The data for long term maintenance can be found but for example the government could mandate it be published for car models to give consumers more insight and be a lever to incentivize designing cars to be more easily maintainable (e.g. not have to remove a truck's cab to replace an oil filter gasket!) https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-maintenance/the-cos...
While that's true, there is some market clearing price in which the activity just ceases to exist.
For instance, take something with a small marginal benefit like a dedicated person at a supermarket to bag groceries. It's a nice to have but the value to the employer is probably less than a $15 minimum wage. So you could say there is a shortage of grocery baggers since there is no one willing to do it at a market clearing price.
Doesn't mean we should do anything about it. There will always be some extra activity that would take place at a lower price, but it's worth while to notice that.
> While that's true, there is some market clearing price in which the activity just ceases to exist.
The article cites a mechanic commenting on Ford CEO's remarks on lack of mechanics by referring to how Ford fails to pay rates for warranty repairs that justify the volume of work required to pull them off.
This suggests the root cause is the automaker's refusal to pay for warranty work at a market rate.
The article raises some points on how Ford both designed cars that are too expensive to repair and fails to pay mechanics to make their product line attractive for any maintenance business. This doesn't sound like a market efficiency issue.
While reading the article, the now-less-common business of vacuum and TV repair came to mind. I imagine it's easier than ever to repair vacuums, with improved tools and free internet repositories of schematics. But I only know of one store still doing this within 5 miles of my house. I haven't asked former vacuum repairmen, but my guess as to the reasons:
1) Labor costs go up with inflation
2) Rent goes up
3) New vacuum prices go down
At some point in the past, the downward line of vacuum price crossed over the upward line of repair cost. That's when this profession cratered.
Cars may have a while until that price point hits. But the quoted mechanic's suggestion that engineers optimize for simpler repairs instead of simpler production may be something similar. If simpler production makes the price of a new car $X cheaper, but increases the labor cost of repairs over the car's lifetime by $Y, there could be a time when X > Y.
I remember reading an article about the last TV repair shop in Chicago many years ago in the Chicago Reader.
This would have been in the early 2010s.
The reporter asked the owner why TV repair was dying: were TVs getting too complicated? Help too hard to find or too expensive? Nope, the owner said it was 100% parts availability. The vast majority of business coming through the door he'd have to turn away because manufacturers didn't want him repairing their equipment.
There may sometimes be a tradeoff for manufacturability vs repairability but even when there is not -- holding everything else equal -- manufacturers will choose the less repairable option because they perceive it to be in their interest to do so.
That is because there is not a cost for the disposal of the broken vacuum. Imagine if we paid by the weight of our trash. Some of the right to repair laws are trying to change that by requiring replacement parts be available to purchase. https://www.repair.org/know-your-rights
A quick note to say that at our local repair cafe we do a roaring trade in vacuum repairs for peanuts (not literal peanuts; though some of our repairers do get peckish). If you're in Europe, there's chance you have one nearby. https://repaircafe.org/en
Could you please go in to a bit more detail on how you set that up, how you handle issues, etc? I'm a member of a makerspace, and there's been discussions about doing something similar. There's just not a consensus about how to go about it.
TVs and vacuum cleaners are now a lot cheaper AND more reliable then they used to be.
Cars have become more reliable and relatively cheaper then they used to be, but they are a lot more expensive so have a long way to go until that point is reached.
It's not clear to me what the difference is between what you're saying and what the parent comment says. Not being willing to pay the wages necessary to hire someone is pretty much exactly what they're saying as well.
> It's not clear to me what the difference is between what you're saying and what the parent comment says.
The key difference is whether rentism plays a role or not.
It's one thing to claim that no one will pay a mechanic if it's too expensive. It's an entirely different thing to claim that some employers are abusing their position to pressure wages to stay low to maximize their profit margin at the expense of their employees.
There's a good litmus test: is there a massive wave of car shop bankruptcies due to lack of business? Or are car shop owners complaining they can't get enough employees to keep up with demand?
They agree that corporations don't do things that aren't profitable, their implied disagreement is whether this is greedy/bad or merely rational/amoral.
