Sorry that I've been away for a while

I'm happy to say that things have gotten easier for us and I have time to invest into this project again. Stay tuned for a lot of new posts.

Got a few minutes? Part 2.

• OK. So you want to know about the laws in your state (country), well then either go to law school and study until the end of time, or consult a lawyer and hope that he/she is truly up on the subject at hand. Now if you want to know about auto repair and how cars really work I guess you should go to tech school and study until the end of time or else consult a lawyer!
  
  OK, maybe that's not fair but then again that's the point, being fair. In the linked podcast Mr. Lehto describes buying a used car and even with a blank check the shop only replaced the spark plugs. It's notable right here that we don't know anything about this car, make, model, year, mileage, previous repair history etc.
  
  Over the last few years if you have paid attention to the information that has been shared the first thing that you should realize is that you can't take any given symptom on any given car and automatically know what is wrong, and especially what part to replace. People often guess with respect to a given symptom what part(s) may be causing an issue and like any guess they just might be right. However when it comes to really being proficient one has to test, not guess because when it comes to service and repair the guesses will quickly lead to one of Mr. Lehto's top five rip-offs where part after part get's replaced. Experience has taught top techs that nobody can just tell you what is wrong based on a symptom, but we can tell you how to test and prove what is wrong.
  
  In some of the threads here in the forums we have discussed the issues about only replacing the spark plugs on today's cars and this actually dates back into the mid 80's once computer controls hit the scene and the engines were designed to run a leaner air fuel ratio. (I promise that I'll try and do this without writing an entire book on engine performance so there may be some portions of this that deserve to be explained in greater detail). In the podcast Mr. Lehto praises the shop for only replacing the plugs and not the plug wires. That is actually a mistake on the shop's part and anyone who listens to the podcast who doesn't know better could listen to Mr. Lehto and then stop trusting a shop or the technician who correctly advises to replace both as a set.
  
  There are several things that happen when someone tries to do only the plugs, or only the wires. As the boots deteriorate from the engine heat and simple aging that not only weakens their insulating capability but it also causes them to harden. In that condition when they are removed and re-installed on the plugs they cause microscopic scratches on the insulating porcelain of spark plug. Any damage to that surface can allow spark to start to jump outside of the cylinder instead of across the gap of the plug. When that happens it results in carbon tracking of the plug and the plug-boot. We learned this the hard way back in the 80's and 90's when we used to still pull plugs to inspect them. Back then it was quite common to pull and inspect the plugs and quite often we found nothing wrong with them, so we would re-gap them and put them back in. Then, and it could be a few days to a few months later the car would come back and now it had a misfire that it didn't have only a few days before and we would then find an external carbon track on the plugs. The real fun then was that if you didn't replace both the plug and the wire at that point was you ended up re-transferring that carbon track from which ever component you didn't replace to the one that you did and the car would keep developing repeated misfire conditions until someone finally came along and replaced all of the plugs and wires at the same time.
  
  This didn't happen in the 70's and earlier cars but it happened frequently when leaner engine designs became the norm. Today when you are driving your car down the highway it takes anywhere from around 9000v to some 20,000v to fire the spark plugs depending on the operating conditions.(avg. 12000v-15000v) The richer air fuel ratio's of the older cars only required 5000v to 12,000v so even though the same scratches could occur to the older model plugs the spark demand inside the cylinder simply wasn't usually high enough to force the spark to get to jump outside of the spark plug like newer cars can.
  
  The things that contribute to the spark demand voltage that is required to ionize the gap of a plug are primarily the air fuel ratio in the cylinder, the compression of the cylinder, the plug gap, and the timing of when the plug is fired. It gets pretty complicated but essentially the leaner the air/fuel ratio the higher the voltage demand will be. The same goes for compression, the higher the compression the greater the demand voltage as well as the closer the ignition timing is to TDC and the wider the plug gap. As a technician road testing a car many misfires can be proven to be ignition spark leakage related by simply understanding this and operating the vehicle during a road test in ways that cause the spark demand voltage to be raised and lowered to see if the tendency for the cylinder to misfire changes. When you take all of this into perspective and especially since the number one reason to try and prevent misfires is to protect the catalytic convertor one should avoid inspecting and re-installing spark plugs or replace only the plugs or the wires (plug boots coil on plug) individually. 

Got a few minutes? Check out this lawyers podcast. Part 1

• Got nineteen minutes to spare? Then sit back and take a listen to the podcast that I mentioned above.
  
