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Multiple people have reached out asking what I think about the recent comments from Ford’s CEO Jim Farley. I enjoy it when people ask for my opinion on things like this- so let's get into it.
Farley went public and said he has 5,000 open mechanic jobs that pay about $120,000 a year and he still can’t fill them...... WHY?
“We are in trouble in our country.”
He’s right about the trouble.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics says there will be about 70,000 openings for automotive service technicians and mechanics every year for the next decade. That is staggering.
Ever wonder why it takes days, weeks, or even months to get your vehicle looked at? I covered my own four-month wait on my truck’s transmission in this blog:
Dealership woes: Why customers are fed up with “No problem found” https://abrhouston.com/dealership-woes-why-customers-are.../
TechForce Foundation estimates the U.S. will need hundreds of thousands of new entry-level transportation techs over just a few years, with automotive being the largest slice of that pie. The automotive world has a huge opportunity sitting wide open for young adults who want to make real money without walking into life with six-figure student loan debt.
I recently spoke at The Woodlands College Park High School about what my career path looked like and what life in this trade is really like. The students were sharp, curious, and interested. There are young people who want this work. The system they’re walking into is the problem.
So yes, we’re short on techs. Badly.
But that “$120,000 mechanic job” is not what the public thinks it is.
Flat Rate: The Part Mr. Farley Skips
Most dealership technicians are not on salary. They’re not on safe hourly pay either.
They’re on flat rate—which is basically 100% commission, with no overtime and no safety net.
Flat rate means:
You’re paid by the book time, not the clock.
If a job pays 5.0 hours at your agreed rate, you get 5.0 hours.
If that 5.0-hour job takes you 10 hours, you still get paid 5.0.
If:
The part is wrong
You’ve never done that job before
You don’t have the proper tools
The special tool is broken or missing
The car is rusty and everything fights you
The foreman or dispatcher sits on your ticket for half the day
…you eat that time. The book/dealer/world does not care.
On paper, at a high enough flat-rate number, you can “make” $120,000.
In real life, a tech’s income depends on:
How much work the dispatcher actually gives them
How busy the shop is that week or that month
How the manufacturer writes warranty times
How often parts delays or missing/broken tools slow things down
How many broken, half-fixed cars they inherit from the last hack who touched it
That’s before paying for tools, ongoing training, and dealing with the politics in the building.
The Training Pipeline Problem
Farley is right about one thing: this isn’t a six-month trade.
He talks about five-year learning curves. I agree with the timeline, with a twist.
In my world:
Five years in the automotive trade, with the right attitude and effort, will get you to where you can do about 80% of everything well and without drama.
The last 20% of the job—the weird, ugly, one-off problems—takes the rest of your career.
In the beginning, you will have problem cars weekly. It’s not the car’s fault. It’s you. You’re new.
As you get better at your craft:
Those “it just won’t go away” cars get less frequent
You start seeing one or two of those gnarly cases a quarter, maybe every six months
That assumes you’re seeing 20–30 cars a week and actually paying attention
Meanwhile, the cars themselves are getting more complex.
Modern vehicles are rolling computer networks:
20–60 control modules talking over multiple, intertwined networks
Hybrids and EV systems layered on top of existing gasoline platforms
Driver-assist, cameras, radar, lidar, crash avoidance, thermal imaging
Encrypted software, secure gateways, MAC addresses, Ethernet, and firewalls
Manufacturers who digitally lock you out of simple functions, including resetting an oil service light, unless you jump through their hoops
Trade schools and community colleges are trying to keep up. Many are still behind.
High schools are even worse off. I’ve been on Klein ISD’s automotive advisory board for almost 10 years. I’ve pushed for updates. The curriculum hardly moves. Students are still not coming out ready to walk into a real independent shop or dealership and be productive.
So we end up with:
Not enough techs
“Trained” techs who really aren’t ready
Cars that are harder and slower to diagnose
An industry paying like it’s 1998 and acting shocked nobody lines up to do it
It’s Not “Nobody Wants To Work”
The lazy excuse is:
“Young people don’t want to work with their hands.”