Demand is a function of price. At any given price there is a quantity demanded. To know the price you also need to know the supply function. There is a demand for socks but if no one is will to supply socks for less a million dollars, the quantity demanded of socks at that price could be 0.
In a free market, commodity-level jobs will only happen at commodity-level wages. But it's not a free market, because of minimum wage laws. If you set the minimum wage too high, the number of baggers may go to zero, not because of supply but because of demand - the price is higher than any grocery store is willing to pay.
You can argue about the need for the minimum wage laws. You can argue about the morality of paying a living wage. But that's a different argument.
In some countries there's something called a "minimum wage" that sets the minimum value of a job that is allowed to exist, and any job that isn't worth that amount ceases to exist, or has fewer people doing it, or has partial or full automation doing it.
There’s a demand, but the price we want to pay for “grocery baggers” is usually less than minimum wage, so the job usually can’t (legally) exist. The cost (wage) is fixed higher than the value added.
Not really, when you consider both the interests of the buyer or the seller. The buyer of course would rather like goods and services be cheaper. It might be tempting to say that "people" deserve special consideration over "goods", it breaks down when you consider that goods are also made by people. Moreover gatekeeping whether you can use the characterization of "we can't get ... for cheap" depending on whether the seller is sympathetic or not (ie. "people" vs "goods") is a blatant way of smuggling in a conclusion via wording, similar to "terrorists" vs "freedom fighters".
I don't think this is correct. The reasons economists separate capital and labor is that they do have different characteristics. Labor has skill, capital can have technology. Assets exist regardless of utilization, labor cannot be stored up in an inventory since labor is time which flows inexorably onwards.
A shortage of an asset is a reflection of inventory levels. A shortage of labor reflects a lack of skill or time OR a lack of willingness to pay for that skill and time.
Honestly, between how soft-science macroeconomcis is, combined with the fact that this planet does not contain a single person willing to argue about it in good faith, makes it simply impossible to have real conversations around it, especially on the internet.
Ya, and then people wonder why cars are so expensive to repair these days also. The market is at a breaking point, efficiency has to go along with the higher pay or it just won’t work out.
I recently acquired a new (to me) 2017 vehicle and took it to my independent mechanic who has been working on my cars for years. He is registered with the mfg. and has access to many of their proprietary diagnostics and tools, but warned me that there is very little he can do on the latest models. They are basically 'return to dealer' because of 'software'.
Skilled labor (such as mechanics) require training and apprenticeship pipelines. If those pipelines don’t exist or are starved of people it doesn’t matter how much you’re willing to pay right now. Long term sure you can make that career path more appealing but it can and often is absolutely the case that companies would pay out the nose for employees with particular skills and are unable to find anyone. But sure let’s go with the standard Reddit pablum, why give it more thought than that?
That's what a shortage is, a short-term undersupply. Market forces will eventually correct the problem if allowed to operate normally (e.g. prices spike, incentivizing more supply), but like you said that takes time. If it's a shortage of goods it can take a while to ramp up production. If it's a shortage of skilled labor it can take a while for people to learn those skills. Either way it's fundamentally the same type of problem.
Agreed. It kinda worked for software for a bit since it was such a new field, so there could’ve been some truth to it just as a matter of time to get the systems in place to educate people.
It was a good view into what exactly the car companies are doing, but essentially it was "we're getting underpaid" with extra steps.
The car companies have basically set up a monopsony with cartels, squeezed the mechanics out, and are now complaining that they squeezed them out too much.
The "design for unmaintainability" problem has been around for a while. I remember helping a friend change his plugs on this Ford Ranger in the early 90s. The closest two plugs to the firewall required you to climb into the engine bay and basically hug the engine to get your arm into position to blindly get to the plugs. If you look around on YouTube you'll see some crazy mechanic videos where they show things like bolts located in impossible to loosen locations.
Cars used to be simpler to work on because a) they inherently were simpler and b) the engine bay used to have a lot of room to work in. Both of these things are not coming back.
No, it's because they are designed to be assembled from complete sub-assemblies. Maintenance is not assumed to be done on the sub-assemblies while they are in the final product. Under warranty, workshops are intended to replace entire sub-assemblies with new/rebuilt parts.
