Drac From TikTok (Eric Pierce) | Stories and Struggles

If I have to work on a car for three hours to get paid one hour, I'm not going to want to do it.

No, I won't.

Because there's some times where you get a car, you look at it, you figure it out in, let's say, 10 minutes, and the customer makes a big issue about it, and you're just like, all right, take the car somewhere else. If you don't want to believe my recommendation, don't even pay me the diagnosis. Because for me, it was simple and it's going to be more of a headache and waste my time.

Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to another exciting episode of Jada Mechanic Podcast. One of those new friends with me is with me tonight, Mr. Eric Pierce from TikTok, otherwise known as Drac. How are you tonight, man?

Doing pretty good. How about yourself?

Very good, very good. We were just talking for the people that are going to see this on YouTube if they could get the full audio. He's got a video, our video. He's got a beautiful dog behind him with a cone around her head, which makes. Which makes her very. Look very sad. But if you.

She is sad when she wears it.

Yeah. Which. So if you hear me laughing at once in a while, it's just. It's not. I'm laughing at the guests and laughing at the guest dog. So, yeah, Eric, tell me a little. A little bit about yourself, kind of. You're big on tick tock.

I kind of knew you because you're working at a Nissan dealer and you were doing some Nissan repairs, which is in my back category, my. My history a little bit. And then you kind of disappeared for a while and, you know, you kind of came back around, kind of get us kind of going on what you've been up to, where you've been, where you want to go.

Well, I'd say the TikTok algorithm definitely put me in that, like, going away, because I never stopped making videos or things like that. I've noticed if I don't start a video saying, like, customer states, xyz, this car is doing this thing. The algorithm doesn't push my videos at all. Yeah, a bunch of people, when they finally do see videos, like, if it gets more than 500 to 1,000 views, people say, oh, where, where have you been? Like, I haven't seen your videos, and I didn't even know that you were no longer working at Nissan. And then I comment, telling them kind of what's happening. But mostly the main cause of me leaving Nissan is that I got in a motorcycle accident, May 8th of 2023. Broke my thumb, my wrist on my left hand and then I hurt my back pretty good. Finally leaving.

It's just was a compiling of everything like you know as well as everyone else watching this. Well, if they've been in the mechanic field, know that when you bend over all day long, you kind of have a sore back at the end of the day. You stretch, you do whatever you need to do and then you wake up in the next morning and you feel fine, ready to do it again. Now, for nine years, that's how it was. I mean, some days you wouldn't even have any back issues if you had an easy day or whatever. But after the accident I would. The management would try to give me the easier jobs like reprograms this, that and the other to start me off with. And that was really difficult to make any money just doing those jobs.

So I did as best as I could. I begged my manager to give me an apprentice because I can teach people just fine and they can do the work for me. But upper management didn't really want to do that. It didn't seem he finally was able to get the go ahead to have one of the B techs with me for one day a week. And when I finally had him with me, I could make 10, 15 hours in a day like I used to. And then as I healed, got a little bit better, I could be on my own again. But after the accident, I've only ever done one transmission replacement.

Yeah.

And that was kind of difficult to do. So I still had issues with doing those because I used to like a Pathfinder, pays 15.5 or something like that for transmission replacement. And if I start at 7 o'clock in the morning, I can have the transmission out and bolt the bell housing back in before lunch and then have the job done at maybe 2:00.

Yeah.

So I could get the job done really quick because I've had very repetitious work, especially at Nissan, doing all those transmissions.

So let me back up here for a little bit or not get too far out of ourselves. You said nine years, so did you have nine whole years at Nissan? Where's that?

Yeah, I started July 3rd of 2015 and I left in 2023.

Wow. And is that, was that your first? Like what, did you have a kick at the industry before getting in Nissan?

No, I. I started working at Nissan not even knowing how to change oil in a car.

Wow.

Well, I should say I had a 1993 Ram that I changed the Oil on it once.

Right on.

And that's the only real experience that I've done. And then my friend helped me replace the thermostat and I started as a lube tech. So I just. One of my friends was neighbors with the general manager at that store. And so he's the one who's like, hey, we're hiring. If you don't want to work at Burger King anymore, put in your resume. And I got the job pretty easily.

Mm. Wow, man. So nine years you became pretty, you know, you like that's your, that's your whole kind of start to where you are now is all on that brand. Right? So it's.

Yep.

You'd say you're pretty comfortable with it. Whereas me, like I jumped around on so many things before I finally hit Nissan late in my career that by then I never loved that brand at all. Like I didn't. I mean there was the transmissions, yeah. Were good work, but they were so like everything else about them was really hard to sell the customer on. On doing maintenance on it because they always seem to be coming in for a transmission issue. And you know how that goes, right? When the, the Internet says that you drive a Nissan, you're going to put a in it. Then everything becomes a transmission.

Right. It's not an misfire, it's not a plugged cat, it's not a low fuel, it's. It's always a transmission. They always want a tranny. So that did you find when you started, like how was it to work your way up? Like did you get treated pretty good or did you have to, you know, fight and claw and scratch? There's my dog barking. Yeah, Give me one second, man, I gotta.

No worries.

I'll have to go handle her. No, so when you. What I mean when I say struggle like and whatever we're talking about is. So you said you started on a quick lube. Tell us what that was like where you just paid an hourly with an incentivize or bonus or did they just throw you to flat rate right away?

So when I first worked there, in the time that I have worked there, we went through three different managers. The hiring manager that took me on, I loved him, he was great. I started at hourly. The reason I wanted to be louptech is because at Burger King they wanted me to be a shift manager making $9 an hour. But I could start as a lube tech for $10 an hour.

Yeah.

So to me that was a no brainer. I might as well do something that is Interesting. And not have to worry about all the managerial duties of Burger King. For sure. Started at $10 an hour. There was no incentivizes or incentives. Then for about the first possibly year, I was just in the loop in the lube bay. And my manager noticed every time I would walk from the lube bay to the service ride service drive that I would always be looking into the main shop because back then it was just papers.

We didn't have any digital inspection that we could do to make it easier. So he asked me one day, he's like, would you want to be an apprentice for one of the guys? And I said, sure, I'd love to know more. One of the guys. And I won't say names, but I was an apprentice under two different techs. One tech, I was an apprentice for him for about a year and a half. Learned a lot. He was the. He was GTR certified.

Eventually when diesels in 2016 came, he was also diesel certified. So I learned a lot from him. And then management wanted me to be more of a. Like a lube manager.

Right.

But this other. In. In that time frame, the hiring manager that I had went on to infinity, and he was the manager at that shop. He got pretty much a raise, promotion, whatever you want to call it. So one of the service writers got his position as a service manager. And with him, he. I would say for the majority of me being there, he was the main manager. And there were.

There were some very questionable things that he's done while I was there. But what frustrated me, what he wanted me to do, is be a lube tech manager, essentially, so that the tires don't fall off, that all the cars get done in an orderly fashion, that we can have a great time. But he never specifically told the lube guys there that that's what my position was. He says, I want you to get the guys to listen to you. And. But I'm not going to tell them that that's what you're supposed to do.

Right.

I'm like, okay, I'll try my best. But the kids that were hired, they were. They were just there trying to make a paycheck, and they didn't want to listen to me.

Yeah.

Since there wasn't someone who's like 40 years old over them telling them what to do. I'm just maybe four years older than them or whatever it might be. So they didn't want to listen to me. So I just went to the manager and I said, this isn't going to work. And then I Started being an apprentice with a different tech because the other tech did ask for someone that was knowledgeable and could get work done fast. So I went with another tech and someone from Lube took my position with the first tech to be an apprentice with him. For about another year I was with him and then we implemented a. An express tech kind of position where instead of the cars, when you would in Lube recommend a drive belt or whatever it might be that Lube can't do, the service writer would have to try to find a tech to do that job.

Right.

Well, if you're stuck on an engine, you can't just pull that off the lift and do a quick brake job. So we had the B techs in the express that would do those easy jobs. Now I made great money doing that, but it was boring after a while. Just all day every day, only doing breaks or fluid services. So when the. The guy that I was an apprentice with, he and I both transitioned into that, but. But he was the main one getting money. I was still technically an apprentice making hourly wage and he was.

Whatever his pay plan was. I. I don't know, I never asked. Never. Pride didn't matter to me. Yeah, but him and I were both kind of over that because he used to get paid for a percentage on any job that we would do.

Right.

And then there the manager said, okay, well, you're no longer going to get paid for doing batteries or things like this. So he was fed up. He's like, well, what. What am I in this position for? I can make more money as my own self, as a normal tech, instead of managing two guys in the express.

Right.

So he came to the offer for me saying, do you want to go back to mainline with me as an apprentice? And I said, hell yeah. I'm bored of just doing the basic stuff all day long. For about another year I was with him. And then that manager was like, I think you're ready to go on your own. And for myself, I was like, well, I'm not. I don't really know if I am or not, but we can give it a go and see how it is. So I finally went flat rate after about, I want to say, four and a half years, maybe five years of working there.

Right.

And it was a bit of a struggle at first. I never got sent to like, basic electrical or any of those Nissan certified classes because that manager at the time, to me it felt like he only cared about making the shop money. And if you have to send your tech and spend up to $3,000 for them to go get training. That takes money out of the shop.

Right.

And him and his manager, it just felt like his only goal was to make the shop money. But he failed to realize that Nissan gives incentives for your mechanics to go to training and be certified in specialty training or whatever it might be. I think one of the main reasons why he ended up losing his jobs is because now I never went to the Better Business Bureau or whatever it might be for it. But he started making it so that if you had a car that you were working on and you broke something on it, you would have to pay for it. But he did it secretly. We told him the whole shop said no, if we're being negligent, yes, we'll pay for it. But if we're just doing something and replacing it, that should not come out of our pockets.

No, it's just part of the business. Right. Like you can't always, if, especially the older stuff, you know. Right. If you're trying to get some of the pieces of the dash apart or pulling the door panel, do a window regulator or something like that stuff happens. And it starts with communication at the front counter with the customer saying, hey, we're not going in there all ham fisted and you know, gorilla, but you got an older car here or, or stuff can happen. This can happen. You're going to be aware of this.

Are you willing to risk it or not? Yes or no, you know, the customer, it doesn't necessarily mean everything needs a new door panel every time you put a window regulator in as an example. Right. But there are some things where it's like, people come back and it's just like, you know, I got to make the customer, you know, happy. Which means the tech is, he's got to take more money than they made on the job and pay for something that was completely unavoidable. And you know, if, if it would have happened to anybody in, else in the shop, because we know there's some jobs that it doesn't matter who would have touched it, it's just going to go that way.

Yeah.

Then how does it fair to still charge a tech?

But the thing that none of us realized until after a few months that he disregarded our request and he secretly pulled money from our paychecks to put in a fund or whatever he called it.

