Is Communication What’s Failing the Auto Repair Industry? | Eric Sprague
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Term
TPMS
TPMS is a system in cars that checks if the tires have enough air. If a tire is low on air, it lets you know so you can fix it before it causes problems.
Term
sensors
Sensors in cars are small devices that check things like tire pressure. If something is wrong, they send a message to the car to warn you.
Term
build date tire
The build date of a tire tells you when it was made. Tires can wear out over time, even if they look okay, so it's good to know how old they are.
Term
winter tire package
A winter tire package is a set of special tires for winter driving, often sold with their own wheels. This makes it easier to switch between summer and winter tires without hassle.
Term
safety system
A safety system in a car includes things that help keep you safe, like airbags and brakes that prevent skidding. Turning these off can make driving much more dangerous.
Part
snow tires
Snow tires are special tires made for driving in winter conditions like snow and ice. They help your car grip the road better when it's cold outside.
Car
Nissan Rogue
The Nissan Rogue is a small SUV that is great for families. The 2018 version has a lot of space inside and comes with many technology features.
Term
EV rated tires
EV rated tires are special tires made for electric cars. They help the car go farther on a single charge and are built to handle the power of electric motors.
Term
telematics
Telematics is a way for cars to send and receive information, like location or health status. It helps with things like navigation and can even call for help if there's an accident.
Term
ADOS
ADAS refers to technology in cars that helps drivers stay safe. It can include features that help you stay in your lane or slow down if you're getting too close to something.
Term
connected vehicle
A connected vehicle is a car that can connect to the internet. This helps it share information with other cars or services, making driving safer and more enjoyable.
Brand
Honda
Honda is another popular car company that makes cars known for being reliable and efficient. Many people choose Honda because they are often easy to maintain and last a long time.
Company
BYD
BYD is a car company from China that focuses on making electric cars. They are known for their modern technology and efforts to create environmentally friendly vehicles.
Car
Nissan Leafs
The Nissan Leaf is a car that runs on electricity instead of gas, which means it's better for the environment. It's popular because it helps save money on fuel and is easy to drive around town.
Car
Toyota Prius
The Toyota Prius is a car that uses both gas and electricity to drive, which helps it save fuel and produce less pollution. It's very popular among people who want to be more environmentally friendly.
Concept
electric vehicle (EV)
An electric vehicle, or EV, is a car that runs on electricity instead of gas. This means it doesn't produce pollution from a tailpipe, making it better for the environment.
Car
GMC Yukon
The GMC Yukon is a big SUV that can fit a lot of people and their stuff. It's great for road trips and can pull heavy trailers if needed.
Company
Edison Motors
Edison Motors takes old trucks and modifies them to use both electric and gasoline power, making them more eco-friendly.
Part
door panel
The door panel is the inside part of your car door that you see when you open it. It can have things like handles and buttons for windows.
Part
lift gate panel
The lift gate panel is the inside part of the back door of an SUV or hatchback that you see when you open it. It can have buttons and storage compartments.
Term
door latch
The door latch is the part that keeps your car door closed and lets you open it when you pull the handle.
Term
OE
OE means Original Equipment, which are the parts that come with the car when it's new. They are made by the same company that made the car, ensuring they fit and work well.
Term
aftermarket
Aftermarket parts are made by other companies, not the one that made your car. They can be cheaper or different from the original parts that came with the car.
Car
Cadillac
Cadillac is a brand of luxury cars that are known for being comfortable and having lots of features. They are often seen as high-end vehicles.
Term
HCU
HCU means Hydraulic Control Unit, which helps control things like brakes in a car. It makes sure the brakes work properly when you press the pedal.
Term
TIS
TIS means Technical Information System, which is a tool that mechanics use to find information about how to fix cars. It helps them understand what needs to be done for repairs.
Term
Vista
Vista is a computer program that helps mechanics find information about fixing cars. It has a lot of details, but it can be hard to use at first.
Term
PCM
The PCM is like the brain of the car that helps control how the engine and transmission work. It makes sure everything runs smoothly by processing information from different parts of the car.
Term
electronic parking brake
An electronic parking brake is a modern way to set the parking brake using buttons instead of a lever. It helps keep the car from rolling when parked.
Part
brake fluid
Brake fluid helps your car stop when you press the brake pedal. If it's low, it could mean there's a problem with the brakes, which is dangerous.
