multi-point inspections to try and make sure that a vehicle doesn’t leave with issues
that should have been detected during a given visit. Part of the idea of the
MPIs is to upsell Needed work and
part of it is defensive in nature. Imagine a car came into a shop for a given
issue and meanwhile the engine oil is a couple quarts low and several thousand
miles overdue to be changed. What would you say about a mechanic/technician who
didn’t check the oil and report that information, especially if there was then
an engine failure in the next month or two that should have been prevented? You
have to believe there are customers out there that would lay blame on the shop
for missing that potential issue, just as sure as some others would jump on the
other side of the issue and find fault with the shop for recommending the oil
change. The difference right now is in this context of this essay there are
finite limitations to the situation making the recommendation objective in
nature, but in day to day service operations there is a subjective side to it
that isn’t as easy to account for. This has some unintentional consequences for
consumers when placed in context with the original ABC story and that is a junior
technician concerned about making recommendations because they might be seen as
overselling may in fact not make recommendations that he/she should have made.
That ironically leaves the technician potentially (subjectively) wrong both
ways, in other words, wrong if they advise additional work be done and at the
same time wrong if they do not.
“The shop has to stay in
business,” Joe said. “There are pressures to do things that maybe you wouldn’t
do normally.”
Joe admitted that he has used shady tactics, himself, in the
past.
“I’m ashamed a bit to admit it, but when your boss tells you ...
'Either you do it here or the door’s right there,' what are you going to do?”
he asked.
Easy answer Joe,
toolboxes have wheels on them for a reason. There are a lot of former
technicians or ex-mechanics for a reason. There are bad managers out there who
can run a shop in a way that produces significant profits, all the while
ignoring what they are doing to the technicians that work for them. For the
technicians in a shop like that they have made a terrible career choice in the
best of times and it only gets worse when times are bad.
|
4.
Jacking Up Repairs Based off the 'Idiot Light'
|
One of the most common, and profitable, ways to jack up a repair
bill is exploiting fears over the “check engine” light, affectionately known by
some in the trade as the “idiot light,” Joe said.
“The check engine light will direct you to a failure code,” he
said. “Guys kind of have the phrase where every code deserves a part.”
Nonsense, real techs
do not call the MIL (malfunction indicator light) anything other than what it
is, a notification to the driver that the PCM has detected an issue because of
an onboard test that failed.
“20/20” put the “idiot light” tactic to the test. Before heading
out undercover, “20/20” had expert mechanic Audra Fordin purposefully unplug a
cord to disconnect the mass airflow sensor in the engine of a “20/20”
producer’s car, something that would be quickly detected and easy to fix. Both
Fordin and Mendola deemed the car perfectly fine otherwise.
Well that’s fine for
them to say that based on having all of the information in front of them and of
course for causing the problem. But let’s look at it with real world
experience. I’m betting that you can Google an engine symptom description of (one
or more of the following) stalling, surging, hesitation and/or cuts out and you’ll
get some tips to try unplugging the MAF sensor and see if the car runs better.
If it does those tips will tell you to that either the MAF needs to be cleaned
or replaced. (We don’t condone cleaning but the reasons go way beyond what can
be explained here) Now given someone’s experience level and having a car come
in the door with the MAF unplugged and otherwise running correctly that can
falsely lead them to thinking it is bad based on past events. However in our
opinion that doesn’t excuse them from not testing completely and correctly this
time and discovering no other problems “at this time” other than the sensor
being un-plugged. By the way, the key point in that last sentence is the “at
this time”. Experience has proven that the sensor could be simply plugged back
in with no trouble found right now, only to have the car come back in a week or
two with the sensor genuinely failed and now the tech is at fault for not
getting it right the first time. The rigged example that the ABC story is
trying to rely on doesn’t take that into account either. On top of that it gets
even better when we talk about what some of the shops did that solved the
problem without upselling.
One repair shop in New Jersey fixed the cord issue in 15 minutes
without even charging our producer -- though ABC News' expert mechanic say it
would be reasonable to charge between $50-100 to diagnose the problem.
This one sentence sets
the stage for tying all of this together. The shop SHOULD have charged for what
they did and by not charging the common thought is that somehow would earn them
more business. The problem is there are many more just like them doing the same
thing and in all of those shops that loss of revenue shows up at the bottom of
the spreadsheet in classes that the techs won’t be sent to for continuing
education, wages they won’t be paid, tools that won’t be purchased and
ultimately more techs that won’t stay in the trade long enough to really get to
be as good at fixing cars as you the consumer need them to be. Now picture this as having gone on for the
last twenty plus years and you should start to understand why there is a
shortage of qualified people especially when it comes to the more difficult
work. Combine that with the fact that it takes some fifteen to twenty years for
the young technician just out of trade school to really learn to be the
journeyman that you need him/her to be and that means if we could fix all of
the problem tomorrow, there will still be a severe shortage for the next
fifteen years, and if you think that it’s hard to get your car fixed now, just
wait ten years and see what it is like when all of this really hits home.
“The light was definitely
on because of the sensor,” Mendola said. “And plugging it back in should have
the solved the problem. ... I can give you an example. If you came home and
your lamp wasn’t working and you realized, ‘Hey, somebody unplugged it from the
wall,’ you wouldn’t go out and buy a new lamp. So basically, all you had to do
was plug it back in and you’d be fine.”
The Sting and why it
fails. Techs don’t fix rigged cars. If you want to run a test and try to make
it accurate, you need a car that has developed a natural failure to do it with.
The only thing the sting like this really proves is that people can be tricked
especially with a marginally chosen “failure”. Give anybody enough chances and
they will make a mistake (fail) on a test, especially if they don’t know a test
is being given. Combine that with how many shops don’t charge for diagnostics
correctly, (if at all) which means they don’t pay their techs correctly (if at
all) for doing them and you should almost wonder why some actually get it right
instead of just deriding the ones that fail.