It's effectively a deliberate decision from the 80s that enabled faster assembly while warranties were shorter. For cars that are out of warranty, it doesn't matter either way.
The problem in the article occurs when Ford tries to pay someone to repair faults that were not planned to happen during the warranty time. Impossible, because it's completely uneconomical.
I've encountered these headaches helping friends with their vehicles, and every time I'm reminded how much I prefer wrenching on my 80s-90s era mazdas.
My old protege even had an access port in the fender well added specifically to remove the crank bolt with an extension. If it were an Audi the FSM would point you to the engine removal process as step 1.
It's kind of always been that way to varying degrees. In the 70's/80's, changing the Porsche 911 spark plugs required dropping the engine.
Also, in addition to planned obsolescence and repair hostility is Design for Manufacturing (DfM) that doesn't care about maintainability, safety, comfort, or durability, only lowest cost to shove things together on an assembly line. This is why there are some cars that require removing the wheel well to change the oil filter and other that have things completely out-of-order or require absurd tools to service. My grandfather was a 30 year Chrysler dealer mechanic who had a dozen or so custom tools for very specific purposes.
Source: Dad had an A/C & electrical mechanic shop next to a Porsche specialist shop.
Luckily you don't have go drop the engine to change spark plugs on modern water cooled Porsche 911s, but let me tell you about changing plugs on mid-engined Cayman/Boxster platform. The 4 cylinder cars are easier but 6 cylinder cars require 3-4 different combinations of sockets and extensions and tiny European hands to really get in there.
>Also, in addition to planned obsolescence and repair hostility is Design for Manufacturing (DfM) that doesn't care about maintainability, safety, comfort, or durability, only lowest cost to shove things together on an assembly line.
Exactly. It's basically fight club math. Spend $10 on a click-fit connector that can't be disassembled but that a $60/hr (though they only see a fraction of that) UAW laborer can plug in in half the time can't easily short-insert that can be visually checked.
The fact that it costs $200 the 1/10000 times it fails under warranty doesn't matter with those numbers. And you don't even care about the 100/100 times it fails at 2-3x the warranty period.
Of course, you're burning credibility doing this. But credibility doesn't have an obvious mapping to a number and stonk go up, KPI go up, bonus get paid, nobody cares.
Emperor has no clothes. Instagram is full of videos by mechanics explaining this or that brand/model is stupidly engineered. Known problem. And mechanics do not have a seat at the table where these matters are discussed and decided upon. Unless he plans to change that…
Auto mechanics do things to "flat rate" where each task is listed as taking a given amount of time. There seems to be a lot of variation between what the book says, and how long the tasks actually take. How are these flat rates assessed? I wonder if it's assuming a new car with no complications or wear and tear to components, or rust etc.
Book rates are often set by the manufacturer. In theory, they have a mechanic do the job and time it. The real big problem is warranty work is only paid at a fraction of the book rate. So if a job normally takes three hours if you do it under warranty, you only get paid for two hours. It’s a massive disincentive for mechanics to work long-term for a brand-name dealership that sells new cars. They always run the risk of getting shafted by too much warranty work.
There's some similarity here to US medical/dental insurance. Some work obviously needs to be done, but the entity that promised to pay for it won't. The system adapts (or fails).
I'm pretty sure the manufacturer does pay for the warranty repair. But only at the fractional rate. The dealership effectively passes that loss onto its employees. Working for a small, independent shop can have better wage/salary, but often lacks benefits (health care in particular) and comes with all the usual downsides of a small business (one bad owner/manager can ruin the experience).
If they assess that a repair needs three hours, then only pay two hours of work if it's under warranty, I don't see how that doesn't mean that either they know that the book estimate is an overestimate and reimburse the correct amount, or the book estimate is correct and the dealership effectivley assumes 33% of the warranty risk because they only get reimbursed for 66% of the repair cost. (the third alternative is that the book estimate is underestimating, but that's basically the second case, but worse).