  In it he talks about some shops telling a consumer that there is a law that makes it illegal for the owner to take their car if the brakes are found to be unsafe. He is correct in that there is no such law. Now if he stopped right there then there would be no issue, but as you will see he carries this out and makes a number of other statements that really need to be examined closer.
  
  While there is no law that states the shop can keep the owner from taking the car, the shop can be held liable if something did happen when the owner does take the car. This kind of thing is sort of like playing the game of "Cups and Balls" with Penn and Teller. From the shops point of view they have as much of a chance at being held liable for someone else's actions as you do of knowing which cup the ball is under. In this example, you could replay the video or else back it up and then you would get the answer for a given event, but shops don't get to have that kind of an option.
  
  One of the key points that Mr. Lehto tries to make is "If the brakes were that unsafe, how did the owner get the car there in the first place?" The answer is without the owner having total regard for him/herself nor the other motorists that were out there on the road with them. Frankly I don't think there is a law against that either. but maybe he will finally chime in and let everyone know. (Doubtful)
  
  In a real event where a car is genuinely unsafe to be driven the only safe thing that the shop can do is have the car towed to where-ever the owner wants it to go and if the owner won't pay to do that then the shop should. The laws that are on the books don't protect the shop from liability at that point no matter what is signed in the form of a waiver, or how much documentation has taken place so they might as well go ahead and lose a little right now instead of risking even the time that it would take to fight any other legal challenges. At least once the car is on the tow truck the shop has truly done the best that they could under the circumstances at that point in time. Now "some" lawyers will probably argue that and make a good point one way or the other but they still look like Teller with the "Cups and Balls" from my point of view. BTW, the advice of having the car towed from the shop comes from the repair associations lawyer and even they say that the customer can still refuse that solution, drive the car away and turn around and try and hold the shop liable if something does happen.
  
  Later in that podcast Mr. Lehto talks about a shop that he goes to and recommends. He talks a good bit about how he bought a used car that he took to them and he trusts them so much that he told them to do anything and everything that the car needed, no questions asked. I'll discuss that with the next post.

A Response to a Lemon Law Lawyer

Mr. Steve Lehto  posted an article on the web that can be found here.

http://carbuying.jalopnik.com/top-5-ways-mechanics-rip-off-customers-1717682723

It deserved a response which I posted there and am re-posting here........

Do you think this essay is going to change anything for the consumer? Beyond trying to stir up more contempt for an already troubled trade what was the real intention of writing this? Don’t you see this as just another attempt to create a problem so that the author gets to try to be the solution aka "The Hero"?

Take this essay and most of the derogatory responses and put them all together and you see a picture of people on the outside who have no idea what it actually takes to be the shop and especially the technician that the consumer needs at the ready. Unlike many other careers, when it comes to really mastering the craft it takes some twenty years after tech school to really excel at being “a mechanic”, with one caveat and that would be if the cars didn’t change. So really when it comes to mastering being an automotive technician there is no finish line, the learning never stops. Time and again you will see anecdotal stories about some problem that occurred where a technician failed and someone with little to no experience ended up the hero. The truth is that majority of those “stories” leave out a lot of the details and just like one of the comments above where multiple issues have to be dealt with before a car is completely repaired everyone is fast to the assumption that only the last thing that needed done was “THE PROBLEM”. The reality is while that can be the case it is usually the exception and the more common and real situation is people often put off getting their car serviced when the first problem occurs, and then when a second or third (and on and on) until something finally forces their hand and they have to get it attended to.  The dilemma for the automotive technician then is which problem(s) should he/she attend to? Try to identify and fix them all and this essay and many of the responses paint a picture of them being unethical. Meanwhile only attend to the worst one, or some of them in any fashion and the tech now gets to be viewed as incompetent and the stage is set for someone else to play the hero role.  After a few years of dealing with that kind of nonsense and the consumer pressure from it what ultimately ends up occurring is the tech leaves the trade for greener grass and that is usually well before the twenty odd years that it takes for someone with the right kind of intellect and natural talent to genuinely become a master at the trade.