Term
transmission fluid
Transmission fluid is a special oil that keeps the parts of your car's transmission working well. It helps cool and clean the transmission so it can shift gears smoothly.
Term
CVT
A CVT is a special kind of automatic transmission that helps the car change gears smoothly without any noticeable shifts. This can make driving feel more comfortable and can help save fuel.
Car
Lincoln MKX
The Lincoln MKX is a fancy SUV that focuses on comfort and has lots of high-tech features. It's a good choice for people who want a smooth ride and a nice interior.
Car
Volkswagen I
The Volkswagen ID. Buzz is a new electric van that looks like the old VW buses but runs on electricity. It's designed to be roomy and eco-friendly, making it a cool option for families.
Car
BMW X5
The BMW X5 is a fancy SUV that combines style with a powerful engine and lots of tech features. It's a great choice for people who want a comfortable ride with plenty of space.
Car
Subaru Outback
The Subaru Outback is a car that can handle rough roads and bad weather, making it great for adventures. It has a lot of space for passengers and gear, which is perfect for families or trips.
Car
Nissan Frontier
The Nissan Frontier is a tough truck that can carry heavy loads and go off-road. It's a good choice for people who need a vehicle for work or outdoor fun.
Car
Volkswagen Rabbit
The Volkswagen Rabbit is a small car that's easy to drive and park. It's known for being reliable and fun, making it a popular choice for city driving.
Car
MG MGB
The MG MGB is a small, sporty car that people loved to drive in the past. It's known for being fun to drive and has a classic look that many fans appreciate.
LIVE
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for the sponsorship of the Jada mechanic podcast. I don't think tech should be working for less
than a hundred a year. Yeah. The way, you know, between inflation, just cost of living in general,
even before inflation. Yeah. You know, I know guys that are still working for 10, 12 bucks an hour,
and it makes me want to punch their balls in the face.
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen to another exciting episode of the Jada mechanic podcast.
We're all kind of feeling the turkey famine, the fest thing that's making everybody a little groggy.
So if we have a few slip ups, it's not the booze. It's the we're going to win the turkey.
Now we're going to turkey.
I'm sitting with my brother, the Ramlin mechanic, Mr. Eric's frag from L and N performance.
See, I'm doing it. L and N performance at a beautiful, beautiful, blowing rock, North Carolina.
Brother, Eric Howry, man. Very good, man. It's awesome. I've been looking forward to this for a
while. Yeah, it's fun, isn't it? Yeah. You and I don't touch base as much as we should. I mean,
it's it's little, little bits here and there and then the occasional phone call or something like
that. But I mean, I've just been, you know, you were kind of joking about your last recording and
it was like, I said, Jim, I said, like, I couldn't hear a damn thing you were saying. So you're
closer to the microphone today. That's good. So yeah, I think we got some of those issues worked
out working with unfamiliar equipment. Definitely did not help. It's tough. Everybody thinks like
this just is, you know, all I got to do is like comb the beard out and then get on and it just
happens. But I mean, you know, I have to thank Brex Braxton for all the magic that he, you know,
makes everything work good. And you know, it's, yeah, we're lucky to have him. So yeah, it was
absolutely. It was good. It was very quiet this year. You know, the kids have all aged out,
they're doing their thing. So it was a very low key quiet day. It was really, it was really nice.
It was relaxing for once. Yeah, how was it at the shop leading up to it?
Chaotic. It always is. It's always, we're full throttle. I mean, we don't, we don't really have
a slow period. So that's, that's a blessing. You know, it's, it's the problem you want to have,
but it's trying to balance getting everything out, getting everything through.
Yeah, I'm trying to, trying to fight off that, you know, holiday sluggishness that always invariably
comes. Well, and that's the thing, like it doesn't seem to matter how many times I've been doing this
for, you know, working in shops on the 24th for 25 years, right? And there's always either somebody
shows up with a tire problem or a brake problem on the 24th. It doesn't seem to matter. And you
know, I always chalked up to weather, but I mean, what's your guys been like the weather
right before Christmas up there? Are you sitting in a bunch of snow or?
We were right around Thanksgiving, early December, we got drilled pretty hard. And then we were up,
it's in the 60s right now, 50, 60s. So it's, it's pretty, pretty nice right now.