Neither of those cases looks like fair business dealings
Electric cars need a lot fewer mechanical repairs. Sounds like yet more reasons to avoid buying one of these overpriced over complicated petro vehicles.
If only I could find one that isn't a spy platform. That's a problem with all vehicles that are too new, not just EVs. That makes new cars a nonstarter for me, which as a side-effect makes all EVs a nonstarter for me.
I'm curious how in-depth you've been looking, especially investigating models where you can do a little bit of work to do things like unplug cell modems. I'm somewhat in need of a new vehicle and have just assumed the whole market is trash based of what I've read online and the new cars I've seen people get. But I'm hoping I've missed some gems of online communities still managing to eek out some freedom (and physical buttons, of course).
Sounds like you have no idea how dangerous is to put your hands around electric car batteries and how expensive certified electricians are. Without a mechanic that ALSO has an advanced expert certification for high voltage electronics, the blown BMS or contactor (500$) becomes a whole battery to scrap (20k). Then you add the 6 hours of diagnostics and labor on top of it.
Electric vehicles are not an arduino circuit with a couple of led and an usb cable.
There are a few basic things you have to not do in order to work on an EV, basically the same rules as for airbag systems but with physically larger components.
No modern car is electrically simple, but they all do a pretty good job telling you where you ought to be looking.
Does it really matter? If the article is poor quality, then it is poor quality. It doesn't matter if it was written by a person or an LLM. I'm more annoyed how so many articles waste time quoting things people say on social media.
So basically they refuse to pay a reasonable hourly rate. They pay flat fee perfect world rates that cause mechanics to lose money when they encounter real world problems.
As always the worker shortage is a “there’s a shortage of skilled workers who refuse to get screwed on pay”
It is very often like that. Employers like to play capitalism with employees, but when tables turn and employees will start playing capitalism with employers then it is suddenly a big problem and ideally government should be involved to help poor little employer out.
No it's not. People pay market rate salaries to compete with other employers also wanting those people. Everyone's "playing" capitalism, as free agreements are better than people being forced to do what their master / guild / bureaucrat tells them to do.
Car companies don't want you to be able to work on these cars. They would much rather you either buy a new car or use their 3x the cost parts and services.
No, "learn to code" was the supply-side response of people who saw software engineers get paid shittons of money. This is a demand-side CEO lamenting the fact that he can't get people to fix cars for cheap, so literally the opposite problem.
The other day I listened to The Verge's Decoder episode with the Ford CEO [0] and unlike most other CEOs, he almost felt genuine. There was a noticeable lack of BS. Have I been played?
The lack of mechanics was mentioned and I recall him saying that they're building up apprenticeship programs and the US should take more pride in blue collar work.
The data for long term maintenance can be found but for example the government could mandate it be published for car models to give consumers more insight and be a lever to incentivize designing cars to be more easily maintainable (e.g. not have to remove a truck's cab to replace an oil filter gasket!) https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-maintenance/the-cos...
As usual, low pay + increasing task complexity, YoY.
Nothing there has changed for decades except the world around it.
Hard physical labor, increasingly complex work, low pay. That mix will make any job interest dry up.
Every single time someone says "there's a shortage of <profession>", you can mentally substitute it for "we can't get <profession> for cheap".
While that's true, there is some market clearing price in which the activity just ceases to exist.
For instance, take something with a small marginal benefit like a dedicated person at a supermarket to bag groceries. It's a nice to have but the value to the employer is probably less than a $15 minimum wage. So you could say there is a shortage of grocery baggers since there is no one willing to do it at a market clearing price.
Doesn't mean we should do anything about it. There will always be some extra activity that would take place at a lower price, but it's worth while to notice that.
> While that's true, there is some market clearing price in which the activity just ceases to exist.
The article cites a mechanic commenting on Ford CEO's remarks on lack of mechanics by referring to how Ford fails to pay rates for warranty repairs that justify the volume of work required to pull them off.
This suggests the root cause is the automaker's refusal to pay for warranty work at a market rate.
The article raises some points on how Ford both designed cars that are too expensive to repair and fails to pay mechanics to make their product line attractive for any maintenance business. This doesn't sound like a market efficiency issue.