Today the cars don’t break like they used to, service intervals have been extended and those two facts that consumers really should love about today’s cars have a dark side. Since the cars don’t break as often as they used to there is less work for the shops and technicians to perform. On top of that the work that does come through the door today is best described by this statement. After nearly forty years as a technician, three out of five things that I do today are something that I have never seen before and it is very unlikely that I will see twice. For myself as a technician that’s OK, I’ve studied and invested in myself for my entire career and am perfectly suited to work at that level. But what about someone fresh out of trade school? That person is fifteen to twenty years of hard work and endless study from being ready to step into place after my career is finished. Oh, I almost forgot to mention the prospective person that the consumer needs to enter the automobile repair trade today is the same one that is usually headed off to engineering school. Coming out of engineering school that young person expects to have a career that will see them making six digits and have great benefits. You do realize that is something they are unlikely to ever see repairing cars even though its getting to be the same job when you really understand the robotics that make today’s cars work. So here we are needing that young man or woman to come into this trade to better serve you the consumer and what you are really doing with this article and its comments is making it less likely that will occur.

There is a reason that lawyers need input from expert witnesses and this article demonstrates that quite nicely. In training classes we often challenge the students with a relatively simple sounding question. “What is a trouble code?” Mr. Lehto the author of this article in all likelihood cannot answer that simple question correctly and the same would go for the majority of the responders here. That’s OK because they aren’t technicians and haven’t really studied the technology that is used  to get a computer to generate a trouble code. Inside the trade many junior technicians today also cannot answer that question either and that of course is a problem.  The senior technicians inside the trade who are also instructors want our new generation of technicians to not only be able to answer that question they need to be able to deal with questions that are infinitely more difficult.

To the consumers who recognize that they need talented technicians to service their cars you should see what Mr. Lehto has done here is essentially added one more obstacle towards getting them the training that you need them to have. As a lemon law lawyer maybe that’s what his real intentions are. Without techs that can actually fix the cars, he’d have more work and make more money. If he is really concerned about the consumer wouldn’t doing something that would make it be more likely for you to find talented technicians who would fix your car correctly the first time do more for you instead?

Before I rant on all day a few closing comments about some of the comments. No shop could suddenly charge labor alone and stop generating profits from the sales of parts and survive. Consumer pricing pressure simply wouldn’t tolerate what the labor rates would need to be. For anyone who has ever solved some automotive issue and think that is the measure of your technical prowess, why didn’t you become an automotive technician in the first place? Maybe, just maybe, you have the kind of talent that could have let you become the technician that the trade and consumers really need (needed). How much would you have demanded to be paid to be a technician as compared to what you did choose for a career? Were you simply not willing to give up the potential for your present lifestyle for the meager one that being a technician would have afforded you?  

The trade faces a significant shortage of qualified technicians that is some forty plus years in creating. Now combine that with the real demands that make it take twenty plus years to become the master technician today and you have a real problem that won’t be corrected anytime soon and all of the negativity and hate in the comments will only serve to make that be even longer.

It's good to be getting back up to speed.

Hi Everyone.

It's been a while since I've been blogging and you deserve to know what's been going on. In November I had surgery to reduce the pressure on my spinal cord in my neck. The discs had all failed and were causing spinal stenosis. The surgery performed fused C2 through C6 and the recovery forced us to shut the shop down. In order to get by we sold our flat bed truck and leaned heavily on providing training classes.

One of the other things that I have started doing is a lot more of the mobile diagnostics. Between already having all of the tools that were required and the fact that a lot of the physical side of the job has become much more challenging for me it just made sense. While its taking a lot longer for that to grow than I would prefer it has been a good experience. Meanwhile things are shaping up at home. Instead of working one hundred hour weeks, which is known as living to work, there has been a lot more time to be in the house and attend to its needs and I find myself working just enough to live. Well, almost anyway. Things have to pick up a bit as money is getting a little too tight on occasion but considering what we have gone through it could be worse. I'll be investigating some other avenues and hopefully the writing that I have been doing for free up to this time will start to generate some return.

My ABC 20/20 comments

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.

Another attack on technicians, with no regard for the actual outcome.

here is the book on Amazon

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KEW9ENS

I haven't bought this book, nor will I. There is no reason to believe that anything new will be discussed in it. The one thing that I can agree with the author about is that good techs(mechanics) want the bad ones out because they ruin things for everyone. Where this book is going to fail, just like every other attempt to educate the consumer is that everyone lays the blame for the overselling on the technicians without really getting involved in examining why it happens. If that is never done the only thing that will continue to change is the number of qualified shops and techs who can repair vehicle problems when they occur.

