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.