Yeah. See, we had a, we had a bunch of snow right up until like, say the 18th. And then we got, not
a warm spell, we got a bunch of rain, which I guess it's kind of a warm spell. And it literally like
washed all the snow away. And then it got cold again. So we had a bunch of ice, but no snow. And
then it just rained, it snowed on the 27th. And we got a bunch of snow. But we had a green Christmas,
which everybody is like, you know, the old people up here think that's a real bad omen,
right? They say that used to say, you know, green Christmas led to a fat graveyard in the spring.
So, you know, I don't know if there's truth to that or not, but, but that's my, you know,
I had my post there on the 24th or 23rd, where I was talking with the tire blowout and that young
girl and I was, you know, disabled in the TPMS on the car. I wasn't disabling it. It was disabled.
And the, of all the threads to do for the Jada mechanic in 2025, that sucker blew up
at a rate that was unbelievable. Like it had a hot, it had a hundred comments and I think in
two hours, Eric, like it was nuts. Like it was ridiculous. But on all three programs, you know,
profiles linked together, it was, it was nuts. It was like a hundred comments. And
being in multi-geographical, you know, we've gone international here. People are talking about,
we'll listen in Canada, like you can pass the car as a safety with the tire light on. I go,
I realize that I don't personally, somebody else can sign that safety for that. I don't,
because it's to me, I don't care what our Canadian government, but you all know how I love and respect
the Canadian government. You know, it's another thing that they've gotten wrong. So for me,
like, I don't, if I have to sign a car for safety and it has a TPMS light on, it has to be fixed.
And I've had to put four sensors in a car because we sold it with an aftermarket set of
Ramizana and the TPMS was disabled because there's no sensors. I'm not kidding when everybody says,
well, it's like, we can buy those sensors for $27 a piece. Yeah. You know, so to me,
the idea that we're disabling a system and then you get into the whole thing, Eric, of like,
well, it's not really disabled. What do you think about that?
Bypass, bypass disabled. I mean, is there a difference? Yeah. You know,
something's designed to work a certain way. If you're altering that, you're bypassing,
you're disabling its intent. Yeah. For me, if the system's designed to give you four pictures on
this cluster with four pressure readings, and all of a sudden you have four lines through
where the pressure readings should be, that's disabled. It's not enabled. It's not doing,
somebody says, well, now it's doing what it's supposed to do because it's telling the customer
that the tire's low. No, it's not. It doesn't tell them it's low. It tells them that that sensor
doesn't work. Yeah. Is that any different than putting an O2 spacer in to kill a catcode?
Exactly. Right. I mean, there's no difference. It's just, you know, potato, tomato. Yeah. There's
no, you're disabling something that's there to give the driver information.
Yeah. And I try not to make customers cry at Christmas. And, you know, she did get a little
teary, but I don't think she cried because it's like, you've heard me talk. When I start talking,
it just sounds like I'm lecturing. I'm not. It's just blunt to the point. So you understand,
you don't have to ask me a million questions to understand. And I said to her, I said, well,
where did you get these tires? I always bought them on Facebook Marketplace. You know, okay, cool.
Well, they're a 2013 build date tire. So firstly, like I'm sorry,
you paid money for essentially scrap tires, but that's what you got. Secondly, because, you know,
your rims that you got with the tires, which, hey, I applaud you for getting a winter tire package,
rim and everything, because that's better than ripping the tire on and off twice a year.
I said, somebody for the sake of saving $100 disabled your safety system, because she had a
blowout at almost 70 miles an hour in the left hand lane. So on the left front,
left front, left hand lane, 100, you know, almost 70 miles an hour,
she panicked, didn't try to get over to the right shoulder. She stayed in the left shoulder
and went over even more, which is like, so you know, we're, you know where I'm going with this.
You're jacking the car up on the left side shoulder on the left hand embankment to get the
tire off. You're lucky the fucking thing didn't roll over into the embankment, right? For somebody
that's never just a car up in their life, you know? Well, lucky it didn't come off. Lucky you
didn't get hit. I mean, it's, you know, left lane is mocked Jesus. That's as fast as the car is
going to go. Realistically. Yeah, up here, especially in that stretch that happened that
they're well known to drive. Like I'll drive 80 miles an hour down through that stretch all the
time, because there's never a cop in that stretch between those kind of some of the exits in this
my area. Now the weather probably has got some people slowing down, but she was, she was not
kidding when she said she was doing, she was doing 105, which is like 64 miles an hour, right?
