Bad Mechanics video

[Tom]

Hello,
I have nothing but respect for all the technicians and mechanics out there. They are the doctors of the automotive world. My grape is where they are employed. I refuse to go to a chain garage, mainly they over charge and try to get you to buy other unneeded services. Case and point: Mr. Tire was running a special for state inspection and emissions testing. I live in PA this is mandatory every year. My 2004 Silverado came back FAILED. The manger said I need two rear rotors and a front ball joint. Total bill $850. I said show the bad ball joint. He took me back into the shop and had a tech put a pry bar under each front tire then lifted the bar and nothing happened. The manager said you are killing me and we won’t make any money that way. So back up front he said we still have to replace your rear rotors. This I knew was true due to running the brakes down to the rivets. However, He charged me $144 per rotor plus installation. I said really, I can go literally across the packing lot to the parts store and get the same rotor for $75. Both life time warranty.. He told me he can’t put on an aftermarket parts and warranty the works. So my bill was $475 for two installed rotors and a state inspection. MR TIRE ARE A BUNCH OF CROOKS. And believe me I told everyone to avoid mr tire.
So the take away here is don’t trust chain stores, they may fix you car/truck but they care more about the mighty dollar. I put my trust in a small town private garage. I got to know the owner and he never over charged me nor steer me wrong. Sorry for the long post I just needed to vent.
Tom

Topic

[David]

I don’t know that it’s really fair to make sweeping generalizations like that… there are some bad apples out there, no doubt, but if you do your homework before bringing the car to a particular shop, you can avoid unpleasant surprises like that. Most of those shops probably make their money on parts, so they tend to be more expensive. No excuse for trying to take advantage of someone, though, with false “broken” claims…

If you can DIY, that’s one way to save quite a bit of money when it comes to repairs – the cost, of course, being your time (but if you enjoy working on your vehicles, the time you spend doing it isn’t really a cost!)

[EricTheCarGuy]

Sorry to hear about your experience. Experiences like that are part of what bring people into the repair profession.

Here’s the video and the response I did.

[Rob megee]

That markup doesn’t sound too far off. A normal mark up at the garages I’ve worked for is double the cost. Then the shops labor rate per hour for the labor charge.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Jason White]

Not anyone can be a doctor or a lawyer, or most any other professional. In order to be a doctor you have to get a license from the Medical board and to do that you have to have educational credentials. In order to be a lawyer you have to pass the BAR. Even in the food industry, there are standards on the equipment and they are checked out, notice their inspection. Fact is anyone can open a car shop if they can get a business license. They can hire anyone they want and set the standards wherever they want to.

To be a mechanic, you just have to say you’re a mechanic. It seems everyone, their dad and brother thinks that they are. No license, registration, test to pass, credentials required. Yes there is ASE but it’s not mandatory. So, the results are lots of people claiming to be experts who aren’t. Lots of what I call hacks. Yeah, they get-r-dun, but they don’t do it properly on a consistant basis so the repairs/services aren’t really complete. Eric did a video on a Honda Timing Belt that was broken, where some Hack did the timing belt job and water pump, and the vehicle drove for a while just fine, but because they didn’t properly reset the tensioner it failed down the road and causes a complete failure. Then there are these frauds that make a living off upsells and often sell unnessasary services and then don’t even do them properly. What they do is give the rest of us a bad name.

What I really find amazing is how some of the worse mechanics out there have a huge following (not you Eric) of people who swear by them, even though they are wrong so often and mess up a lot, they have a customer base. A lot of these guys know how to talk, and they love to talk, and to the “untrained ear” they sound like they really know what they are talking about but in reality, they are a joke. The big red flag to tell on those is they can “diagnose” any car without going through the diagnostic steps, always boasting about how good they are, talk about things that really don’t matter.