That’s nonsense.
Plenty of people are willing to work. What they’re not willing to do is:
Take $40,000 a year for a job that destroys their back, eats nights and weekends, and sends them home filthy
Finance $30,000–$50,000 in tools out of their own pocket just to be employable
Lose pay every time a service writer over-promises or a warranty administrator decides to get picky
Sit in a bay for years with no clear path past “just another tech”
If you want people to chase that $120k number, you can’t bury the fine print.
You fix the pay structure. You fix the training. You fix the culture. You stop wasting good techs with bad leadership and broken systems.
I’ve got more to say about this, and I’ll be expanding on specific parts of this topic over the next few blogs.
If you think I’m off base—or you’ve lived through something similar at a dealership or shop—say so.
ABR Houston – European Auto Repair
IIRC, the book time for that replacement is ~3 hours. Yeah, right! I had to invent tools for the job!
I get the idea of incentivizing good/fast work through a reward system, but you have to make sure that it is a reward system and not a penalty system. As @thecardoc3 has mentioned many times, the most valuable techs are often the ones most screwed by the clock because they get handed the most difficult jobs.
No, techs need solid base pay with a + system. They need to be able to go to work and not be expected to buy their own supplies. But, I fear that manufacturers have already written off the trade. With every new model of vehicle, it becomes more difficult to diagnose and work on than the last, to the point that they will soon be no different than any other appliance considered disposable today.
We do see some positive changes. Some dealers today pay their technicians a higher rate for warranty work. There are some states that have passed laws that require the technicians to be paid by aftermarket labor guides. Even then it's still a problem that no one is actually doing labor time studies anymore.
Service and repair have always been considered a "necessary evil" and the vehicle manufacturers, and their dealers were not alone in doing that.
I looked underneath and saw these bolt areas wet. She took it in, they glanced at it and iterated it needed a transmission, to be swapped. We waited for the part to come in and then dropped off the car. She picked the car up and the service people did not suggest anything. She came home and pulled out the invoice. It stated the transmission was not the source of the leak and that they replaced an axle seal, free out of good faith.
When the next failure occurs, this assembly is now the one that goes back into the machine.
However, that would be very difficult to implement into a general automotive application because people don't want some other yahoo's engine that may or may not have been maintained properly, and shops surely could not afford to rebuild a component every time it is swapped out for something as simple as a leaking seal or whatnot.
I have a friend who works at a small company that received a major military contract some years ago. They manufactured machines that cleaned runways. There were all sorts of specs required from noises levels to speed to reliability. Ultimately, they got the contract because they built the best machine... and it was 100% "componentized." They were the only ones that presented their original prototype in this format, and they demonstrated how quickly major parts, like engine, final drive, etc., could be swapped out.
That machine was fully hydraulic, though, so it made for very fast changes (like under ten minutes per component).
Watching videos like this make it clear why only around 1-2% of vehicles in the US make it to 200,000 miles.
Mine: 1995 318ti Club Sport-2020 C43-1996 Speed Triple Challenge Cup Replica
Wife's: 2021 Sahara 4xe
Son's: 2018 330i xDrive
First question, how much money did you just lose by signing the papers and driving it home? $5000? $10,000?
The flip side of that is that mechanics today have no interest in maintaining older vehicles. I always approached my mechanics with an open checkbook. They did not inspect it, they gave no indication of things that were just about to break while I showed interest in that, and they did not explicitly ask if I wanted OEM parts or Chinese. After replacing brakes three times in a handful of years and hearing, "These just don't last like that" I thought why are you telling me this now? I would have no problem with a $1500 bill for OEM brakes that go 8 years without touching them! Also, to all of the prior discussion, the mechanics take the financial pressure from so many people that they just assume everyone wants everything as cheap as possible as they are already planning their new car. Thus as an OCD vehicle owner, after keeping a car as long as possible, but going through all of this trash, I just cannot rely on anyone for a holistic view of the vehicle. Sadly, all forces out there just want us to ditch the car and buy a new one, and it is rough on the soul trying to fight the system. I will continue to take my total cost and divide it by years and try to establish what I think is a reasonable value. On an Outback, 12 years translates to about $320 a month +maintenance. As these vehicle prices go up, these numbers are starting to seem like a lot, particularly during COVID times, the monthly deprecition stays about the same even when the vehicle has little use (ouch).