Yeah.

And when we found that out, the main text went to the general manager of all the stores in the area and he was like, oh, yeah, that's not right. And so none of us knew really how much money was taken from our paychecks, but we got a check for $700, all of us, so that must have been at least the base amount that everyone had taken from their paychecks. And the shitty thing is, we get that paycheck, and then it's also taxed. So if you're taking money from our paycheck that's already being taxed, and then you give us some money back, and then that's taxed again. It was. It was awful. So he lasted another few months after that, and then we got another manager and he went to a different store as just a. Why am I drawing a blank? Just the service rider.

Okay.

And the new manager took over. This is maybe 20, 22 sometime. And, man, that when he was brought on, it was more. So, okay, we need to make the shot more money.

Right.

Because again, that's all that they really cared about. And so they started implementing practices that just to every single one of our techs. And we've had many shop meetings saying, what your service writers are doing and what they're being told to do is driving customers away and we're not making money.

Yep.

How that manager told the service writers to do it is as soon as the car comes in, look at the mileage, tell them the fluid services that they need. And if they come in with a concern, let's say they come in with my car, has a sound, or I need this looked at. Okay. Well, they would off the bat say, you're due for these services. Would you like to take care of any of them? And they were trained well to do that. So the customer would say, okay, well, let's do this, that, and the other. These fluid services and get the car looked at. Well, there'd be times where I look at it and I'm like, well, they need a whole control arm or let's say a safety item.

Yeah.

And then they would be like, well, I don't want to tell the customer that they need this because I already sold these services and they got a bonus for those fluid services. We use BG products. So if you get a certain amount of sales, BG sends you a bonus in a little credit card, whatever. And so if a customer needs. Has a $500, let's say, budget, if that job is going to add an additional $600. Well, let's just do the fluid services today, and then they can come back for whatever later.

The important repair.

And I'm like, well, screw the fluid services. The guy needs brakes or the guy needs this, that, and the other. And on one of our shop meetings, we've told our manager, that's not how it needs to be done. Let us make the recommendation of what it needs. Because countless times they would sell a 30k on a car with no power steering fluid, and there would be a line for power steering fluid.

Yeah.

So they don't even. They didn't even know what the cars do or do not have right for us to correctly do it. So then when I say, hey, man, this rogue doesn't have power steering fluid, you're like, oh, well, let's do this other service instead, since it's the same amount of money. And I'm like, or you could tell the customer that, hey, I messed up. Your car doesn't have power steering fluid. We could do this instead. Like, yeah, the customer might not know this, that, and the other. And at the end of the day, you could say, well, is it really harming the customer because they approved this amount of money? Well, to all of us techs, yes, it does, because that's another, let's say, $150 for power steering flush that they could have kept in their pocket for whatever they may need.

And it's very, very frustrating.

And they could have bought a belt instead, or they could have bought. Well, they might not have been able to buy a whole control arm, but a link, you know, like. I mean, you and I know is familiar with that product. To me, Eric, what it sounds like is they've got. They're really trying to motivate their service writers to actually start selling. Yes, it sounds like. And I want to hope that they were. You know, if you sell $500, it shouldn't matter whether it's $500 on fluid or $500 on a control arm job with an alignment, you should still get the same commission on 500 bucks.

But it sounds like they were using BG to push them to make some money and weren't even the same insistence on selling $500 for a safety repair versus $500 for fluid. I'm just like you. I would have. I'd be like, over the moon, you know, pissed. Would not be up in arms, because it's just complete nonsense. Like, we're not. We're not advocating, as I like to say, for the customer when we do it that way. I'm not against Fluid Services.

Don't get me wrong. Cars need to be maintained. They need to be serviced. Everybody should be working to sell to make some money. Of course, but, like, priority always has to Be on the safety stuff, not on fluids. And when they're like, unlike you, when they're selling a power steering flush on. On a rogue that you never flush the fluid in, they're almost all electronic, you know, like, what sense in that? I mean, yes, some of the Nissan power steering systems that are electronic still have a fluid, but I've never seen an interval to change it. You know what I mean?

Yeah. And then another like. Well, a company sent me out a brake fluid tester, so I would. I would start using that. Not just for the videos, but I actually wanted to know if the customer needed to have their brake fluid done. Just because it looks dark doesn't mean it's bad.

Right.

And I believe the Nissan interval is every 60,000 miles for brake fluid, not 30,000 or three years, something like that. We would recommend it every 15,000.

Yeah. I was going to say when I left up in Canada, we're on the metric system. They were selling because it was DOT four and they're saying it's super hydroscopic, which it is. It absorbs a lot more water than three. Three. They were selling sometimes every 20,000 kilometers. So, like we would do it where every other oil change it was getting because they pushed the other oil change interval to 10. Every other oil change we're doing a brake fluid flush.

Like, I've never flushed so much brake fluid until I started work for Nissan and. And then you saw all the ABS recalls, right, that they had to do the modules and all that jazz.

Those paid good money. I enjoyed doing those.

Yeah. But the, like, you'd flush one in in. Then the next month, the recalls out, you're flushing it again for this time under warranty. Right. Like, if I was a customer, I'd be PO'd big time.

Yep.

But I just, I never got behind that way of doing things. Everything was a brake flush. Brake flush on an air filter. Brake flush and air filter. Ridiculous.

Yeah. The. There was this one service rider that I could not stand him because of his, I would say, moral code. There'd be many times where I say, hey, this car needs this, that and the other. And he says, oh, just don't put that down or we need to get this sold. Instead, they came in for this. X, Y and Z, whatever. And I would tell my other co workers that I'm like, I am this close to telling this guy, I'm never working for your cars again.

And one day a Pathfinder came in. I think it was a 2017 Pathfinder. They came in with some issue. It Was like a check engine light. I can't remember exactly what the check engine light was for at this point because it's been over a year and a half. Yeah, but they came in. He sold Fluid services and spark plugs along with a bunch of other stuff on the service drive. Well, I never start doing a job until I think you froze again.

No, didn't phrase. Okay, on my end, your screen just froze Anyways, so I always wait until I see. So this. Eventually we did get electronic MPIs. And I can see every step when the MPI goes to the parts department for parts pricing, and then when it gets sent to the service writer, I can see how long the service writer has had it before sending that quote to the customer.

Right.

And if they come in for a check engine light, but also $1,000 worth of fluid services and spark plugs, whatever the amount may be, I don't do anything on it until I get that back of what the customer has greenlit and what they've denied.

Right.

And I'm just sitting about an hour later, I say, hey, man, have you gotten this sent to the customer? He's like, oh, just start working on it and I'll send it to the customer. I'm like, no, I'm not starting this job until you tell the customer their options. Because they might not want to do the Fluid services and they want to do this instead. And it was maybe 3:30, and usually I leave at 5. He's like, man, you still haven't started it. I'm like, no, you haven't sent the customer the quote for him to say what they want or don't want. I'm not touching this. I don't care.

And he finally got the quote back and everything was greenlit. I'm like, okay, cool. The customer is aware of it. But in that program, I can see the total amount per line item, and it showed seventeen hundred dollars for the spark plug line. And wow. I'm like, that is on a Pathfinder. It's 3.2 hours for Spark plugs, and the spark plugs are like $17 each. Times six.

That job should be 600, $700 on its own because the shop rate at the time was 180 per hour or whatever it might have been. So I went to the dispatcher, who's also the assistant manager, and I said, this isn't right. You need to find out why this is literally doubled for the spark plugs. And this service writer has done things like that before where he charges extra on a line item. Where I put two hours, it might be three hours or whatever. Or he's like, I'll get you on the next one. So you don't get paid on a job. And then the next one, the customer gets charged three hours when it should be a two hour job.

Yeah.

And so the assistant manager came back to me. He's like, okay, so the customer approved the spark plugs to begin with. And then when you made the recommendation, it was put in double. And that's why it was put in double. And I'm like, you think I believe that he didn't see that and didn't go like, well, let me change it and make it right? No, he, he did that on purpose, I guarantee, because he's done shit like that before. And the assistant manager even said, yeah, we know he, he does sketchy stuff sometimes, but we'll get it taken care of. I ended up finishing the car for the price that it should have been. But after that, I said, I am never doing a single job for him ever again.

I don't care what you say, you cannot make me do a job for him. You will have to fire me if you make me do a job for him. And then my motorcycle accident happened. And even though.

Let's, let's back up here for a minute. Isn't that disgusting though, that like, they literally come to you and they say, yeah, we'll take care of it. So we know we have a guy who's charging double on a job of what it should cost to the customer, but we're going to protect that service writer because, like, let's be real, he's making us money. Yep, that whole part. And see, there's. There's always been a double standard in this industry, or not so much necessarily double standard, because if a technician did that, the shop would throw the technician under the bus so fast and make an example of a. String them up, pelt him in the street with stones, you know, like, and, and tell the customers and probably put it on the news. Look what we did.

We had a guy in our midst and he was terrible. We got rid of him. Look how great we are. But I've seen it countless times when advisors are doing sketchy stuff like that and they completely. The manager looks the other way and goes, don't worry, we'll handle. I can tell you why they look the other way is because this is my problem with incentivized pay in this industry, period, is because it just trickles down. Everybody allows sketchy stuff to happen because everybody relies on that sketchy stuff for their paycheck. It's disgusting.

Sorry.

My own little r. It's all good. So when I got back. What was that?

So you had the motorcycle accident?

Yeah, so I had the motorcycle accident. I was gone for two months completely to heal. And then I got back and of course I was, quote, unquote, desperate for work because I didn't have my short term disability anymore.

Right.

And they would. The dispatcher would come out, bring me tickets, and I would see that service writer's name on it, and I would just go back, put the paperwork down on his desk, and he's like, don't you want money? And I said, I told you I don't care what it is. If I told you I don't want to work on his cars, that means I'm not going to work on his cars. And the dispatcher says, well, eventually we're going to need to talk to the service manager and figure this out because you can't just not do his work. And I'm like, you can try me. I've been there for almost nine years at that point. So I was kind of comfortable knowing that short of blowing a customer's car up or whatever, I'm not going to get fired because I'm valuable to the company.

Yep.

So I said, you can try me. Like, I'm not doing his work. And there'd be times where I don't know if the dispatcher would do it on purpose or if he's just not paying attention, but here and there, I would still get those ros and I would just bring them back, put them on the desk and say, no, I'm not working on his stuff. And also I found out since I've quit Nissan that another tech has also said that he's not doing that. Service writers work.

That service still works there.

He still works there to this day. I went to Nissan to do some stuff on my Xterra and he's still working there. Like now. I don't harbor any grudge. Like, I would be pissed at him and not even talk to him when I work there. But now it's not my problem. I have no control. So when I come into the shop and say hey to everyone, I'm cordial, like, I'm not going to harbor anything.