That's something she's being honest. She's probably lying a little bit. She was probably doing
close to 70. And I'm just like, and I said to her, so I said, so because somebody, and I kind of
took over the conversation, the service advisor standing right there and Mike's a great guy,
but he doesn't really get involved too much when I start talking because, you know, there's really
no point. And what I had done by the time I was done, I said, listen, so, you know,
we'll call her April. I said for our Charlotte's her name, Charlotte, for the sake of argument,
here's the reality of what you now need to be budgeting for is you need to be budgeting
for four new snow tires and four tire pressure sensors. Well, how much is that going to cost
about a thousand bucks, probably by the time you're done, you know, like now depends on the
quality of tire you want to buy, right? Like we're talking a 2018 Nissan Rogue here. So,
you know, not, they're not super expensive. But I mean, a good snow tire up here is well over
a hundred bucks an hour per tire, which, you know, we're buying them for $50 a tire, right? Like,
I haven't honestly, I have no idea anymore. I don't, I don't deal with that side of it.
Yeah. Yeah, it's, it's, you know, you get what you pay for, definitely. If you get
in crap tires, they're not going to last. They're not, you know, EVs, we're seeing that a ton.
You know, even EV rated tires, if they get 10, 15,000 miles out of them, it's,
you want to give them a medal. Yeah. It's just, it's, it's insane. You know, when you start putting
10 plies on, you know, model threes. Yeah. So if it comes into L&N, you guys don't, like, and they
want to buy, you know, a snow tire package, which you guys do do some snow tires in Long Rock,
because you guys get some snow. What's, what's the policy there? Like, will you go ahead and
just put them in without sensors or do you kind of just let that, you know?
So we'll, we'll go, we'll, if they have a sensor problem, you know, we don't do a lot of tire wheel
packages, we'll do the rubber. But if they have sensor issues, we sell them with the sensors,
if we, with the rebuild kits, with the stems and the components. Yeah. If they're not serviceable,
if the batteries are testing out weak, then we're, we're putting sensors on there.
Yeah. But we'll generally include them. If there are system faults, obviously, if we have working
sensors and a system fault, then we're going to go into the system itself and let them know what
we need to look into this. But we're, you know, we're never going to ignore it being on. Yeah.
We'll give, we'll give them the opportunity to say they don't want to do X, but we're always
going to let them know about it. I mean, we're going to disclose everything we find about the car.
Yeah. Yeah. You've seen our inspection process. It's, it's thorough.
Yeah. There's no miscommunication by the time you guys are done about what the customer is
expecting and what they want and what's actually performed, right? Like, and that's where a lot
of the conversation for me is because it's like sometimes you've got somebody speaking to the
customer about just as an example, again, TPMS and sometimes they don't even really know what
they're like enough about how the system works and what it actually means to the car.
To be able to have the conversation. Somebody left me a message
and a mutual friend of ours and he's like, they don't understand. You're going to see cars that
now when the TPMS lights on or the system is in some kind of fault, you're going to see
where they're going to limit road speed, going to limit throttle, going to limit all kinds of stuff
to where now they're going to tie it in so you won't be able to drive the car. And everybody's
like, oh, it's getting to be such a nanny state thing. And of course, like, you know, as a Canadian,
I can certainly relate to the idea that I don't want any more nanny state. But to me, it was just
the whole conversation of like, you couldn't sell, you know, four hotel universal sensors for under
a hundred bucks and put them in a car and make it work. All that fee, I'm just like, you've got all
got the wrong. I can tell in your shop if they can't find another hundred bucks. So, you know,
I caught some flak for that. But it's true though, you know, the systems, I agree, I think some of
them get abused by manufacturers. But at the end of the day, stuff like TPMS, ADOS, the telematics,
the connected vehicle stuff, it's about at the end of the day, it's about safety. Yeah. You know,
at the end of the day, these systems are implemented because quite frankly, a lot of people on the
road have proven they probably shouldn't be. Yeah. You know, you're driving around with your cell
phone like this and you're rear end somebody. Thank you automated emergency brake. Yeah. Yeah. You
make me, it's frustrating because I'm in a lot of groups that are not directly tech related,
a lot of Subaru groups, a lot of other, you know, things like that, just they're enthusiast groups,
if I can help out, I do, but I'm an enthusiast. Yeah. You know, I drive a Subaru, I want to
figure out what's going to break next. Most automotive conferences, unfortunately, only focus
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But, you know, I look at some of the comments in there and it's like, Oh my God, are you people
serious? Like you want Bluetooth, you want car play, you want this, you want that. That all
takes technology getting dumped into the car. Yeah. And we just went from a $30,000 in Presa to a
$50,000 in Presa. I mean, where do you think that comes from? We're not going to trim back.