While reading the article, the now-less-common business of vacuum and TV repair came to mind. I imagine it's easier than ever to repair vacuums, with improved tools and free internet repositories of schematics. But I only know of one store still doing this within 5 miles of my house. I haven't asked former vacuum repairmen, but my guess as to the reasons:
1) Labor costs go up with inflation
2) Rent goes up
3) New vacuum prices go down
At some point in the past, the downward line of vacuum price crossed over the upward line of repair cost. That's when this profession cratered.
Cars may have a while until that price point hits. But the quoted mechanic's suggestion that engineers optimize for simpler repairs instead of simpler production may be something similar. If simpler production makes the price of a new car $X cheaper, but increases the labor cost of repairs over the car's lifetime by $Y, there could be a time when X > Y.
I remember reading an article about the last TV repair shop in Chicago many years ago in the Chicago Reader.
This would have been in the early 2010s.
The reporter asked the owner why TV repair was dying: were TVs getting too complicated? Help too hard to find or too expensive? Nope, the owner said it was 100% parts availability. The vast majority of business coming through the door he'd have to turn away because manufacturers didn't want him repairing their equipment.
There may sometimes be a tradeoff for manufacturability vs repairability but even when there is not -- holding everything else equal -- manufacturers will choose the less repairable option because they perceive it to be in their interest to do so.
That is because there is not a cost for the disposal of the broken vacuum. Imagine if we paid by the weight of our trash. Some of the right to repair laws are trying to change that by requiring replacement parts be available to purchase. https://www.repair.org/know-your-rights
A quick note to say that at our local repair cafe we do a roaring trade in vacuum repairs for peanuts (not literal peanuts; though some of our repairers do get peckish). If you're in Europe, there's chance you have one nearby. https://repaircafe.org/en
Could you please go in to a bit more detail on how you set that up, how you handle issues, etc? I'm a member of a makerspace, and there's been discussions about doing something similar. There's just not a consensus about how to go about it.
We have one here in town maybe twice a year; I wish it was a monthly thing.
great idea. I get a "coming soon" type message for my town and search does not say where the next nearest is.
I used the map and found the two nearest I quite far. plenty where I used to live, and a lot in other parts of the UK. Good to see.
TVs and vacuum cleaners are now a lot cheaper AND more reliable then they used to be.
Cars have become more reliable and relatively cheaper then they used to be, but they are a lot more expensive so have a long way to go until that point is reached.
It's not clear to me what the difference is between what you're saying and what the parent comment says. Not being willing to pay the wages necessary to hire someone is pretty much exactly what they're saying as well.
> It's not clear to me what the difference is between what you're saying and what the parent comment says.
The key difference is whether rentism plays a role or not.
It's one thing to claim that no one will pay a mechanic if it's too expensive. It's an entirely different thing to claim that some employers are abusing their position to pressure wages to stay low to maximize their profit margin at the expense of their employees.
There's a good litmus test: is there a massive wave of car shop bankruptcies due to lack of business? Or are car shop owners complaining they can't get enough employees to keep up with demand?
They agree that corporations don't do things that aren't profitable, their implied disagreement is whether this is greedy/bad or merely rational/amoral.
That doesnt make sense to me.
Seems like theres either a demand for something or there isnt.
And the amount of demand sets the rate of pay.
The invisible hand.
The demand curve might not be gradual, there might be demand for e.g. 1 million jobs at $15 but 100 at $16
Demand is a function of price. At any given price there is a quantity demanded. To know the price you also need to know the supply function. There is a demand for socks but if no one is will to supply socks for less a million dollars, the quantity demanded of socks at that price could be 0.
In most markets seems like commodity level items and services like baggers and socks would have plenty of supply.
In a free market, commodity-level jobs will only happen at commodity-level wages. But it's not a free market, because of minimum wage laws. If you set the minimum wage too high, the number of baggers may go to zero, not because of supply but because of demand - the price is higher than any grocery store is willing to pay.
You can argue about the need for the minimum wage laws. You can argue about the morality of paying a living wage. But that's a different argument.