It's in the past. It doesn't matter to me. I have no say. Yeah. But yes, he, he still does work there. And in our parts department, we, I want to say, had an amazing parts department. They would get our parts Quotes really good. Sometimes there would be mistakes like getting the wrong part, but everyone has that and that's understand.

However, the parts manager, I don't know the exact reason why he left, but he started working for another shop after being at that Nissan for 20 years. And then he pretty much took almost every single guy with him to the new shop and then our shop had to scramble and find a new manager. And this was about the time when I was also getting back from my accident and I was contemplating of not not being a mechanic anymore because I just physically couldn't do it. And I know the techs that have gone into the parts department, they make more money. It's less work. You make more money being in the parts department, which is crazy when you.

Think about it, right? That the technician leaves the bay and can make more money working in the parts department. Now I got asked and so the parts guys, are they on commission of some type or how is that they.

Make a percentage of sales.

Yeah. So see which, you know, it's that whole thing again. Like I, I've, I, I, I've always said that I think service writers should be on some type of commission. I think in fact, if you're going to put, if you got a technician on one side and an advisor on the other, I think most of the time this industry would be right to make sure that the advisor is on a commission and not necessarily the technician because the advisor needs to be. I've seen too many lazy, unmotivated advisors than I've ever seen lazy, unmotivated text to put it that way. So, but parts people, I'm on the fence about that, you know what I mean? Because it's like yes, you want the guy to be or gal to know, okay, every little part that's supposed to go with this repair, you don't know what it's like. You want all the bolts that are supposed to be changed, you want all the gaskets when that trainee comes out, the whole thing. But the fact that they can leave the bay and go into parts and make more money.

Your dealership man had it all screwed up like how stuff was down.

So I did try, I asked my service manager because I didn't want to just go behind his back because of course they would need to find someone to replace me. I said, are you okay with me making this transition? Because physically I am, I'm hurting here. Like I need to be able to make money but also chill out. And I, he says yes, that's fine. And I went to go Talk to one of the main guys that was still there before he left to that other shop. And he's like, oh, well, the new service manager brought all of his guys from the shop that he came from. So there's no room like you. You can't.

There's not even a spot for you to come in. And so I just kind of wrote that off. I'm like, okay, well, I guess I can't go into parts because they've already filled it. And, oh, the new guys that came on, they were, I think from Hyundai and they didn't know Nissan's at all and their system was different. So I would say if you ever need me to show you on the diagram the exact part that I need, I'll do that. Like, that helps me and you. And there was one time where I came up and said, hey, do you need me to show you what part I need? He's like, no, I know what you're talking about. Okay, cool.

And then I get the part. Open the box. Wrong part.

Yeah.

Like, I even offered to give you. Look, show you the exact part that I need. And maybe that could have been a part of them just wanting to be able to do it themselves, which is fine. But if you genuinely don't know the answer, don't pretend that you know the answer. This. This can go from any part of dealership or any job ever. Just ask. You don't have to feel like your ego is going to get hurt by just saying, hey, I don't know this thing.

Can you show me? And I think a lot of people get caught up in that. And I'd say someone who brings a lot of light to that is Chris. And he makes his videos about what's the difference between a tech and the service writer. Like, should this happen, should that happen? He's been in the industry too, and he knows how to kind of put it into perspective. Like, these sides need to work together instead of getting pissed off at each other. And I don't know, like, in my shop, I've only been in the one shop, so I can't say for 100. Sure. But it just feels like money hampers that completely.

Yeah. What Chris talks about a lot is. And like you said, is he. He shines light on, you know, a lot of the times where so many of the same scenarios happen. It doesn't matter where. The only thing that changes is the address and the brand. It always seems to have the same problems and how the network goes within the dealership. And he's not we're talking about.

For people that aren't aware, we're talking about Chris Craig. Chris MF Craig on TikTok. I've had him on as a guest before. He's fantastic. He'll be back again as another guest. But he really shows light with how the different communication breaks down between the different departments within the dealership. You know, the same thing like what you alluded to, you know, customers coming in for pre sold maintenance packages or whatever, a schedule B schedule. And the car needs, you know, work for safety.

How is that supposed to be handled? Well, safety is always supposed to be done first, end of the story. There's no argument for that. I don't care. You know, but it goes so much deeper than that where he talks about like, whose responsibility should it be to look up the parts. Whose responsibility should be to, to, you know, to get the parts correctly, like all that kind of stuff. He's, he's just great. So I, it sounds like your dealership man, is just too much. Too many people that are relying so heavy on that commission just to get like a decent living wage.

Yeah, nobody is, is doing well what they should be doing. I'm, I'm still stuck in this. My head's pounding on the wall, figuratively trying to understand how a technician can make more money in parts. I've never in my career have I seen that in my life. It is just so asinine and backwards to me that that's, that even worked. They should know. That's just ludicrous.

I know. On a base scale, any part sold to customer is upped by 30%. And for text, if you buy a part, it's up by 10%. So the shop's still making money and that's fine. Like, yeah, but man, that beyond just service and parts, like even our sales team, I stopped buying cars there because I got a 2006 Infiniti M35 and I paid nine grand for it. Well, I found out that they took that car on trade for 3,000. He had 168,000 miles or no, 268,000 miles. Sorry.

And when I hit a deer, it ended up having 274,000 miles. And it was a bulletproof car. I loved it. But after that, I never bought a single car from that dealership because I knew that I wasn't going to get any type of employee discount. Typically it's 500 over what the dealership got the car for. But my dealership would say, oh, it's just, you don't pay for the check in for, like, the oil change and all that stuff. That's your employee discount. And the.

The one guy that I loved to work with, he. He was always straight up to me or any customers. He was at that dealership for a very long time. When I was gone through my motorcycle accident, I found out that he quit. And I asked why he quit. And it turns out he had a friend that wanted service trucks, like the cargo vans. And he bought, oh, I don't know, let's say four or six. I don't know the true number, but a decent amount.

And you know, when you sell multiple cars in one deal, that's a great paycheck for the sales team.

Yeah.

Or for that salesman. However, he couldn't get that deal because another service or another salesman was the guy that worked and did the deals on the cargo stuff.

Right.

So the deal had to go to that other guy and he didn't get anything. So he's like, screw this, I'm done. I'm gone.

I would.

You lose an amazing salesperson.

Yeah.

Because you have to keep with the. Oh, this guy always does fleet X, Y and Z. Like, it shouldn't matter. You brought in this person to make the sale. You are the one who should get that commission. And so it's just bad practices here and there that I don't understand. And I mean, that dealership has been in business for longer than I've been alive. So of course they must be doing something right in a monetary sense to keep themselves up.

But the cost of good people.

Well, I can tell you, Eric, that I wish I could tell you that it gets better. I can tell you that you've been doing this like 10 years and I've been doing it like 30. Every dealer that I've ever been at sounds exactly like that one. And I had the same thing, and they all are the same. It's like it's their culture or something. Like, you know that salesman that did that, that contact that sold, say, like six Envy's. Right. Six Envy vans.

Just as hypothetical stuff, if he brings a person in to buy six, and it's a fleet sale and it has to go to a fleet manager and be processed, that's fine. I understand it. Right. Fleet is a different thing to sell. That salesman still deserves a really good kind of check or a bonus or something. Maybe it can't be the full amount because policy is policy, you know, but it's to say you get nothing. But I've said it so many times, man, and, you know, most People don't listen to me are probably not a dealer owner, so I don't care if they do. When you work for a dealer owner, what you're working for is you're working for what is already a millionaire who is trying to build themselves into being a multi millionaire.

And it's just part of their portfolio. So they don't really care too much about the people that work for them. I don't care if you own a dealership. You want to come on and argue that fact with me, great. I'm all for it. Let's hear it. Because. Yeah, it hasn't been shown to me.

I could show you millions of people, hundreds of testimonials that all say differently, that they're just treated like a number. And I'm not trying to say that everybody is, you know, like, you gotta lose money to keep everybody happy. I'm not necessarily saying that, but, like, we know people that have been around a dealership a long time. I wish I could say that, you know, some are good, but so far, they all look the same to me. The only thing that changes is the brand and the address.

So for me, I would say the dealership when they would need to take care of the customer. That's one thing that they always did do.

Yeah.

Like, if a mechanic screws up or let's say something goes wrong, the customer will get taken care of because of course, we want that repeat business. But sometimes it's at the cost of a mechanic who. Who had no control over it. Where they have enough money to pay the tech internally.

Yeah.

For the hours that missed out or whatever. Now, that just wouldn't really happen. No, sadly. So there'd be if. If I had a tally of all the cars that I've done where they're like, oh, the customer is pissed off. I'll get you on the next one. And then I never get on the next one. Yeah, I.

I'd have another year's worth of salary, probably a lot more than.

Seven bucks, I'll tell you that. Yeah.

So it's just. It's crazy that. And when I would talk to other people, like, let's say for a transmission issue on Chevy, I would talk to Brandon and be like, hey, I need some clarification on this. Because my dealership only had all data. We didn't have any other type of system where we could look up information and all that. I just didn't have the information that I needed. So I'd have to reach out to someone else. And thankfully, I would Be able to get that information and fix the car correctly.

Right.

So also with Brandon, I know we've talked about him saying I didn't get much mentorship. Training and mentorship. Yeah, I did, but I didn't. I got a very basic, like, this is how you replace a transmission. Like a technical mentorship of, this is how you do this. X, Y and Z. And the last and still current manager, he knew the value of sending texts to training. And I was one of the first guys to get sent to training when he started working there.

Finally went to California, got my basic electrical passed, first try. It was a great learning experience. I learned that, okay, I can do this test for this issue or whatever. And it did help bolster my diag skills more so because I understood the fundamentals. There'd be times where I would have my multimeter and be like, okay, why am I not getting voltage on this blower motor? I'm not getting 12 volts. Well, I didn't realize it's. What's the correct word? Stepper motor that you start with half a volt and then go up from there. So just getting that class done helped me understand that.

Now there's a big debate of is going to places like a tech school worth it or this, that and the other. And I can say that it probably is. Now, there's a difference between having real world experience and just being a tech. And you have to put those two together to be able to have a better understanding of what you're working on. Yeah, I know there would be guys that came into the shop that they came from a tech school and they had a better understanding than guys that have been in the industry for 30 years.

Yeah, I say it like this. When I was at the dealership now, I got mentored. I was lucky. A couple guys mentored me really well. And like, how do you make hours? How does this job. Here's your shortcuts for this repair. Here's your shortcuts for that repair. Like you said, a transmission re and reuse, something like that.