No, no. And that's the thing now, you could see it where, you know, Lucas has talked about some
of the cars that could hit, you know, necessarily the North American market, right, being built in,
you know, foreign, that if they hit here, they would really turn the market upside down with
how they could actually put a functioning car in the showroom for such a low price. But then you
see the other detractors in this thing that are going, listen, it won't matter, you know, if you
can't, if you can't sell it, will you connect and everything else? The clientele is not going to buy
it. And you know, they're not wrong either. Because some people it's like, if it's really
difficult to get my phone to link to this used car that I'm not going to buy, I'm not buying that used
car. And I'm like, Oh my God, so you wouldn't buy a Toyota or a Honda, right? But you're going to go
buy that. I'll just roll words out Kia, because your phone links up to it really cool. Like, come on.
Well, you got to have something to do while you're sitting there waiting for the tow truck.
That's right. Yeah. But I think companies like BYD and I know that's a big one. If they, we saw a
few of those when we were down in Texas for the F1 race, there were five or six BYD EVs run around.
Right. Dude, they don't look like crap cars. They look really nice.
It made it at least six miles on a charge. Because that's how far we had to go to Kota. So,
I mean, what more can you ask for? It's better than a leaf. Yeah, well, that's
we had a customer buy a leaf from our from our shop from the lot. And then they had it a month
and they want to bring it back. And it's like, sorry, you know, like it, you know, because what
are you, well, you know, I had to immediately take it over the dealer and, and, you know, the,
the battery. Yeah, I understand. That's why it was traded. Like that's exactly,
let me reiterate that we don't know why it was traded, but it's probably why it was at the auction
where it was Frank came from. Because if you had drove up and said, I want to sell you this
Navy leaf, you know, they would have went and got Jeff and be like, Jeff, what do you think of this
this customer wants to sell Navy leaf? And I'm like, I wouldn't buy it, you know, like a, you know,
I wouldn't buy it because I know what Leafs are like. They're not as far as the
just buy a Prius, you know, don't buy a leaf just buy a Prius or anything else. Just don't buy a
leaf, don't buy a Nissan EV, don't buy a Nissan period, but don't buy a Nissan EV, you know,
please don't. They're just, they have no range. They were so problematic.
I think realistically, hybrid is where we're headed. You know, long term, it's sustainable.
Yeah. I have a friend in Colorado. He's cracking me up every time we talk because of some of the
stuff they're trying to do out there. So Colorado is pushing really hard for EV. They do not have
safety inspections in Colorado. They will put every car on the dyno, but they don't have a safety
inspection. But they're trying to push every all new construction fully electric, no natural gas,
furnaces, no gas, anything. It's like, what the hell do you do? I grew up in Georgetown, Colorado.
That's 70 miles into the Rockies. What the hell are you doing? How much electric are you running
out there? It's going to survive winter up there. Yeah, look out over the mountainside and see,
do you see a bunch of power lines running up there? No, you know, it's insane, but they want
they're pushing for EVs. It's like, what the hell are you going to do? It can't see.
You already can't keep the grid alive in summer with AC. What are you going to do when there's
30 below in winter with all electric heating, plus EV charging, plus all this other crap?
Really, get real. Yeah. And it's solar or wind. I mean, I guess you get some wind in Colorado,
but I mean, like, not that much. Yeah.
Yeah, no, it's laughable. Yeah. My government by 2035 wants to have no ice being sold.
You know what I mean? In Canada, that's their long-term goal. Now they keep pushing it back
and it could be, you know, now they're saying 2040 and that's all. But I mean, right down the road
for me, I say like right down a little three miles from my house, they took a whole bunch of
essentially natural green space bulldozed it, bunched, trucked in, I don't know how many 30
tons of gravel and fill to level all of because they were going to build an EV battery factory.