I used to write a monthly column on cars and related topics for a local newspaper. Every so often I’d discuss the excuses people would give for “needing” a new car. Rarely -if ever- did the reason make financial sense. Years ago a goofball on one of the Edmunds car buying forums was trying to get other participants to agree that he “needed” to roll negative equity into a new car purchase because his current car had needed a couple of out of warranty repairs. He was really ticked off because no one agreed with his astute financial analysis. A few months later he was back asking if it would be possible to keep his new car even though he had filed for bankruptcy.
Too stupid to breathe was my conclusion.
Mine: 1995 318ti Club Sport-2020 C43-1996 Speed Triple Challenge Cup Replica
Wife's: 2021 Sahara 4xe
Son's: 2018 330i xDrive
This 16 year old car seems like it gave good service and has almost been driven into the ground. Financial situation of the owner needs to taken into consideration, but depending on that might be better to start again with a new car from my pov.
We have two cars that are almost 8 years old, and I'd be happy if we can make it to 16 years with both of them. I'm pretty confident that our 2018 Acura has a good chance at making it, knock on wood, but I'm not confident when it comes to our 2018 Honda CR-V.
So far my Acura has been maybe the most economical car I've ever owned when it comes to maintenance and repairs. It's still on its original brakes. Total maintenance and repair costs for 93,000 miles is currently at $2700, including a set of new Michelin tires. But if, heaven forbid, I was faced with a repair bill of $10k I think I would move on. But I'm fortunate to be in a financial situation that if I had to I could get a new car if I needed to, as long as the car was something reasonable, like a Camry or a Subaru.
There are plenty of late model used vehicles available for 50-75% of the price of a new one, and an extended service warranty provides peace of mind beyond that.
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2015 Subaru Outback 3.6R / 2024 Kia Sportage Hybrid SX Prestige
For instance, in the 1970s and 1980s I noticed that the dashboards on some cars (VWs etc) would crack after just a few years in the sun. But by the early 2000s that seemed like a thing of the past. Car markers had almost all invested in longer lasting materials for dashboards and so that wouldn't happen.
When the start-stop tech started to come into play in the last several years, really heavy-duty starters were introduced for cars with those. Previously starters were designed for a certain number of starts that just wouldn't cut it with stop-start technology.
I've had to replace starters on three of my vehicles without stop-star that were used in a normal way at around 100k. So I think the engineers and others value-engineered the starters to last to about 100k.
But I've read how engineers came up with a numerical approach for stop-start and knew that the starters now needed to do something like twenty times the number of starts and still not fail. And so they upgraded that component a lot, and they cost a lot more for cars with stop-start. When every dollar that goes into a car is monitored, it's somewhat of a big deal to invest $150 more for every car (or whatever it was) to have a heavy-duty starter that can do 20x more starts than a regular one and still not fail.
A car without stop-start tech will still have a regular starter that is cheaper and that doesn't need to last that long.
But my guess is that the starter in my Acura TLX, even without stop-start, has a higher grade starter than an Accord from the same year. I saw with my own eyes that the battery in an Accord of that year is smaller and weaker than what's in my Acura.
Regular spark plugs forty years ago only lasted maybe 30,000 miles, and now in most cars Iridium spark plugs can last 100,000 miles.
The Buick Lucerne was obviously a good car. My guess is the engineers hoped that with good maintenance and some luck that a Lucerne might make it even to a quarter of a million miles. But my guess is that they wouldn't have dared to hope for 365,000+ miles.
Some current cars, like the Chevy Trax, which starts at around $22,000, maybe can't really be designed imho to last that long. Or at least that's not their priority. The Trax has a small 3-cylinder turbo engine with some areas that are considered design weaknesses, and analysis I saw somewhere was guessing that owners will be lucky to get to 150k even with good maintenance. The transmission of the Trax might be one of those with "lifetime fluid," which means that the engineers of that essential component of the car also didn't project it to last more than 150,000 miles. Forget 200k when it comes to the Trax, since probably only 10% of Trax will even make it to 150k.