In some countries there's something called a "minimum wage" that sets the minimum value of a job that is allowed to exist, and any job that isn't worth that amount ceases to exist, or has fewer people doing it, or has partial or full automation doing it.
There’s a demand, but the price we want to pay for “grocery baggers” is usually less than minimum wage, so the job usually can’t (legally) exist. The cost (wage) is fixed higher than the value added.
Every single time someone says "there's a shortage of <goods>", you can mentally substitute it for "we can't get <good> for cheap".
Try this with: housing, nvidia GPUs, toilet paper (when there's a pandemic)
Is there a difference between people and goods?
Not really, when you consider both the interests of the buyer or the seller. The buyer of course would rather like goods and services be cheaper. It might be tempting to say that "people" deserve special consideration over "goods", it breaks down when you consider that goods are also made by people. Moreover gatekeeping whether you can use the characterization of "we can't get ... for cheap" depending on whether the seller is sympathetic or not (ie. "people" vs "goods") is a blatant way of smuggling in a conclusion via wording, similar to "terrorists" vs "freedom fighters".
I don't think this is correct. The reasons economists separate capital and labor is that they do have different characteristics. Labor has skill, capital can have technology. Assets exist regardless of utilization, labor cannot be stored up in an inventory since labor is time which flows inexorably onwards.
A shortage of an asset is a reflection of inventory levels. A shortage of labor reflects a lack of skill or time OR a lack of willingness to pay for that skill and time.
They're different for good reasons.
Of course not. That would ruin their analogy!
Honestly, between how soft-science macroeconomcis is, combined with the fact that this planet does not contain a single person willing to argue about it in good faith, makes it simply impossible to have real conversations around it, especially on the internet.
Ya, and then people wonder why cars are so expensive to repair these days also. The market is at a breaking point, efficiency has to go along with the higher pay or it just won’t work out.
I recently acquired a new (to me) 2017 vehicle and took it to my independent mechanic who has been working on my cars for years. He is registered with the mfg. and has access to many of their proprietary diagnostics and tools, but warned me that there is very little he can do on the latest models. They are basically 'return to dealer' because of 'software'.
Skilled labor (such as mechanics) require training and apprenticeship pipelines. If those pipelines don’t exist or are starved of people it doesn’t matter how much you’re willing to pay right now. Long term sure you can make that career path more appealing but it can and often is absolutely the case that companies would pay out the nose for employees with particular skills and are unable to find anyone. But sure let’s go with the standard Reddit pablum, why give it more thought than that?
That's what a shortage is, a short-term undersupply. Market forces will eventually correct the problem if allowed to operate normally (e.g. prices spike, incentivizing more supply), but like you said that takes time. If it's a shortage of goods it can take a while to ramp up production. If it's a shortage of skilled labor it can take a while for people to learn those skills. Either way it's fundamentally the same type of problem.
The reason those pipelines dry up is because pay is too low.
Agreed. It kinda worked for software for a bit since it was such a new field, so there could’ve been some truth to it just as a matter of time to get the systems in place to educate people.
You’re right, although the mechanic’s claim here was more complicated and interesting than just “we’re getting underpaid”.
It was a good view into what exactly the car companies are doing, but essentially it was "we're getting underpaid" with extra steps.
The car companies have basically set up a monopsony with cartels, squeezed the mechanics out, and are now complaining that they squeezed them out too much.
I think part of this may be that some of the market is buying EVs now. The amount of car repair necessary per person is decreasing overtime.
> but essentially it was "we're getting underpaid" with extra steps
Oh, yeah, it's definitely them getting underpaid—but in a way that I wasn't expecting and was surprised to learn about.
The "design for unmaintainability" problem has been around for a while. I remember helping a friend change his plugs on this Ford Ranger in the early 90s. The closest two plugs to the firewall required you to climb into the engine bay and basically hug the engine to get your arm into position to blindly get to the plugs. If you look around on YouTube you'll see some crazy mechanic videos where they show things like bolts located in impossible to loosen locations.
Cars used to be simpler to work on because a) they inherently were simpler and b) the engine bay used to have a lot of room to work in. Both of these things are not coming back.