And then once our prime minister changed up here, which didn't change the party,
just changed the prime minister, all of a sudden all the funding for that project just went away
and now it's sitting there. It's just this giant field with a layer of gravel on it,
nothing there, nothing being done, brand new fence built around it, the whole thing and
everybody's just like, what happened? You know, I thought, well, let's think about this, right? If
the project can't fund itself without government funding, financially, it's not that fiscally
responsible. And how's the ice road going to work with EV semis?
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I seem to recall there are some range limitations once you get super cold
like that. How are they, how's the ice road going to work? I mean, that's critical up there to the
northern infrastructure as I understand it. Yeah, 100%. 100%. And everybody thinks, well,
it's just delivering groceries. Yes, it's delivering groceries. But the main thing is like
if those trucks can't get the ore, the diamonds, the oil out of the north down into the spots
where we can use it, it all shuts down. It's not that the community doesn't have groceries to eat,
there is no community. Those are communities that are literally up there only for mining.
And they go across the ice, they deliver whatever needs to be done, but it's all that stuff coming
back. It's the infrastructure, it's the same as Fort Mac, you know, Albert, it's the same thing.
It's almost the same kind of climate except that they're not crossing giant lakes to get there.
But they are going out of Fort Mac going north up to Yukon, Nunavut, all these, you know,
Ecolot, all that kind of stuff. If those infrastructure shuts down, because all of a
everybody says it has to be an, you know, an electronic truck that delivers it. Everybody's
like, nah, shut down that industry then we're not happening. And you've seen Edison Motors,
like if you really delve into what's happening in Edison Motors, those are the guys that are
retrofitting all those older, well, they were trucks into full EV trucks. Well, not, no, they're
not full EV, they're full hybrid, right? Well, they're getting every pushback that they can from
our government. They're getting almost no funding from our government and every kind of obstacle in
the world about trying to make them legal for sale right now in Canada. It's disgusting what our own
government's doing to them. So it's got zero to do with, you know, environmental and everything to
do with money, everything to do with it. So. Oh, wind turbines are nothing but scrap after they
end their life cycle. They're not recyclable. You can't reclaim crap out of those. I live in one
of the most populated areas for wind generation right now in Canada, right along my corridor,
the St. Lawrence River on Lake Ontario. And you wouldn't believe the amount of them that are
sitting, they're spinning right now, the blades turning around and there's no power being produced
off of them because after about 20 years, when the armature starts to go, nobody goes up in there
and restores it because it fiscally just doesn't, it doesn't make sense to, you know, it's, they're
all built with funding. They go up and after the 20, 25 year life cycle of them, they're just standing
there making noise. That's all they're doing. They're not creating any power for the grid.
That's a waste. It is a waste. Everybody thinks it's awesome. You know, I'm going to get on the
ferry with my Prius and I'm going to go over there and plug in and I'm going to feel like I'm in my
own little world because you know, I'm, I'm living on Amherst Island or Wolf Island and I plug my
Prius in and you know, my generator, you know, the wind chime charges my electric car and you're
a loser. Yeah. It's getting power from the nuke down the street.
What's, how's your, how's your, can I say, you're dipping your toe into the online content
creation? How's that been going for you? It's been fun. It's been challenging. There's a,
I never appreciated how much goes into it. Yeah. You know, I've had the benefit of watching Lucas
kind of build the podcast. It was very young when I came down to work for him. So I've kind
of watched that grow, but oh my God, the amount of, I got my first piece of my first hate message
that made me really happy. I guess that means I've made it now. Yes, you have. But you know,
it's, it's, it's a lot of fun. I really enjoy it, you know, getting to do stuff like this. The solo
videos are fun. This is so much more engaging. It's a lot more, it's a lot more fun to do from
this side of it. I love the fact that I do get a lot of positive feedback that it's really nice
to hear there are people that actually get something out of it, which is, is the whole point.
Yeah, that's a, that's the thing for me, right? Like it's, you get those messages where it's like,
you can have a, you, I know you do, you have them and you have an ass kicker of a day, right? And
you feel like everything went sideways or didn't get done or, you know, didn't go the way you wanted.
And then somebody reaches out to you in a message and says, thanks dude, like,
I don't feel like I'm on an island after I hear, you know, your weekly rant.