Just imagine where the consumer will be without truly qualified technicians, who don't oversell and strive to do exactly what the customer needs each and every time. The dealerships and chain stores don't favor these people because their productivity is typically lower per hour than the ones who are selling services, while they demand a better pay rate and benefits. There are many reasons for that, not the least of which is the way the flat rate pay is managed especially at the dealerships. Imagine doing a major repair such as a head-gasket on an engine, or some internal transmission work. If it is customer pay "the book" allows for one labor rate, while warranty pays maybe half for the exact same job. They call it flat rate, but there is nothing flat about it and the technicians routinely get taken advantage of. Meanwhile they are being trained to sell services in order to make up the time that gets lost when they do a warranty repair. If they don't sell those services which they must do in order to be profitable by the end of the week, the technician can end up losing his/her job, even if they have perfect quality in their workmanship with the more difficult repairs.

Consumers will read that and quickly write it off as not their problem but that is because they aren't looking at the long term effects of the management practices that have been in place for the last twenty to thirty years. Today inside the trade we see a serious shortage of qualified technicians. The ones that are carrying the real high tech load are typically in their late 40's and up and life is going to do what life does and they will all too soon be gone from the trade.

What this author likely doesn't understand is that is exactly what the dealerships and the manufacturers want, because when you can't get your vehicle repaired efficiently and correctly that will drive sales of new cars. Some may think "so what", or they may think that it doesn't make sense for them to not have qualified techs to service their cars and generate resales. The facts are if someone is dissatisfied with their present vehicle, they worst they will do is switch to a different manufacturer for their next purchase. Meanwhile someone else will be doing the same thing in the other direction. That's a win/win for the manufacturers and the dealers at the consumers and the auto technicians expense.

There once was a time when there was a shop on every street corner. You don't see that anymore do you? Between the cars getting better and requiring less repairs and now longer service intervals, shops have been closing with no-one in line to replace them. There was once a time when a tech could have a career plan that ultimately lead to owning a business. That has all but been destroyed due in part to the cost of the tools and equipment required to open a shop, let alone the rent for (or cost of)  a properly zoned location. On top of that the wages produced by today's pay-scales for technicians puts that goal well out of reach. You might be paying $100/hr for their services, but most techs make under $20/hr. To add to the problems is the need to specialize inside the trade No-one can do it all anymore, and especially the idea that one can work on all makes and models. It is simply too expensive to tool up and train for even a handful of manufacturers and any business that cannot generate a return on its investment is doomed to fail. That makes the career of being an auto technician little more than a dead end job, that gets attacked at every turn, which BTW is all this author is really accomplishing with this book, and of course the feedback to it.

No one ever considers the natural reaction to the action of attacking the trade like this. Here is what the ultimate outcome from this book will be.

It is correct that overselling is wrong, no argument about that at all the author is right on the money with that perspective. But what constitutes over selling VS making correct inspections and advising the consumer about their car? IMO the latter is always going to be subjective opinions, nothing more, nothing less. When a tech, especially a younger one takes to heart the suggestion that selling is wrong they naturally stop selling completely and the result is in fact another wrong when they fail to recommend proper service that is truly needed on someones car and that ends up causing an otherwise preventable mechanical failure. The consumer involved may then go back to the shop laying appropriate blame on them and the result is another nail in that techs coffin and they move ever closer to doing something else with their lives. Think about it, how many times do you see someone say they that are an ex-mechanic? They demonstrate knowledge and passion, yet they weren't able to make a career as a technician. Isn't it time that someone starts asking why?

Lastly, doesn't it seem strange that the manufacturers and the dealerships never rebut these books and articles, in part or in whole? It's not because they agree or disagree with any of the points that get made. The facts are these things all lead right to where they want to be anyway, and that is a shorter turn over of the vehicle fleet. They don't want cars out there that last several hundred thousand miles and fifteen to twenty years (or more). They darn sure don't want people who can make them last that long either, because it is expensive for them to train and provide the equipment and tooling to do so, and they make more money selling the cars anyway. It takes decades to learn to be the technician that consumers need us to have, and as one former shop owner puts it we have become a trade that eats its own young. We haven't been attracting the people that we truly need to work on the high tech computerized systems that are on today's cars because as a career we have nothing to offer them compared to what they can earn in other fields. On top of that it takes a truly capable person some twenty years to master the trade and even if they started coming into it tomorrow, there is no reason for them to stay in it long enough to get good at it.

Instead of praising this author, thank her for helping to contribute to you being less likely to finding a great technician that can solve the difficult problems that can occur on today's cars. That is really the only thing that comes from any of these efforts because they never look at the actual cause for the problem and try and effect any changes where the blame really lies.