And then I had some other guys that were like, they could mentor me. And like, this is what the data, when you're looking at it on the screen really means. Right. And that helped me a lot because I would just. I enjoyed it, I gravitated towards it. But in this industry, you know, you can mentor people two ways. You can mentor them in a dealership to just how they turn hours. And there's so much more to that than just like the shortcuts on the job, it can become kind of sketchy where, like, guys immediately go, no fault found.

I didn't hear anything wrong with that car. I couldn't find it. And it goes back out. And they sit there and they wait on that gravy ticket, right? At some point, everybody has to start doing the hard work. And this is where, you know, the dealerships are failing. Because like you said, you can have two technicians in the same dealership with the same certs. You pay them the same amount per hour, but you know that one is stronger than the other at getting to the cause of the problem. What is actually, why is the customer complaint? What are they there for? If we're trying to tell everybody that you just have to work harder to make more hours to make the pay, it's.

It's absolutely stupid. Certs don't even matter, right? You have to fight constantly for your hourly rate. And then even that if your hourly rate is really high, but you're not getting the good work, you're getting the nightmare after nightmare after nightmare. It doesn't work either. And that's where we have to. That's not even a dealership thing. That can be. When we talk to shops that still want to pay their technicians flat rate, if you got a guy and you're only paying a dollar more an hour than your guy that can't solve a problem, where's the incentive all of a sudden to fix all those cars if at the end of the week, we're only $40 difference because of turn? It doesn't make any sense, right? And.

And I don't know the exact. You can't put a numerical value on and go, this is what this technician's worth. But if you got a guy that can always get to the problem, that has that critical thinking skill, they're worth double what your guy that can just turn hours is worth. Yeah, he's worth double. I don't. Whatever. You want to slice it how you pay him, he should be taking home twice as much. Just as simple as that.

You know, they have to be.

There'd be some times where you get guys that are just there to make hours and you try your best to say, so there was a BTech. I don't know if he still is there or not, but he would come up and say, hey, can you show me how to program a key? Like, sure, next week. Hey, can you show me how to program a key? You know, just keep asking. I'm like, dude, it literally in the console tells you step by step how to Program the key. Now, I understand there's certain nuances that the console doesn't say that you have to do, and I get that because I had that same struggle. But if you have several different texts showing you how to program a key and you just can't learn how to do it, then you're not here to actually. Because you're not here because you actually like the job. It's just a job, and you don't care that it gets done right.

And for me, I was next to a guy that him and I got along really well, and that's why we were put next to each other, because I could help him, he could help me, and this, that, and the other. But if I had an issue, I would go on trying to find tech line cases, this, that, and the other, see if it's happened before. But this guy, anytime he had a squeak, he just stop, Pull into the shop, stop right where the foreman is and say, hey, hopping, help me find this squeak. And they, they were good together. We. We always joke saying that they were like son and dad because they both looked similar. They had glasses. Like, their mannerisms were the same.

They got along really well. And it, like, I'm not saying it's a bad thing to have at all. But on the flip side, if you always need the foreman to come over to help you fix a problem, then that's slowing you down. That's taking the foreman off of a job that when other techs can't figure something out, he's the one that would be able to. Okay, he's not flat rate. He's on a salary, commission, whatever it might be called, where he can figure out the harder stuff and not have to worry about turning hours.

Yeah.

And let's say if I had a car that tech lines down because Nissan system sucks, very rarely works. And I'm like, okay, this is an older car. I. I need his guidance. I need the foreman's guidance. And he'd be gone doing a test drive with someone, not just the tech that next to me or whatever, and I would finally be able to get his help. But when I did my very first engine rebuild, starting in 2017, or was it 16, I believe from 16 to 18 for the 5.6s.

Yeah.

They had very bad engine problems.

Yeah.

And you would have to rebuild them. And on my very first one, like I was, I've never gone that deep into an engine before. And I asked my man, shop manager, saying, hey, I'm gonna need his help with for the duration because I Don't want to screw anything up. And for the majority, I did get his help. And when I was putting the car back together, I've never done timing before up until this point. And so I had my foreman check my timing, make sure everything was good and I put the car back together the rest of the way and I started up and the car's running like the van just doesn't have a good time. And I think it was the left bank was off by two. Two.

Two teeth. What would that been, like 40 degrees or. Yeah, whatever it would be. So I took the front end back off, did the timing, had him do it again and he's like, no, you did it right the first time. I don't know why the, the timing's off. And so that was a big stump to me. But I, I don't know if this caused it or not because I've questioned him about it. I said, when you had me start the engine, I asked you if I should prime it first and you said, no, it's fine, just, just crank it right up and it'll be fine.

Now in my brain I'm thinking, is that what probably caused the teeth to jump? Like there wasn't pressure to the tensioners and that sprocket just turned on a loose setting and I never got clarification. But that's internally what I'm thinking is what happened. Because I was on that van for a long time trying to figure out what was going on with it before I finally found out that, okay, this is the problem. And then, so I also feel if you're telling someone in the shop that, hey, you need a little bit more help, then that should be the goal of the foreman or whoever and have a little bit more structured and you have to make sure that the customer is aware that, okay, this job is going to take a little bit longer. But at the same time, you're not going to tell the customer, hey, we have a tech who's never done an engine job before working on your car because. Yeah, well, me as myself, I'm not going to want to have my car worked on by someone who's never done the job before. And. But you have to start somewhere.

Yeah. So for some context, for some people that maybe aren't quite familiar with the brand, what Eric's talking about is the 5, 6v8 that came out, like you said, around 17. And I remember seeing them in Titans the most because we didn't sell the full blown SUV that had the V8. Like, I mean, not the Pathfinder. What's a bubble? Yeah, Armada. We never sold one when I was there for, for like four years. I never saw one get sold. But the five sixes used to have really bad piston slot or piston tech or whatever you want to call it.

And there was. They. When we first started running, they were shipping whole long blocks. And then eventually, of course, because that gets really expensive, they started shipping just short blocks. And they only gave you like four extra hours, I think, to put short block in versus a long block. So that one that you had, that was like 40 out. What was the final fix on why it was out of time? Was it, were you right? And that it had to be primed before you.

So I redid the timing and this time I did the priming procedure and the engine worked perfect.

Yeah.

And so there was. I took it on a drive. It had no issues. I took it home, took, drove it back to work, and I just made sure for another extra day that it was. It was good. And the customer ended up taking it. And then they came back like two weeks later with the check engine light on. And it had another issue.

And no one in the shop could really understand it, what was going on with it. It kept throwing O2 codes.

Okay.

And so I would replace the sensors, this, that. Because it was still under warranty, the customer didn't have to pay for anything, but nothing seemed to fix it. And then I had the DTS come out. Not the dts. You. You could probably explain it a little bit better than me. The DTS came out and he can authorize whatever. Like you don't need pre authorization from Nissan.

So he ended up saying, okay, just flat out replace this, this, this, and this. And what ended up fixing it is I had to replace the headers and the CAT and the secondary cats for that code to finally go away. Now I made it as tight as it could possibly be. I had new gaskets, new everything. But somehow with doing the engine replacement that's caused that to happen. And my shop was horrible about getting straight time.

Yeah.

And so I never knew that if I was going to get paid for any of that time to fix it, but only because the DTS was there is what allowed me to get paid on that.

So dts, when Eric's speaking of, is what I used to call up here, around here is District Service Manager, which had a little bit more pull and being able to say in a certain area, yes, just go ahead and fix the scar. They're not really the same as like a district. You Know, we hear guys talk about from different dealers where they send in a technician from corporate, right, and he comes in and solves that. Maybe that was what was going on with your situation. But what, that's what I know to be as a district service manager was somebody who could say, you've got approval, you don't have to wait and consult. Because for Nissan, before you could go on with the next repair, sometimes under warranty, you had to get it approved. And it was a long, drawn out, stupid process of emails back and forth, like you said, on a system that really worked. I hated it.

I just stopped doing it. We had, I remember we had an Arma, not Armada, we had an NV with a V8 and it kept coming back and back and back for catalyst failures and auxin sensor codes and whatnot. And it was a similar, it was a boomerang situation and ended up being that the technician that had been working on it was never getting the oxygen sensors tight enough when he was putting them back in and they were loosening off and then, you know, the ground goes away and, and it just, it just. I hated it. I hated that that Nissan is, is an easy product to fix. It is a nightmare of a company to navigate their service information and their processes and their policies. It's terrible. It's the worst one I've ever seen by far.

And I mean, like Hyundai, I would go, I could, I could fix high end is standing on my head with my arms, you know, tied behind my back, my eyes shut. Compared to Nissan, it's just so much easier. They don't build as good a car, but like it's going through hoops to try and fix Nissan. It was terrible.

What, what time frame did you work at Nissan?

So we're going into 2025. So I want to say I started in probably 2015 and left probably by 2020.

Gotcha. So thankfully you missed the whole battery debacle. The newer cars, I think that they did not have an accurate charging system set up because they would be, I believe the AGM batteries and these batteries would get fried. Like I was replacing a battery a day. And every tech pretty much was. And I don't know if Nissan didn't believe, but they made it so that you had to get pre authorization. Doesn't matter. The dealership, it's not that we were on ARC or had any restrictions with our dealership specifically, but global or maybe just North America wide.

If you had to do a battery, you couldn't just have the printout slip. They had I think when you were working there, they had the GR8 battery tester. Since then they got a new battery tester called the DC8 8000 from Midtronics. And then we also had handheld battery testers from Midtronics as well. Now, when you hook up the DC8000 to would register and you did a whole system test with starting the car, whatever, it would come back failed battery.

Yeah.

Well, Nissan told us. No, don't believe that. You have to do the battery test with the handheld tool, which doesn't have the diagnostic power as the DC8000.

Yeah.

Then charge it for a half an hour on the DC8000, then test it again with the handheld. You could not test it with the big machine. And so of course, after you charge a battery for a half an hour, you're going to get a good test result.

Of course. Yeah.

So then you have to send a customer out saying, sorry, we can't do anything, we know your battery is bad, just come back another time when your car doesn't start. So well, then how does that piss off a customer?

It's funny we get onto this topic because I was just telling this story to a friend, backstory. Battery was the reason I got. I finally was my last straw. The Nissan store, because just like you were talking about, we would have starting to have issues with age. And it was probably a center or something like that. But I remember that a customer bought a Sentra. It had sat on a lot, a long time. There's a whole bunch of processes that are supposed to be done with cars that's sit on the lot.

Right. Like what's really supposed to happen is they're supposed to be started up and idled up and charged back up and certain fuses supposed to be removed and all that yada, yada, yada. That never gets done at any dealer I've ever worked at because they're not paying people to do it. So this guy buys this car Accentra battery, at this point, six months old, you know, of course the salesman goes and boosts it, sells him the car. He drives the car home, takes the car home, parks the car for the next two months. He takes a bus everywhere, has to go and never gets in the car. He goes out to the car one day and it won't start. He calls aaa, they boost the car.