And that's, that's a heavy A dude. Like it's really cool to be able to like uplift that,
those, the younger people, especially, but I get, I get people older than me, you know,
our age that say like I've been doing this 20 years and I've hated it for the last, you know,
15. And now I kind of understand what I need to do to, you know, go into the next, the,
the next portion of my career, how I can do it with a better attitude and a better outlook. And
you know, they, they thank you for that. And it's like, I'm not doing anything special. I'm just
having a conversation, you know, like, I don't think I'm, I'm not, we're not bringing the magic,
you know, secret sauce to this by any stretch, are we? We're just,
we're bringing it to the surface. You know, I mean, I was there, Lucas got me re-invigorated
in this. I was ready to throw in the towel. Yeah. But yeah, it, it, you know, there's so much
that is unspoken in this. There's so many things that are just so taboo, you can't talk about him,
you can't bring them up. No, that needs to stop. We need, you know, we have a tech shortage because
we don't acknowledge these things and we don't do anything about them. You know,
examples of that, because like, I kind of know some of them, but like, share some of that with me,
you know, what you think is a real, where we really need to delve in further between,
you know, in the industry to get some of it brought to the surface.
Go man. So culture, I think is probably the single biggest killer, you know, we don't,
when I came into this, and I'm sure it was the same when you came into this, you know,
it was hard knocks. Everything was mess around, find out. Yeah. And that, that was everything
that we did was you figured out if, you know, I mean, service info wasn't really a big thing.
You know, you kind of look at it, you figure out how it comes apart. I mean, I wasn't
diagnosing it. I was being told what parts to change, but you figure out how it comes apart.
You figure out what went flying. You go find the stuff that flew out of it because he didn't know
how it was put together. You put it back together and you kind of work your way through it.
We didn't have the levels of integration and complexity that we do now.
They were mechanical systems. They were doing electrical or electronic things,
but they were mechanical systems. Yeah. You know, we're not evolving with, you know,
the next generation coming in, they're not getting the nurturing that they need.
And I'm not talking touchy feely, no, huggy stuff, but you have young absorbent minds coming into
this. They need to be nurtured. That needs to be fed. It's a sponge. Treat it like an attorney.
Throw shit at the wall and see what sticks and then run with it. Yeah.
And I've talked so many times, like, I mean, it's everybody says the young people don't want to
try anything. But I mean, like I quit a lot, like people have heard me talk about like trying to
pull a door panel off or a lift gate panel off, right? Like there's so many things that if you
don't, like in the service information is not always really clear. And people are knowing like,
well, where, what more do you need to know? I want like a diagram that shows me where the
screws are on that way. Show me so that I know how many there are and I get them all out.
Before I ripped the panel off. Right. Because hey, you know, I'm going towards this door latch,
you know, switch that I need to test power and ground out, right? And I'm trying to pull this
panel off and we just broke a $300 panel. There's not $300 profit there, right?
But these people that write the service information, they're not getting to that next level, I feel
in detail that the young people, the way their brains work, they need. So everybody laughs if
they pull their phone out and they start looking at a YouTube video with somebody showing that to
them, we immediately laugh at them and tell them that's ridiculous and it's crazy and how dare they
sit there on their phone. And I'm going, he's trying to prevent from breaking something. And
then he's trying to, you know, understand better how to do this, you know, like,
my process with the new guys with when I have a trainee or even the guys I have in the shop now,
I mean, I mentor varying degrees, all of them. Yeah. My first thing is check service info,
if you can't find it there, Google it. Yeah. I mean, I don't care if it's YouTube, Instagram,
as long as it doesn't involve Panerite, removing the panel, I don't care. Yeah. In some cases,
that's fine too. But yeah, I mean, the service info, now I will say, I get a good mix of OE
and aftermarket service info. I have been very burned by that one line at a page rate that
doesn't make it over to all data or identification. Yeah. Oh, I had a, I think I talked to you on
a Cadillac eating up breaks. There was one step in the reset for the HCU that was not an all data
that was in TIS. Yeah. Which is shocking because I mean, you've used GM TIS, that is not a,
that can be challenging. It's easy to find stuff once you know it, but like everything else.
Once you're familiar with it, it's easy. Yeah. I love Vista. It's easy as hell to use.