> Cars used to be simpler to work on because
No, it's because they are designed to be assembled from complete sub-assemblies. Maintenance is not assumed to be done on the sub-assemblies while they are in the final product. Under warranty, workshops are intended to replace entire sub-assemblies with new/rebuilt parts.
It's effectively a deliberate decision from the 80s that enabled faster assembly while warranties were shorter. For cars that are out of warranty, it doesn't matter either way.
The problem in the article occurs when Ford tries to pay someone to repair faults that were not planned to happen during the warranty time. Impossible, because it's completely uneconomical.
I've encountered these headaches helping friends with their vehicles, and every time I'm reminded how much I prefer wrenching on my 80s-90s era mazdas.
My old protege even had an access port in the fender well added specifically to remove the crank bolt with an extension. If it were an Audi the FSM would point you to the engine removal process as step 1.
It's kind of always been that way to varying degrees. In the 70's/80's, changing the Porsche 911 spark plugs required dropping the engine.
Also, in addition to planned obsolescence and repair hostility is Design for Manufacturing (DfM) that doesn't care about maintainability, safety, comfort, or durability, only lowest cost to shove things together on an assembly line. This is why there are some cars that require removing the wheel well to change the oil filter and other that have things completely out-of-order or require absurd tools to service. My grandfather was a 30 year Chrysler dealer mechanic who had a dozen or so custom tools for very specific purposes.
Source: Dad had an A/C & electrical mechanic shop next to a Porsche specialist shop.
Luckily you don't have go drop the engine to change spark plugs on modern water cooled Porsche 911s, but let me tell you about changing plugs on mid-engined Cayman/Boxster platform. The 4 cylinder cars are easier but 6 cylinder cars require 3-4 different combinations of sockets and extensions and tiny European hands to really get in there.
>Also, in addition to planned obsolescence and repair hostility is Design for Manufacturing (DfM) that doesn't care about maintainability, safety, comfort, or durability, only lowest cost to shove things together on an assembly line.
Exactly. It's basically fight club math. Spend $10 on a click-fit connector that can't be disassembled but that a $60/hr (though they only see a fraction of that) UAW laborer can plug in in half the time can't easily short-insert that can be visually checked.
The fact that it costs $200 the 1/10000 times it fails under warranty doesn't matter with those numbers. And you don't even care about the 100/100 times it fails at 2-3x the warranty period.
Of course, you're burning credibility doing this. But credibility doesn't have an obvious mapping to a number and stonk go up, KPI go up, bonus get paid, nobody cares.
In the 70's/80's you could fit a person in the engine bay of a Volvo. So, varying degrees of complexity and difficulty to fix things.
Emperor has no clothes. Instagram is full of videos by mechanics explaining this or that brand/model is stupidly engineered. Known problem. And mechanics do not have a seat at the table where these matters are discussed and decided upon. Unless he plans to change that…
Standard CEO: "I'll do anything to hire more skilled workers, except pay them a reasonable wage."
Auto mechanics do things to "flat rate" where each task is listed as taking a given amount of time. There seems to be a lot of variation between what the book says, and how long the tasks actually take. How are these flat rates assessed? I wonder if it's assuming a new car with no complications or wear and tear to components, or rust etc.
My mechanic charges by the hour and does great work. They're not the cheapest option, but the value for money can't be beat.
Book rates are often set by the manufacturer. In theory, they have a mechanic do the job and time it. The real big problem is warranty work is only paid at a fraction of the book rate. So if a job normally takes three hours if you do it under warranty, you only get paid for two hours. It’s a massive disincentive for mechanics to work long-term for a brand-name dealership that sells new cars. They always run the risk of getting shafted by too much warranty work.
There's some similarity here to US medical/dental insurance. Some work obviously needs to be done, but the entity that promised to pay for it won't. The system adapts (or fails).
Why do dealerships assume warranty risk instead of the manufacturer?
I'm pretty sure the manufacturer does pay for the warranty repair. But only at the fractional rate. The dealership effectively passes that loss onto its employees. Working for a small, independent shop can have better wage/salary, but often lacks benefits (health care in particular) and comes with all the usual downsides of a small business (one bad owner/manager can ruin the experience).