We've had 3 examples here recently with Car Wizard of turbo cars that failed well before 200k. I think the designers of those cars also felt that if the cars lasted that long that the owners had gotten full value out of them.
There are some people who garage their cars, drive huge amounts of highway miles, and follow meticulous maintenance schedules who can get over 300,000 or even more than 400k miles out of a good car, but that's very, very rare.
Only 1-2% of cars and SUVs in the US ever make it to 200,000 miles. Many of those were neglected of course, maybe most of them. But many vehicles are just not designed imho with normal use to and following the long maintenance intervals in the owners manuals to ever make it past 200k in most cases.
ASTM tests and internal test methods highly accurately predict the life of mechanical parts. If a part is too robust, finance dictates that materials and labor are removed from it until its duty cycle matches the leadership's arbitrary standard. There are, right now, perpetual races in manufactured goods to pull cents out of products, wherever possible, with tolerance for some decrease in quality. Data Science models are cranking these results out all day long, which are then sent to R&D to implement and test.
Another view of this is that the OEM knows the exact life of existing parts, whether 60k, 80k, 100k, etc. and via neglect does nothing to improve it. Outliers of poor quality are either recycled or depending on the type of part, it may be acceptable to have such a percentage of parts that fail earlier.
If quality were free, and this would actually be debatable with auto manufacturers considering how awful they are, but they could significantly boost the quality for the same price. But quality is not free. Every gram of material and every second of production attention to the part has a cost associated with it. The aggregate of this material and labor has a perfectly predictable lifecycle. You identified exceptions. I had to search and I read that typical mileage is 110-120k miles for these crank failures. No one would buy a vehicle if the crank life was well-known to be 120k miles. That would be the model's kiss of death. In the consumer's mind the drivetrain is critical and few other items hit that standard. News of bad cranks, cams, valves, pistons, and transmissions would be devastating. But most other systems can snap at 80-100k. The owner can still sell it. What do ads iterate? "It runs great!" Sure it does
On a side note, it is interesting that according to Webster's "drivetrain" is one word but "power train" is not.
@guitarzan you mentioned before ASTM (American Society for Testing and Materials) tests. If you know more about this that you care to share I'd be interested.
This engine in this 2013 Subaru was neglected, but a simple part also failed that maybe shouldn't have...
In Subaru's press release for the 2020 model Subaru Outback they said that nearly 90% of the parts for this engine were new or revised. Seems like a high percentage. But I'm hoping that they overbuilt things to prevent failures like found above.
https://media.subaru.com/newsrelease.do?id=1445&mid=131
Mine: 1995 318ti Club Sport-2020 C43-1996 Speed Triple Challenge Cup Replica
Wife's: 2021 Sahara 4xe
Son's: 2018 330i xDrive
I don't have much time to devote to watching them all to see and potentially try to guess if there is a concern with the information they are trying to share or not. I did watch most of the Subaru battery one because it was being discussed. I do have some concerns. Yes, the battery is likely getting tired and if kept at a low state of charge over an extended period of time will sulfate and have a very short lifespan. The tester did score the battery as under charged but didn't fail it. This battery should be properly charged and then retested, as well as the starting system tested to see if the slow crank continues to be a concern. It's likely the drivers normal usage is playing a role in the batteries state of charge, which overtime impacts it's state of health. I should also note that carbon pile testers can be misleading on some newer battery types because of how much power they are pulling from the battery.
As far as these "conductance" battery testers they work by rapidly pulsing a smaller drain on the battery and measuring the voltage changes that occur. Here are two screen shots of measuring the tester test the battery.
The blue trace is the battery voltage, AC coupled to help display the amplitude of the change and the red trace is the current that is being drawn from the battery. Ohms law states that if you know the voltage, and the current you can calculate the resistance. This is pretty easy to do with basic DC circuits but takes calculus to deal with a conductance test like this. I'll just say the battery being tested passes, but needs charged.