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.
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