He brings it down to the dealership. I run a test on it. Of course it's all charged up. He's a waiter, by the way, which is even stupider. And I go, there's nothing you know, the battery passes. I'm using the little handheld that we're supposed to be using, it says it passes. I know what this car needs at this point, but I can't fail the battery without a slip that says the battery is bad. So the customer leaves, he's gone another two months, doesn't use the car.

It's got 17km on it since it was last there, which is the time, the travel distance to get it back home. He parks it again, shuts the key off, goes in, takes the bus everywhere for the next two. Why the guy even bought a brand new car in the first place, I don't know. But whatever, it doesn't. It's irrelevant. It gets boosted again, brought back. This time they started as a comeback. Now I'm the type of person when you give me a comeback, if I'm legit, like it's mine.

But when you play that kind of game, which we know what this game is at this point, it's nothing I'm doing wrong, right? It's a lack of communication between the customer and the service writer and policy and all that jazz. Be ready to watch the bearded guy get angry. So anyway, so I now have to know that I. If I put a battery in this car, it's because the last two times, they're not paying me for nothing. I'm not getting paid the last two times. The first time and the second time, it's in so process. At the time policy was you needed printed slips that said the battery is bad. Now, Eric has probably done this or seen it done.

And I'm gonna say that lots of other people have had to do it too. You go into the. Where the battery cores are and you put the machine on and you find the battery core that will fail and you get your printout. So I get two printouts that say battery is defective because forever you needed two, not just one two. I go and put them on the desk with the writer and the service writer. Tower guy looks at me and he says, now realize that I'm not even gotten paid yet. Like this is all zero. He says, actually need three.

I lost my ever loving I flipped my lid and I said, well, then you go get the effing. Of course, I got counseled for how I spoke to the tower dispatch and to the service writer because I said, this is. This is so stupid. This car doesn't even need a battery. We need to explain to the customer that if he's going to park it for two months, we need to remove the radio Fuse, right? Move it around so that it's not drawing on the stupid thing. It's like talking to the wall. They didn't want to hear it. So that was my story about how batteries cost me my final day at the Nissan store.

Thank God for that customer, because it was it. Onward and upward to better things. But this is. This is what, this is the reality for people that are listening have never worked in a dealership. What Eric and I are talking about is the reality of what we face every day. It's not like we don't make this stuff up. You know, the people that are on social media and, you know, dealer plate guy and Chris and what. This is all very real to us.

It. We get flashbacks, trauma from these stories that we tell because it's happened. So, yeah, I can remember the GR8. I can remember never using it because it was slow. It was a good tool. Don't get me wrong. It's a great tool, but I'm still at the point like that. Even those little handheld testers, as a diagnostic tester for a battery, there's still a lot to be said for a carbon pile and what you're actually trying to do.

So that's. And again, if the dealers, the dealers are forever hating the warranty batteries because most of them get kicked back because the shop the, the OE looks at. When it was installed in the car, was it actually like the process which, which is every week it's supposed to be started up idle, charge the battery back up. Why did I not do that? Because they take delivery of them with almost no fuel in them, and they put no fuel in until they're sold. So you can't leave them sitting there idling for 10 minutes every week because there is no gas in the stupid things. This is just. This is the. This is the reality of us that have worked at a dealer before.

This is what we face this nonsense all day long. So when you wonder why some of us that come from a dealer are the way we are, this is why shit like this. Sorry, Eric. Go ahead, man.

That's all good. I'll pose this question to you. How hard do you think it'd be to work on any brand when your diagnostic tool doesn't work?

Oh, it'd be impossible. Absolutely impossible.

Now you know how Nissan's system would go down all the time. They. When you were working there, the system wasn't fully online.

Yeah.

You had cards in the computers. If you needed to do a key reprogram or if you needed to do any Bi directional functionality. You could just do it without having the console hooked up to Internet. They made it a cloud based system. Yeah, you have to have the console hooked up to Internet to even pull codes most of the time or do anything. So when the system's down or Nissan pushes out a bad update, you're trying to read codes on a car and an hour later you finally find out that there's something wrong with it.

Yeah.

And you don't get paid for that. Time of you trying to diagnose why the Nissan computer is not working.

Yeah, it's terrible. And when he says bad update, he's not kidding. Like, I can remember countless software updates that were out and then we got a notice next week saying, don't do that update. There's another one coming because we effed it up. The software's wrong. Like that's not just something we make up. That's real legit. I know that guys.

I talk to an aftermarket, they absolutely hate, hate Nissan when it comes to the reprogramming side of it. Because like their interface, what we talk to is different than when, what they get access to. Right. So it's always behind there. It's just awful. It's the worst. I can tell you that what only survived for me at Nissan is by the time I was at Nissan, we had an Identifix account and I had a snap on Solace. So I was using more times than not, I was using the Snap on Solace that I was very familiar with.

And I was using Mitchell or All Data or Identifix for my service information on anything that was two, three years old because it was easier to navigate there. The way they set up it sounds so counterintuitive, but they would have their connectors in one section of their service information, their wiring diagram in another, and they were always showing you the flip side of the connector view. Like you never knew what you were looking at. The connector view, whether you were looking at it, like staring into it unplugged or whether you were looking at it from behind. It was awful. It was terrible. Worst brand I've ever worked on in my life. I'm a smart guy and I go home thinking I was dumb.

So many days since I've only known Nissan, the connect review, they could have updated it, but it was easy for me because you could toggle a switch. Do you want to look at it pin side or other side? You can toggle which way that you want to go. So I could look at that wiring diagram and I Could be like, okay, this goes here, this goes there, that goes there. And. But sometimes it would be incomplete. You don't have the whole thing. Like, okay, there's. If you need to.

I don't know if you've ever seen this bulletin. Why they didn't just update it within the ESM is freaking beyond me. But when I was doing, I think it's a 2017 or 2018 Altima, when you're doing the calibration for the radar system, for the like automatic braking and whatnot, you have to enter in values of whatever it might be. So you would go to esm, it would tell you these are the base values that you have to put in and the board will figure everything else out. And so you'd put the values in and it wouldn't go. It would be impossible. You couldn't do it. They made a bulletin saying, hey, use these values instead.

And then it would work. Okay. Why create a bulletin instead of just fixing the ESM to begin with? When a tech makes they. Sometimes they would send out emails asking what are issues that you were having with consoles or this, that and the other. It just didn't seem like they actually read into any of that. Because on Facebook there's a group for Nissan Infiniti mechanics that I'm part of and everyone would be in there being like, hey, I'm having this issue. What's going on? And someone would be like, oh, Nissan's down. Or this, that and the other.

There's an issue here that hasn't been addressed. Or there was a time where I had to replace the ECM and it didn't have the steps in the correct order.

Yeah.

So you have to put in a new ecm. There's a step that was out of order for programming the tpms and it was like the third step and it actually needed to be the second step. So I did it out of order and finally got it to work. And it's just like things like that. Do the people who create the ESM even have a real world person telling them exactly what needs to be done?

Yeah, no, no. I can remember that Facebook group that you're speaking of because I was on there when I worked there and there's some really sharp guys there. There was also some real attitude too, which I couldn't. Sounds funny coming from me because it's like I'm known on Facebook for being a bit of a. But like there was some guys that just were. They looked at instances and I can kind of relate now where they're coming from. But it was like, if you were new to the product, but you had a question because you were new to the product, they would talk to you like if they had 10 years in, like, you were just absolutely stupid. Yeah.

And for me, that was really hard to stomach because it's like I worked on just about every nameplate that's ever been out. And you knew you're talking to some guys that only knew that product. My service manager that I worked for had started there as a high school kid and had only ever worked on that product. That was it. Other than tractors on his farm, at home and whatever, a little bit dicking around, basic work that he did. So when I came in with my diag experience in my process, I had. I struggled trying to navigate the service side of the information system. But, like, in terms of fixing the cars, it was easy.

He would talk to me like I was stupid because he had these guys that were, like, turning way more hours than me. But, like, they couldn't diagnose a volt drop on the ground. Right. Or they couldn't diagnose a shorted fan clutch in a diesel truck. Like, that's a really famous story of mine. I watched a harness and an ECM get thrown on a truck because I had a shorted fan clutch, you know, and he didn't even understand at that point when I went to him and said, this is what they did to fix it, this is why. Blah, blah, he. It was like it went right over his head.

He had no idea what I was even talking about. It was old hat for me because, let's be real, it's a Cummins engine in a truck. Cummins, when they're putting them in Dodges years ago, we're having the same short happen on the same. Because it's probably a Vallejo clutch. It's probably the same damn part. Right. But it was like if he'd never been exposed to it, he didn't know. And when I was trying to explain to him what was happening, he.

It was like fishbowl. He didn't have any idea what I was talking about. It was. It was the most trying. Well, I swore off dealerships after Nissan. I'll never go into one again. I'll sell my tools before I'll ever go back to a dealership. Because it's just.

I'm sure that that's. And they. Since I've left, they've turned over their whole service department except for one guy. Well, and that says. That speaks volumes about how Poor. The culture is there. So, I mean, I. I can honestly say that the.

The product gets a bad rap for a couple of really glaring issues, but it deserves that. At the same time, it's terrible. Did anybody ever show you, Eric, the IPDM output test that you could do with the door jam switch and the key when you were there?

I'm not. Are you talking about where it cycles through?

Yeah.

Like the wipers and everything? No, no one at the shop showed me that. That's something I learned at Basic Electrical.

Yeah. That's one of the best tips I can give anybody. Learn that because it's. So you don't even need the scan tool then to do, you know, outputs. But what frustrated me from the Nissan side is you'd be looking at stuff and it's like. Like stuff would go into a module and out a module, but you couldn't actually look at it with the scan tool. Like, I remember door locks and wiper status or window status drove me nuts because it was. You knew the message being bused back and forth, but you couldn't see it as data.

You could get in there with a scope and look, but you couldn't see it at that. It drove me crazy. It was so dumb.

The wildest thing that I ended up figuring out that my foreman and three other techs didn't. There was a rogue that you could open the rear hatch because it had automatic motors, but it would not close right. At all. And they're looking at the system, trying to figure out, like it's commanded open. It's. You can see the parts for that, but you can't. Like, they didn't understand what was going on. And I said, okay, well, look at a different rogue and see what the value is for a fully opened.

Can you chill out? She might need to go out. You can see the value for the rear tailgate being fully opened. Okay. Maybe the system's not realizing that the gate is fully opened or something.

Yeah.

And even going to a different car, you couldn't see that the value looked exactly identical. So we didn't know why. And then I finally looked at physically the rear hatch because it was just plastic. Those motor arms go into the rear plastic of that tailgate, not onto metal. And there would be a crack right where that mounting bolt is. And so that just tiny little crack shortened that value so the car wouldn't allow the tailgate to go down because it never registered that it was fully opened. So it wouldn't close because the car doesn't know that it's fully opened. So it.