I’ve been in groups of people where I’m the only one that is actually in the field. Someone talked about a car issues and lots of guys chimed in saying they knew exactly what it was that was wrong with the vehicle. I was like “well, it could be a lot of things, I can’t tell you”. I sat by and watched as some construction worker that did auto work on the side try to fix a truck, and after replacing 5 different components got it running and acted like he was just the master because he got it running, and best part is the people who hired him thought it was great too. However, when talking about the repair he never mentioned the other 4 parts that he threw at it and didn’t fix the car. I didn’t say a word about it to any of them. I keep my cards close to my chest, and I’m not going to tell any unqualified person anything that might help them be able to hide the fact that they are hacks.

[Ole Eggers]

I can only agree with Eric

You get what you pay for.

There are 3 parameters when it comes to service, and 2 of them will exclude the third.

Cheap service, fast service and good service.

Cheap and good service can´t be fast.

Good and fast service can´t be cheap.

Cheap and fast service can´t be good.

That´s just how it is…..

[Leon Alexander]

Just finished watching the Bad Mechanics and the RE: videos, and in the RE: video, ETCG made note of something I had been having the thought of myself. There seems to be a lot of crossover between IT and Automotive. I’ll take it a step further and note the crossover is a bit more prominent specifically between automotive technicians and hardware repair technicians.

I have done hardware repair for about 10yrs, though in the last year I’ve pushed more into web development/design. But I have seen a lot of what ETCG talks about in his videos. Very much the same it seems like people’s PCs, laptops, ect fail at just the wrong time and they just don’t want to have to pay what it cost for repairs.

I’ll admit, a good majority of my time I did not interface with customers. I would be in a “shop” where I was given a product, a problems description, and basically told to have at it.

Another striking similarity is brands. ETCG mentioned in a few videos how your specialist who work on one brand of car will know that much more about the quirks of that brand than someone who works on all the brands because they just see it day in and day out instead of once every few weeks or months. This is very much true in laptop repair, at least more so than say desktop. One brand you may pull two screws to get a hard drive out whereas another you may have to completely take everything out.

I did spend a 4yr period as a field technician though, where I did directly interface with business customers. There were some good understanding customers, but a lot of them were really frustrated and even hard to deal with because understandably, while their product is broke, they cannot get any work done. Sometimes you the service note may be for a dead hard drive, but then you get out and start looking at it and find a bunch of other stuff is actually a problem. Or you get sent out with a hard drive and find out that wasn’t the issue at all. Visa-versa, I’ve had many instances where they ticket says a motherboard is bad and on inspection you find out that the power plug is just bad

Another fascinating similarity is simply the enthusiasm. When I started doing hardware I was pretty excited about it, as time wore on it became just another job. There were IDGAF days, the whole 9 yards. In the profession, I’ve seen hardware techs who really try to do a good job an look out for the customer and I’ve seen techs who just slap things together to collect a paycheck.

Let me tell you, the ones who just slap it together, were really frustrating because then when the product comes back in a week or a month, now you have to not only fix the problem, but also fix their work too. I remember one time in particular… A tech replaced a CPU, the laptop came back for overheating issues and when I looked, they hadn’t bothered to take the cellophane backing off the thermal paste pad.

A big issue in hardware repair comes at commision vs standard pay. When you have people who are paid per job completed, the amount of slop work goes up significantly because they want to just churn out as many jobs as possible to make more money, as was the case of the person who did the CPU noted above.

This is already getting way to long, but a final similarity I found interesting was people gunning for (which was mentioned in a different video). Even among friends, it was always hard to know who really had your back and who would throw you under a bus. Also I’ve been let go from a number of positions for being too ‘slow’ because I take time to make sure the job’s done right. Ironically, in some positions I’ve been in, people who do slop work got celebrated for having so much done. They would basically send something out and then when it broke in a week slop it again and send it out, thus getting multiple credit for doing the same work. I’ve seen people make things up, say a stick of ram unrelated to the current issue was bad so they could open a second ticket and get double credit.

Even with all that I always had a personal belief much like ETCG noted, that techs already had a bad name as it was, so no matter what the other tech may have done, never blame the other tech.

[Author]

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