If they assess that a repair needs three hours, then only pay two hours of work if it's under warranty, I don't see how that doesn't mean that either they know that the book estimate is an overestimate and reimburse the correct amount, or the book estimate is correct and the dealership effectivley assumes 33% of the warranty risk because they only get reimbursed for 66% of the repair cost. (the third alternative is that the book estimate is underestimating, but that's basically the second case, but worse).
Neither of those cases looks like fair business dealings
To give them an incentive not to just rubber stamp every warranty claim.
Electric cars need a lot fewer mechanical repairs. Sounds like yet more reasons to avoid buying one of these overpriced over complicated petro vehicles.
If only I could find one that isn't a spy platform. That's a problem with all vehicles that are too new, not just EVs. That makes new cars a nonstarter for me, which as a side-effect makes all EVs a nonstarter for me.
Disconnect the antenna, and optionally connect a dummy load in its place.
I'm curious how in-depth you've been looking, especially investigating models where you can do a little bit of work to do things like unplug cell modems. I'm somewhat in need of a new vehicle and have just assumed the whole market is trash based of what I've read online and the new cars I've seen people get. But I'm hoping I've missed some gems of online communities still managing to eek out some freedom (and physical buttons, of course).
Sounds like you have no idea how dangerous is to put your hands around electric car batteries and how expensive certified electricians are. Without a mechanic that ALSO has an advanced expert certification for high voltage electronics, the blown BMS or contactor (500$) becomes a whole battery to scrap (20k). Then you add the 6 hours of diagnostics and labor on top of it. Electric vehicles are not an arduino circuit with a couple of led and an usb cable.
It sounds like you are the one who has no idea.
There are a few basic things you have to not do in order to work on an EV, basically the same rules as for airbag systems but with physically larger components.
No modern car is electrically simple, but they all do a pretty good job telling you where you ought to be looking.
He is correct. If you have no idea what are you doing with BEV, you can destroy the car and your garage without even realizing what has just happened.
This article reads as AI generated to me, anyone else see that?
Does it really matter? If the article is poor quality, then it is poor quality. It doesn't matter if it was written by a person or an LLM. I'm more annoyed how so many articles waste time quoting things people say on social media.
it matters because if we want to reduce AI slop we need to prevent it from becoming profitable.
and if we assume that an AI written article costs a fraction of a regular article, then AI articles will be profitable more easily.
I think learning to recognize generated content is an important media literacy skill, and talking about it is one of the best ways to home that skill.
So basically they refuse to pay a reasonable hourly rate. They pay flat fee perfect world rates that cause mechanics to lose money when they encounter real world problems.
As always the worker shortage is a “there’s a shortage of skilled workers who refuse to get screwed on pay”
It is very often like that. Employers like to play capitalism with employees, but when tables turn and employees will start playing capitalism with employers then it is suddenly a big problem and ideally government should be involved to help poor little employer out.
No it's not. People pay market rate salaries to compete with other employers also wanting those people. Everyone's "playing" capitalism, as free agreements are better than people being forced to do what their master / guild / bureaucrat tells them to do.
Car companies don't want you to be able to work on these cars. They would much rather you either buy a new car or use their 3x the cost parts and services.
Is this the new "learn to code"
No, "learn to code" was the supply-side response of people who saw software engineers get paid shittons of money. This is a demand-side CEO lamenting the fact that he can't get people to fix cars for cheap, so literally the opposite problem.
Excessive regulation to blame? How so?
Heh, they just love blaming regulation. But I don't see anything about that in the article?
The other day I listened to The Verge's Decoder episode with the Ford CEO [0] and unlike most other CEOs, he almost felt genuine. There was a noticeable lack of BS. Have I been played?
The lack of mechanics was mentioned and I recall him saying that they're building up apprenticeship programs and the US should take more pride in blue collar work.
0- https://www.theverge.com/podcast/784875/ford-ceo-jim-farley-...
How is this legal?
Yes, opining for wage suppression but also here's a mechanic owner/operator explaining the situation:
https://youtu.be/9cfbhxsqW84