It's an error. So when I saw. I'm like, look, there's a crack right there. I guarantee it needs a new tailgate. And it was still under warranty, and they got a new tailgate installed. It worked perfectly. And then after that, every single time a customer came in with a tailgate that wouldn't close, that would open, I would look for that crack and just instantly be like, okay, well, it's out of warranty. You're just gonna have to close it.

Like, don't spend the thousands of dollars to replace the tailgate. It's cracked. Like, my. My thinking is it cracks because people physically push it down instead of hitting the button. Because that motor has so much tension on that plastic, that when you push it and it goes down, that can cause it to crack. So that's probably what the customer is doing anyways, but at least they know why it's not working. Yeah, I love being able to figure out a problem of, okay, this is exactly why it's happening. Instead of just replacing the part and never knowing why, Just to figure out the actual cause and fix it, That's.

To me, that would be my main, like, happiness. If I could diagnose a car, find out the cause, correct the issue, and replace the parts instead of just replacing a part, it come back a year later with the same issue because you never actually fixed the main underlying cause.

So kind of not. And not to hurry along, but. So after you left the dealer, you've kind of got yourself a new job. You kind of headed in a new direction. What are you doing now?

Right now, these scooters are in a lot of different countries and different states. I don't know all of them, but they're called lime. And so I'm the lead mechanic at a repair facility for rentable scooters. Can you chill out.

If you want to take her out?

Yeah, I'll take her out really quick, and then we'll come right back. So be right back room. And then came right back up to the door. So she's actually good.

So it's lime scooters.

Yeah.

Right on.

Well, these things, they're, I don't know, maybe 40 pounds. You can manipulate them in a way to put them on the stand to actually fix them. And they're not that hard to work on sometimes. I still have issues with my back and my hand working on these things, but it's more manageable than being an auto mechanic, where you're under a dashboard trying to get something Your back is on the door sill and you're just having a hard time. So a couple weeks ago, there was someone who reached out to me that I used to work with. He was one of the main parts guys, but now he's the overall manager of a store up a little bit more north. And he messaged me saying, hey, we're looking for a great tech. We would give you two bays this, that, and the other.

I'd love to have you because I know how good you work. Well, I have an MRI coming up. My back's been hurting. Like I. I need to figure out what's going on with that before I even make any type of decision. And I said to him, I'd rather be in parts still, regardless what my MRI says. And he's like, well, get your results back and then we'll talk some more. And when I said to him, so he said that, and then I said I would still rather work in parks, I didn't get anything back from him.

I'm sure he doesn't have an open parts position. I do love being in the automotive industry, but physically I can't do it. And it sucks because even working on my new car, I had a Infiniti M56s that got rear ended and totaled. Yeah. Sedan with a V8. It was very nice car. And now I have an Xterra that has a hundred 93, 000 miles manual. It's a great truck.

And just working on it. I can only work on it a few, like a half an hour at a time before I have to take a break. But I enjoy working on it. It's a fun truck to work on. That's when Nissan was the best, I think.

Yeah.

Back in those frontiers, Pathfinders, Xterras, those were like the workhorses of Nissan's. No one ever really had an issue except for the intermixing and the radiator. That would happen sometimes. So whenever someone comments on a video of mine saying, hey, how can you work on Nissans? There's such piles of crap. I'm like, well, there are a lot of bad Nissans out there, but any Nissan that I've had has been a good vehicle.

Mm.

I've worked there long enough to know which ones are good, which ones are bad. And so I try to kind of tell those stories about, okay, this car worked for me great. This one didn't work so well. But would I want to be a mechanic at Nissan again? No, I wouldn't really want to be a mechanic in Any sense of any car manufacturer now, let's say. So I did get my MRI results back and I do have two bulging discs and Fisher somewhere. I haven't had the doctor call me to like actually tell me. I just logged in and saw the, the base notes of that. Now if I have surgery on my back and I feel great, then maybe I could be a mechanic again.

But I feel like there are other things that I could do that can give me that same type of fulfillment. Like I would love to fly a plane. Now, that's a different technical sense. You're not really working on the thing, but that's something that I would love to be able to do.

Right? And see, that's funny because I kind of think he already answered the question, but I'll ask it anyway because, like, you know, Brandon and I, and it's popped up and Chuck and everybody else, right, about mentorship and the young people in this industry and stuff like that. You kind of said a very powerful thing where you said you wouldn't necessarily, if you could go back, you wouldn't go back and do it again because of the. And I want to say that it's. And it's never once have you said it's because of what you actually physically had to do that you didn't like the job, right? It's, it's the culture of the job. Like, yes, it hurts you now, right, because your, your back injury from the motorcycle accident. But I mean, if you didn't have the motorcycle accident, you would still be doing the job probably, of course. But you, you, you're like so many of us. It's the culture of the way it is that is, is the grind.

Like we all talk about. Like, and I got, I got wrist issues. I have elbow issues. I got, you know, my back, my sciatic will give me a hard time if I'm not stretching and whatnot. But this, the thing that makes me want to quit it some days is like you said, the political nonsense, the BS of, of, of working in a dealership. And let's be real, everybody, like my detractors that are going to listen to this and a big part of my audience is going to go, well, that's dealerships, dude. But we can talk to lots of other people that have worked in, in shops that the. If the culture is the same because of its money, money, money, push, push, push high car count, big hours, all that kind of stuff, right? Which is pushing major for profit.

We're not saying profit is a bad thing. Then it doesn't really matter. Doesn't that it's a dealership. You're still going to burn through your people. Do you think there's a fix for that, Eric? Or is it like, what, what, what's the industry got to do to make you somebody like yourself not look back on it and go, I wish I'd done something else?

I'd say knowing my friends that have even owned their own shops. So it's not just dealers talking. It kind of seems like there's the huge disconnect of the customers aren't really understanding what we're trying to tell them. And people online could give false information.

Yeah.

And they take that information over your own. Like you have a car that the micro filter has never been changed and it's horrible. And it's causing fan noise because some leaves got through and it's making a noise. Well, they'll just say, bang out the filter and don't replace it. And there, there are some benefits to replacing it. And it's some vehicles. Hey, chill. Oh, one second.

Go, go outside. So when the customers aren't believing what you're telling them, that is a very big detractor. Or you have experience in something, but to them it doesn't make sense. In our MPI system, we could take videos and show. And customers wouldn't even look at them to actually see what's going on with their car. So they would just decline it and move on. And if, if you're working on a car and a customer is pissed off, most of the time you take the hit because it's worth. It's not worth your time to try to convince that customer and you just let them go.

So if it's. They come in for an hour Diag and it's $140, whatever. For me working at a dealership, I was paid 27 an hour. So if I have to work on a car for three hours to get paid one hour, I'm not going to want to do it.

No, I won't.

Zero hours.

Yeah.

Because there's sometimes where you get a car, you look at it, you figure it out. Let's say 10 minutes. And the customer makes a big issue about it and you're just like, all right, take the car somewhere else if you don't want to believe my recommendation or this, that and the other. Don't even pay me the diag. Because for me it was simple and it's going to be more of a headache and waste my time to try to get your car fixed and get Paid for it. Instead of just. Let's say there's the other flip side to where sometimes you take care of the customer and you know that you might make a new customer because you took care of them. Let's say they come in, their rear hatch doesn't open or their trunk doesn't open, and you're like, oh, there's a switch.

Flip the switch, and you educate them and it's all hunky dory. They come back, they're good to go. But that's my choice. When it's not up to my choice, then to me, that's the worst part. Yeah, that's a main detractor where I'm working on a car. Customer comes in, they need a radio update because, holy crap, Nissan had some bad radios and needed a crap ton of updates there for a while. This car was out of warranty. All it needed was an update.

The service writer said, hey, just do the update, because we know that's going to be easy. I'll get my hour diag. Well, then after I do the update, the next day. Oh, we're not going to charge the customer for diag or anything. I'll get you on the next one. And I'm like, what the heck, man? Like, the customer signs when they come in for that, like, what are you gaining from this by giving it to them for free? Where I'm getting screwed on it.

And the thing is, that's always a gamble. And everybody goes like, that old method of thinking is, oh, well, I helped them out. I helped the customer out. You know, I comped it, whatever you want to call it, and it's an investment on that customer coming back. I have been around long enough to know that that doesn't necessarily mean that they do. There's a lot of people that go out of there just smiling and they go, I got one over on them finally. They've always gotten one over on me. And they don't necessarily.

It's a poor investment. The thing is, if that method worked, of giving to the customer that free repair, if it really worked enough of the time, whatever, in your marketing budget or whatever you want to call it, public relations, there'd be enough money to pay you your $27. And that's the thing, like, and here's the thing that blows my mind. It's like you're at $27 an hour and your door rate was 180, right?

Yeah.

Like, that is absolutely effing robbery. That is absolute effing robbery. And I'll say This, I was higher than that at a lower door rate. So your dealership. And you and I talked about this months ago when we started breaking down, because you talked about a wheel bearing quote that somebody, I think gave your. Your Someone. A friend of yours, an ex or whatever. And.

And you know, you were talking about it was the labor was this and the part was that. And you said, but I can buy a part for $70. And I kind of said, so, whoa, whoa, wait. There's a difference there because it's not the same part. But when you started to share with me exactly what they paid versus what they charged, I was with you on the fact that you, like. It's just, I'm. Your dealership that you left is obviously, is like in damage control because they are way too greedy about what they're charging, trying to build. They're not taking care of their customers, obviously.

And I mean. And it goes back to what I said, man, you've got. Sometimes I don't know what the sickness is, but it's like sometimes one dealer owner never seems to be happy just owning one dealer. They want to own like three or four.

Yeah. The Tim Dally was the company that I worked for. They had like seven or eight dealerships in. Around the Salt Lake Valley, some in Colorado, like. Like this. The Dali Corporation has been up since the 60s, so of course they're going to have a bunch of different dealerships. They're not just all Nissans. They're different brands.

And it's a deal. It was actually. Did you see that video where the guy ran through the glass? That was a Tim Dally Mazda.

Wow.

Subaru. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay.

Or was it. No, it was a Subaru, but I believe it was at the Mazda dealership.

You might have bought a used or something and disc. Right?

It's definitely used. And I made a video, and of course, it didn't get many views because I, you know, don't get many views as of late. But yeah, I made a video saying, well, with me working with who I've worked with, I know that you're not given the mpi.

Yeah.

So when I get a car that comes in, I give it the full workout. What it needs, what it doesn't need. This is leaking. This wheel bearing is bad. It needs tires. Let's say the tires are at 3, 30 seconds. Well, by safety standards, that still passes.

