If you’ve been challenged by the manufacturer and dealer with a lemon-colored vehicle, you’ve probably wondered why they didn’t just fix the problem and let you get on with your life. Didn’t you start your day thinking, how can I get the manufacturer or this %$%^$& dealer to pay? You would be happy for them to do their thing and let you do your thing.
Getting a Lemon Law attorney is pretty low on the list, if you knew there was such a thing. But it happens and it will continue to happen. This is an unfortunate fact of life, particularly in a society that loves its cars.
Cars are more than essential to our daily lives; they are at the very heart of our economy. This is big business at its finest. Even car dealerships are becoming big business.
It’s an unfortunate axiom in business that when the going gets tough, departmental budgets are slashed.
Two departments that always come first are training and quality. Common sense tells us that these are the absolute last places to make cuts. It would make much more sense to go to each department and arbitrarily eliminate two levels of management. People who are pouring their work into each other, creating little kingdoms whose measure of success is the number of staff, would be forced to produce with fewer people bumping into each other. Simplifying management would exponentially speed up the flow of work through the organization. It’s sad that common sense is so rarely applied.
Untrained workers are a liability. This is a fact. Allowing them to remain untrained or intentionally withhold training to improve the dealer’s bottom line is worse than ignorance, bordering on criminal.
At the dealership, we are at the mercy of the people who work on our car. In the world of modern auto mechanics, we now call them technicians, lack of training is the source of staggering inefficiencies, lost or outright infuriated customers, significant warranty costs for manufacturers, and sometimes loss of life.
If you’re saying, “it can’t be that bad.” Think again. The need for well-trained auto mechanics, or technicians if you prefer, is a national issue and it’s not getting better even though auto mechanic schools are springing up in every town and city.
More in the common sense department: Thousands of Lemon vehicles are replaced or refunded each year. Many of these cars had problems so complex that dealership technicians couldn’t properly diagnose and repair them. You imagine that being a large dealership, there must be people trained to repair what they sell. This assumption is as flawed as the cars they can’t repair. The manufacturer must assume part of the problem to be sure. After all, it’s your responsibility to make sure your dealer staff is trained on every new car model.
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he need for auto mechanics is so desperate in some parts of the country that dealerships offer auto mechanics who are tech school graduates, substantial signing bonuses, like a Bakersfield high school baseball phenom. True, it is not in the millions. The big car dealers will happily pay tuition for technical school students, as long as they can get them when they graduate. It is a complex problem.
Here are some of the key factors that add to this complexity:
– Older mechanics are leaving the industry to take another job. It’s too hard to stay trained, to keep up.
– The pressures of working at a modern dealership start to outweigh the benefits, especially when any technician with an ounce of decency finds their integrity compromised at every turn.
– The equipment for servicing the modern car is incredibly expensive. A modern diagnostic machine can cost $20,000 or more, and keep in mind that this machine will only work with one or, at best, a few vehicle models. Every day, across America, independent auto repair shops are closing for the simple reason that they can’t afford to buy the equipment needed to work on the modern computer-managed automobile. Even if they could afford the machines, they can’t find anyone trained to use them.
– Many older mechanics fear and hate technology; they don’t want to work on anything that has a computer (that’s every new car made in the last ten years).
– Technical school graduates in automotive maintenance technology often switch to other jobs in computer fields that don’t require them to crawl under vehicles – all that dirt and grease you know.
Technician retention is a serious problem. Because of the competition for a well-trained technician, dealerships must offer more money and benefits to keep these special employees. The turnover rate at dealerships is much higher than most organizations of equivalent size in other industries.
The flat fee payment system leads mechanics and dealers to cheat. It’s an altered time problem. The customer is spending as little time as possible on their problems, while the technician bills the maximum number of hours allowed. The dealer encourages the technician to do this as a stated efficiency factor. It’s money for the dealer, of course.
There is so much to learn with the new models coming out each year that technicians can’t keep up. And now it’s not just the mechanical systems, it’s also the software and electronic integration of all the electromechanical systems of the cars. Somewhere along the way this job went from blue collar to white collar, from grease to pocket protector geek. But, mothers and fathers do not encourage their sons and daughters to enter the field of automotive maintenance because they still think that it is a low-level job. It really is a shame, since it can pay quite well and it is a profession that requires a high degree of knowledge.
Dealerships cut training hours the moment the bottom line appears to be in trouble.
Considering all these factors, it is surprising that someone would want to enter the industry. The auto repair technician profession has become a white collar job in a blue collar world. Here’s another factor, which may seem more like opinion than fact. The typical auto mechanic or technician doesn’t get a lot of respect. For a variety of reasons, auto mechanics do not enjoy a great professional reputation. The average car owner when he talks about his mechanic is a skeptic: suspicious, fearful and willing to exercise violence. The average citizen speaks of his mechanic in terms usually reserved for politicians and perverts. This answer is unfair and inaccurate. It’s definitely emotional.
There is a reason for this. Joe Citizen’s reaction to his mechanic isn’t just bad judgment or perversity. People react to events in direct proportion to their effect on survival. How important is a car to your survival? In Los Angeles, it’s just as important as the food. How well the car runs absolutely affects the quality of life. There is a lot of emotion associated with survival.
These attitudes are not entirely unjustified. Do you remember how you felt when you bought your first new car? There was excitement, the pleasure of having done something as an adult, earned and saved enough money to make one of the largest purchases an American can make. And the satisfaction of having a new car: “New”! This is very special indeed.
As car owners, we have no way of knowing that the technician working on our car has never been trained on the vehicle’s electronics. The flat rate mechanic pay system encourages the technician to work as fast as possible, not as best as possible. The following quote is really meaningful here.
“People forget how quickly you did a job, but they remember how well you did it.” — Anonymous
The service writer does not verify the skills of the technician he or she assigns to do the job. So when the electronic control system computer fails due to poor design or a software glitch, and the technician changes some other component, like the emission control valve, the owner walks away thinking everything is fine. Then, before the owner gets home, the vehicle exhibits the same problem. This is called “betrayal after trust,” and nothing is more likely to infuriate a buyer. When the owner is looking for someone to manhandle, he shoots, whatever level of anger is required of him, naturally targeting the tech. Training is not something you do because it looks good in an ad.
“If we deliver on time, but the product has defects, we have not delivered on time.” Philip Crosby Let’s talk about quality, 1989
What will we get from the untrained technician/mechanic? We got the car back but it’s not fixed. If this continues, it is a betrayal of our trust, plain and simple. Certainly, it would not be out of place for the consumer to ask about the training of the technician who works on our car. We would like to know if the doctor who made holes in our body was qualified. Keep in mind that a defective lemon vehicle can cause irreparable holes in its bodywork.