Yeah.

So you were putting out a car that has bad tires where they're like, well, it doesn't fail safety. So just put it out and then A customer can look at it and be like yeah, this is fine. And then they have an issue with it and then they blame the dealership when in the part it you as a customer you have to do your own due diligence. It sucks that you have to take it to another mechanic, ask them to put it up in the air, this, that and the other. When my girlfriend, her Kia soul it like the engine just went when I was driving it, of course smoke just right out the tailpipe. I looked at it, diagnosed it needed to get a new car. So we went to a Chevy dealership and she really wanted a Mazda and I wasn't very sure about them. Apparently the new Mazdas are better than older ones.

And while we're there at the dealership, like this is the first time where I've really been somewhere that, that I'm not in the industry anymore. They can do pretty much whatever. I'm not getting any discounts. And I said to them, hey, I want to put this car in the air because I want to look if there's anything underneath that's leaking or this, that and the other. And like well it's almost 5 o'clock, all the guys are going so we can do a wheel and you can bring it back and we'll put it in the air and this, that and the other. But they were still pressuring like oh yeah, we want you to buy this now. So of course. My girlfriend really loves the car and when I had my Infiniti I bought it from a GMC dealership because again, it was a rare car.

My Nissan didn't have it and I'm not going to pay for a transfer fee, right? So I got a three year 30,000 mile warranty for like $1200. The car had 62,000 miles on it. Great deal for an aftermarket warranty. And it ended up covering about four grand worth of stuff through the lifetime of it. So I made out my girlfriend, she's like, I really want to have a warranty on this thing because it has 160,000 miles on it, I think. And the warranty was three grand. So that made the $9,000 car after all said and done with all the fees, 15,000. And I'm like, okay if I know you're not supposed to judge you getting a car based on the monthly payment, but in this case she wanted a newer car.

I told her we can get you an old car, like an old Subaru, I can fix it. You can get like a four thousand dollar car. It's going to be fine. But. But that's kind of what you have to balance. Do you want a newer car and pay more? Do you want an older car, pay less. And well, it was her decision to pay the extra to have that also added security of the warranty. But I didn't want to take the car back just to put it in the air to look at it.

What I did is the day after we bought it, it, well, she bought it in my garage. I jacked it up, undid the skid plate, looked under, said, okay, everything looks solid. It's not leaking or anything. And so it was a good deal. Nothing seems to be wrong with it, but it's just the simple fact that you're. You're pressured to buy the car same as you are pressured to buy the services when you're in getting things done. And I think the pressure is what really hurts people and makes them not want to come into really anywhere to get their car worked on. And I know I've talked to guys who worked in 2008 when the financial crisis was nobody afforded fixing their cars.

So instead of doing oil changes, their engines would go blown, get blown up. Like, like, it's just the people are so hesitant to believe when it costs so much to get their car fixed. Like you're telling me it's really $400 to do this repair and then they go online and they're like, well, I can get this part for this amount of money and this backyard mechanic can do it for a third of the cost, but then the job doesn't get done correctly.

Right. Yeah. And that. And that's been my, you know, my whole thing, like I don't really care at the end of the day if the repair gets done right. I just. If you're going to have me check the car out, you're going to pay for my time to check the car out. And I'm going to tell you accurately what the car needs or what it probably needs, depending on the time frame of what you want to allot to determine to go through the inspection and diagonal. That's it.

I just want enough of those checks at the end of the day to justify my time spent there. It doesn't really matter to me if they. Because I always looked at it like this. If they go somewhere else and they get a subpar repair, I'll see them again.

Yeah.

And it's an educational point. Right. Like they've learned that this is why the value $150 store versus the $75 store shop is different. I'm not trying to run them down because there's some really sharp guys that don't work in a shop. There really are. But I just, like, I got frustrated to no end with like, all these, check this, check that, check this, check that. No charge, no charge, no charge. The.

There's a video I'll stitch probably tomorrow. A young lady, I don't know if you saw it. She took her Jeep in, check. Engine light had been on and then it went out. And they takes it back to the dealership. I don't know. She didn't say if it was under warranty or not. But anyway, she got charged 150 bucks.

They went. Went through it all. The light's not on, and they can't tell her why the light came on. Now. She doesn't come with even a. She doesn't have a paper copy of her RO in her hand. She doesn't read anything to anybody saying it had this code, but the light went off. There's no.

There's no context to any of this. It's just another video that says, I paid for something. And I don't feel like. I feel like I got ripped off. People that are listening or out there that need to understand is you need to. You are responsible to make yourself informed and educated about what it is you're operating and what you make your. What you pay for. That's your responsibility as a consumer on anything, not just cars.

You want to go buy a house, you want to go buy a television, a cell phone, do your research on what you're buying. If. If somebody can't convey to her, and I'm not saying it wasn't, there probably might have been a communication breakdown. Because a lot of us service writers, if we've got to know them, they don't always are really good at saying, hey, hey, you had a P0. Whatever code, and this is what it means. And it's not happening right now. And if I had to guess, she probably has a kneevap fault. It probably needs an esim, but they probably went back and tested the esim and at the time it doesn't work.

And everybody that works at Chrysler knows sticking ESIM and it's going to fix the car. Cool. But she didn't come with any of that, right? So now she's just another ranting, I'll say it, lunatic online, talking about they didn't get their value or they didn't get, they got ripped off, whatever. I'm so tired of that narrative. Because the People at this point, I think we're going to where we're starting to bring the technician proficiency up and we're starting to get better communication a lot of our facilities and yet they're, they're still toting this narrative that I got ripped off. Every time somebody doesn't understand something, it doesn't mean that they got ripped off. You just didn't either do the work to understand what was being said and what you're paying for or you can't. You, it was explained to you, but it's still gobbly gook in your head and you just go on and get in front of a platform and start spouting words off and none of it was really factual.

This is my problem misinformation. And you know, we touched on it before we got on. We're seeing a lot of that Eric lately from some, some content creators and it's kind of. How do you feel about it? Like, you've been always really good with, like, if you're showing something it wasn't, it wasn't misinformation and you didn't do a whole lot of, I'll call it DIY type.

Yeah.

You know, videos. And I, I respect the guys that don't because I don't think that that's what the, our best course of action is. But when you see somebody putting out misinformation, does it make you want to pull your hair out?

Yes and no. I know personally when I've done videos, there's been times where I've done a diag and someone comments saying, hey, I think you're wrong here, look at this. And I'd be like, okay, I'm, I'm gonna go into the shop tomorrow, I'll do this test. And then it turns out that that person was right and I was kind of wrong in my video about my diag. But there's a difference between being wrong and correcting it and learning versus just putting something out there that doesn't necessarily make sense. And I've said I've seen some videos a couple ways of like, let's say Dave's Auto about the whole don't let a car idle. Now, for me, in my state, it doesn't really get super cold whenever I've had again, I can't really speak for the diesel side because I've only ever owned gas or cars. I let them warm up for about a minute or so and then I start driving light and warm up the car because I don't think there's a Real benefit to letting a car sit for 10 minutes.

However, when there are cars that are up in the north, very cold temperatures. Like, I bought my Xterra from Wyoming and it had a plug in it to have a block heater.

Yep.

Now I. In Utah, yeah, we get winter snow, maybe in the negative sometimes, but it's not that in my wheelhouse. So with Dave's Auto, he's also in Utah, he's northern Salt Lake. So he's in that same realm that I am of if you have a diesel, to either let it warm up or not. Well, in our climate, again, I don't know if he's a Utah native, been here all of his life, or if he's been in super cold climates. For me, it makes sense that you don't necessarily need to let it warm up for 10 minutes and then go. Now the additives, I'm kind of a cynic in that if you're trying to sell a product and you're saying, don't do this thing or don't do that thing, well, why are you selling a product when there's already products out there for that? Now I've used BG products on my car, whether it's a fuel additive or an oil additive. Now, I had a company that reached out to me or.

Well, I made a video years ago saying, hey, I want to test some oil. Does a company want to send me some oil? And the company was called Silogram Oil. They're based out of New York. I believe due to my whole accident, it took way too long to get the oil change done because I didn't drive the car and I lost the footage. I don't know what happened to it. It was so long ago that, whatever, I never actually got to make the footage. And on my car I would always do the EPR before the oil change and then put the MOA in afterwards because they say that it's meant for the acidity, whatever, it makes your car last longer. And I got the BG rep, sent out my oil sample and I got the results for Mobile One oil and it said that I had higher metallic content.

I forgot what it was. I need to find the email. But when I finally got around to doing the second oil change with the silogram oil product, I never got that result from the VG guy. I sent out the sample, never got the result back. So I don't, I don't know the difference. Now you actually have to test to see if there's any benefit or detractor for using a product. And I know coming back to the Dave's Auto thing, like there are some places that you definitely need to warm up the truck, let it get to operating temp before you go because you're. It's just not going to run the air temperature, it's way too dense.

You're not the computer is going to have a hard time because yes, you have high idle. Like even my 07, you start it up and it has a high idle to get the cat temps up so that everything can start more. So high idle is a thing that needs to be done for missions. That's really what I believe that the high idle is so that you can get those cats up to temp. Now diesel, I'm not too familiar with that if it's the same design where you need to warm it up up and have a high idle for those exhaust systems. But I also know that the amount of times now you worked at Nissan working on those diesels, the amount of carbon buildup on those things is just crazy. Those was it the EGR coolers would get caked up so bad. And I don't know if it's because those vehicles were idling a lot or not.

I don't know the root cause. But I saw those EGR coolers were replaced almost every single day on different vehicles. And you can say, well it's because you did or did not warm up your vehicle. But I think the main thing is is that just has the EGR like you're putting that soot back into the motor. It's like essentially puking and then ingesting it again 100.

All that blow by gas is going right through back into the engine. Right. So EGR on a diesel is a bad idea no matter what. Whatever. Lowering of not of, you know, combustion temperatures that they've been able to achieve from that has been as the expensive shortened engine life without 100 plus cylinder dilution. The whole idle thing with the diesel is that like yeah, he's in Utah, I'm in Canada where I can show you that like Lake most people that buy a diesel truck and use the diesel truck, so I'm talking like they're on a job site or something like that. That thing has started up at seven in the morning and they don't shut it off except to put fuel in it. Or if they're gonna go into the coffee shop, the restaurant for an hour lunch, it shuts off.

But otherwise like it, it may stay at a job site in idle all day long. When I ran our fleet of at a shop over that years ago with a bunch of Fords for tire service. They didn't buy diesels if they could help it because they would, they would soot up all the time thing would sit there and idle all day long while it ran the compressor to you know, service tires, the whole thing. I'm talking tractor trailer tires. So he's not wrong that idling doesn't cause, does cause more soot loading into the DPF and all that kind of stuff. Is it going to like change the fact that like those, those trucks are going to need you know, DPF sensors and, and you know all that? No, I won't because it's just by the nature and nothing he's ever created is ever going to be able to go into the fuel system that from happening.

It's not going to change the fundamental issue that it's the government's control over the vehicles. Now I guarantee that like Nissan switching over to CVT's it's because they wanted to make a more fuel efficient vehicle. Well what was their main reason for making it more fuel efficient was because customers wanted that more fuel efficient car or was it because the government put the mandate that what is, what is it actually called where the totality of the manufacturer has to be under a certain amount of emissions. CAFE credits that you, if you have five brands or five different cars that are fully electric then you can have your diesel or your frontier that doesn't get great gas mileage. So these companies are kind of being pigeonholed into making a product that is within the range that the government is allowing you to operate in. And so that's making vehicles worse. And sometimes it's a bad change internally without it being a government related thing. Like the reason what I was told why the 5.6s would have the piston issue is because they change the metallic content in the piston itself.

It's a weaker material. And on the door seal or the oil cap wherever it doesn't say mandatory premium fuel.

Yeah.

So if you have a weaker piston sleeve and you're using subpar fuel, you're going to get the scoring the, the piston slap, whatever you want to call it. When we would have to send in that information to Nissan, you take a borescope, you see the scratches and you're like okay, needs a short block.

Yeah.

And if it's bad enough, enough metallic stuff in there, then you get a whole long block. But that in that sense it's Nissan making a change to try to save some money and it just backfired on them. So then the new short blocks that come out are better reinforced. But it still doesn't show that there's not a sticker you put in there saying that this direct injection motor is supposed to take premium fuel and if you're using the incorrect fuel, you're gonna have a bad time. Now, diesel, whether it's off road diesel or normal diesel, it's just diesel. You don't have, as far as I know, different levels of octane for a diesel. So that's not really going to be an issue for them as far as I can tell. But it's just the simple fact that you're putting on EGR or DPF stuff on all that into diesel and it's just, it's restricting it and it's not a good time for anybody who does have a diesel.

Like there's benefits to having a diesel, of course, that you just, you kind of have to deal with it for today's day and age.

Yeah. Dave did a video months ago where he showed he had a truck in the shop and it was a truck by the American Air Force that ordered it. And it was a factory 6 liter ordered by. It would have been through a fleet sale, obviously. Yeah. And it's a 6 liter without a factory EGR on it. So the whole idea for this nonsense for me is the fact that it's like, why do they sell that? Because when they know when they sell that truck that if it's equipped in EJAR and they know they're going to sell it to a government fleet, that it's going to idle all day long, it's never going to shut off. That's just what they do.

If you see ever fly out of an airport, every truck that you see down around on the tarmac next to the planes, they're all running all the time, never shut off, ever. So the fact that they can sell that truck to those people and go, hey, we're going to let you have a different set of industry, you know, regs that to me is completely flipped. It should be the other way that the consumer should be able to buy that with the less problematic systems on it.

Yeah.

And the government should be getting the ones that have the problematic systems because they're the ones that, let's be real, they're going to have the money to fix it. You know, Joe, consumer doesn't. So when we get into all these deleted tuned dgr, delete trucks out there and everybody's going after these people, it's really quite stupid in My opinion, because the reality is as diesel, anything as long as it's ever been built has been designed to, to idle all day long. Tractors have been designed to idle all day, right? Trucking like when they're not being driven down the road. Everybody that's ever owned a rig doesn't go shut it off. Now the fleet companies have all got them on timers and they don't allow them because they're just chasing their same fuel standards that everybody else is forced to be. So his whole thing with don't idle, the way everybody went after him for that was just like I, you know, I still go back to the, the transmission seal and I still go back to the mass airflow on the Dodge Charger. Those two things enough like okay, you need to step away from the camera a little bit more, you're digging himself a hole.

But I mean it's not, I never wanted to dogpile the guy. I just, you know, I, I see these things happening on social media whether you and I are, you know, I'm pretty, pretty big on and I just shake my head because we're, all of us are missing the bigger point here which is like it, it, we immediately get called jealous. But the, the reality is, is like I'm not jealous of, of somebody that's built themselves a career and a reputation and all that because good on them. That's what we want. I hate it when somebody comes one sided to a conversation with no backup, with no, like if that guy was saying I'm supposed to have speed emotive pistons in my engine and he never has a piece of paperwork to explain why. And then after the fact that just the video goes away like there was something going on there. And I'm not trying to say that he either you know, got scared and pulled it or whatever, but too many people are trying to dogpile on people anymore online and it's, I don't think it's a good look for all of us. So that's kind of where I wanted to, to end off.

I didn't want to, you know, appreciate you being on here. And I just, I, I, I, I'm glad that we got to know one another because like I said, I enjoyed your content and then you kind of went away and I didn't know what happened. And when I heard it was a motorcycle accident, a back injury, my heart went out to you because I mean it's, you know, you seem like you were one of those good techs that unfortunately when we lost to the industry I was like, there goes another one, right? And then I'm always wanting to know the story, why that happens. You just get burnt out and you want to go, I don't. It sucks that, you know, you're in the, you're in pain the way you are. But I mean, I appreciate what you do for us nonetheless. And I mean, I'm, I'm hoping one day that I can see you back in the industry.

Yeah, me too. At some point, maybe.

We need, we need guys like you. So. But any closing remarks you want to make, suggestions, advice to the young people.

My closing remark is it's kind of a tick tock issue, but I guess if it goes away, it's not much of an issue anymore. You know, there's so many videos about people reviewing products that they make a bad video, like, oh, you aren't doing this correctly. Use this tool instead or whatever. Like, it aggravates me when it's like, you're not, that's not even how you do that. Like, how about you use the product? And every time I make a video where a company sends me something, you're actually going to see me use it, set it up. I'm not just making a video like, oh, they're on sale, go buy them while they last. Like, I think that is kind of a detriment to the people on the platform that actually want to know if a product is good or bad because no one's actually testing these things to find out if they're actually worth buying. And then you, you buy it and you're like, oh, this is a pile of crap.

So there's the latest one that I had was a King Bullen product, okay, that it was a little dongle that you plug in to read codes. And King Bullen products for me in the past have been good. I've had their actual K7, it's a wireless, and then another one that's only for Nissans that you have to plug in. And I told them that, hey, there's this issue with this product because I'm actually using it now. I've seen other people make videos that saying, oh, it's a great product. It's this, that and like you can do whatever you want with it. It's like, no, well, that's not true. Actually sit down and use the product.

And it can be kind of like with Dave's video about, or any video that anybody's made about diagnosing a car, if they get surprised that they're getting for making a video with incorrect Information. I don't. You shouldn't be surprised that people are upset when you make a bad video of a product or a diag that just is incorrect. So you as a viewer, when you're watching it, if you are questioning something, do some research yourself.

Yep.

If something's not adding up, even outside of Automotive, outside of TikTok, do the research. Not just going on Google and looking for the AI overview, actually maybe even talk to someone, look for articles or whatever. Just do your due diligence because that has really gone away. And people just see an article, read the headline, that's all they want to read. They don't go in to see the nuance of what's actually happening. And so people are so polarized. Is this good, is this bad? But they're not actually taking into account what they might have in their situation. And that's pretty much what I'll say.

Just do your due diligence, protect yourself. And if, if you want to save some money, YouTube is a great place to go. You can see some really good videos about replacing things and if you have the tools, you can replace it yourself. And that's what my whole thing of why I started TikTok is because I wanted to show people this is how I fix something and you can use this to help fix it yourself.

Right.

And of course I can't really do that anymore except when I'm working on my own car. But that's my whole mantra. I want to be able to show people how they can fix something themselves and not get screwed over and so that they are educated a little bit better.

Yeah, I, I want to use the platform to be able to, to empower people, you know, and I, I want some of the hate to go away. Like I said, I'm speaking back to that video of that lady that just wants to, you know, young blonde girl be upset because she doesn't understand what the work order was in front of her and what it said and what they did. And that's, you know, I, I hate that that narrative is still happening. But I, I'm, I want to say confidently that we're, it's not happening as much and we're doing better. And you know this, but the reality is, is we're still not communicating effectively what we need to be to, so the customer understands what that $140 an hour charge actually means. What is it? What did you get? And I know it. Sometimes it seems like no value and we're never going to get it perfect because everybody sometimes when we're speaking in different languages. You're not going to see the value.

You're just going to begrudgingly accept that. It's like it's over my head and it sucks and it's, you know, modern text is terrible and blah, blah, blah. It's, that's all reality. It's not going away. But we all have to try and do better, to put out information that is actually valuable and accurate and it empowers people to make better decisions. I don't necessarily want to teach people to avoid paying a mechanic because I think it's counterintuitive to my, my, my, my brothers and sisters. But at the same time I want them to understand exactly why it costs what it costs for what we do for them. Because I think that becomes less hate on the platforms when they get on there and go, you're just ripping me off.

They're not. Nobody's going to work. You didn't go to work one day, I don't think and ever decided you're going to rip people off. And I know I never went to work one day and said, I'm here to rip as many people off as possible. You know, your story and my story have shown that more times than not, we're the one getting ripped off. And that's all it is, is just sharing with people the reality that you think you're getting ripped off. Most of the time that technician is the one that's being screwed here. So let's just, you know, except they're all getting screwed together or, you know, understand where it comes down and it's not malice.

So, yeah, I, I want to thank you for coming on. It's a beautiful Sunday night, so anything I can ever do to help you, man, you reach out to me and I'm, I'm hoping that Tick Tock stays around so that we get to have more of your content because I genuinely enjoy it and if that is the case, you know, even if it goes away, let people know where you're gonna be, if you're gonna be somewhere and I'd love to have you back on again.

I've definitely. It's the same name across all the platforms. Drachnophobia. I've been trying to post more on Instagram. I do have a Twitter, but that's more posting. I just see things that are stupid and just reply, whatever. Yeah, Sometimes I post YouTube shorts and I am trying to post more long form content on YouTube as well. So even if Tick Tock goes away, you can still find me in those places.

Just same exact username.

Awesome. Love it. We, we appreciate you and we'll hope to see you again. So everybody, as always, I love you all. Thanks for listening. Stay tuned. We got a lot of good fun stuff coming up. So hey, if you could do me a favor real quick and like comment on and share this episode, I'd really appreciate it.

And please, most importantly, set the podcast to automatically download every Tuesday morning. As always, I'd like to thank our amazing guests for their perspectives and expertise and I hope that you'll please join us again next week on this journey of change. Thank you to my partners in the AESAW group and to the Change in the Industry podcast. Remember what I always said, in this industry, you get what you pay for. Here's hoping everyone finds their missing 10 millimeter and we'll see you all again next time.