There are some guys in this industry that you put them in front of Vista, they're going to drool.
And it's not intuitive. It's not meant to be user friendly. But once you know how to use it,
it's an insanely powerful tool. Yeah. But it gives you all of those things. It gives you all the
tear down steps, literally page by page. It gives you very detailed parts diagrams that all data
simply does not have. Yeah. You know, and the, the, I get really pissed off with all that. I think
I actually did a video about, you know, providing proper info and support. Yeah.
Vista, the actual scan tool. Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in it. Air is the service info.
Okay. It does not require you to be connected to the car. Yeah. Everything is there. So it's like,
don't tell me that it's not available without scan tool. That's BS. I'm paying you for service
info. Give me accurate information. Yeah. But you know, that there's so much of it. There's
so much raw information we need to fix a vehicle now. It's insane. Yeah. I started in IT. That was
my path after the military didn't work out. I feel like that is more useful now than it would be if
I was still working in IT. And you make an interesting point when you talk about the military,
because I know some texts that have worked in the military. A good friend of mine actually,
and the way they approach the job, like you don't walk out to the machine without the service
manual under your arm under any situation, under any circumstance ever, unless you're probably
being shot out, will they allow you to actually put a tool at it without, because it is just,
it's part of it. They treat like it's aviation and it doesn't matter whether it's a Chevy truck
that they're putting brakes on, you walk out there with your service manual. You know what I
mean? And they're doing it's just, so there's no speed thought, you know, I got to get this done
fast. It's all about following the process. And I think that like Sherwood Cook and I had a conversation
just the other day and, you know, Eric, the car guy and I kind of talked about the same thing.
We have to get back to this idea of craftsmanship. You know what I mean? Like you're an actual
craftsman and what you're trying to do, not just a an installer, but an actual craftsman,
somebody who, because I hate that old antigen, it's like being a doctor, it's not, it's not
like being a doctor at all, you know, it is, they can turn ours off. Yeah, the patient's not as fun
to talk to, like, you know, you can't, you don't have as good a stories when it's all done, like
you just don't. And, you know, when we, when we keep saying it's, you got to go back to like,
this is the way they used to build, you know, cabinetry or, or mason work or so. We have to
approach it to that level of detail now. I think it is, if we want the young people to get it,
because they're not getting it. They're not. We're, we're running them out of them so fast,
you know, and they show this little bit of glimmer. And then it's like, I don't know if it's
they get handed a paycheck or they get handed a tool bill or what. And it's just like, they go,
man, I really enjoy this, but it's just like, I can't see a future at it, you know, and you and
I came through that tougher time. I think when we said it was like, it was a sink or swim or
figure it out, you know, but, and we managed to not because we were tougher, but because it was
just simpler stuff. It was simpler tech. I can remember like, I could take a lot of a, of a
dodge product apart. I could take a lot of it apart, try and something or check in something
real quick without having to go to the service information. It was just almost like it seemed
more intuitive and more natural. Now, like, look at how you do a window regulator in some of these
modern cars. Like it's just, it's nuts. You know, it's absolutely ridiculous. Like it just,
I feel for these kids because door latch recalls, you know, like you see what it takes to put a
door latch in a modern car and you're like, this is a frigging stupid, you know,
and that's, that's the other thing where I think a lot of us older guys are failing.
If they show interest in something, run with it. Yeah. Run with it and segue it into other stuff.
You know, I had a guy, I had a kid, a great kid. I really miss him. Really interested in
dodge diesels because he drove one. Right. Like, okay, so we'll start there because I'm learning
with you because I know, I know it's, it's six cylinders and they're in line and there's a turbo
on the right side of it. Yeah. That's about as much as I know about them. So we're going to learn
it together. And we did, we went through a lot of stuff. We weren't, I mean, I taught him how to
program on that after he bricked it, bricked his PCM. But you know, there, there's, we have the old
school thought where you start with Boston rubber, you start with lube oil change. Yeah,
that needs to go. We start with electrical. We start, I mean, I start every one of my shop.
They all start with standard. They get the book, they get a sub and they are assigned
videos to watch and then we talk about the videos. That's, I mean, we have to start with electricity
because if you don't start with electrical, you're not going to get anywhere. Even with brakes.
I know. I know. I talked to so many guys now. And it's just like the electronic
parking brake thing, just as like, or, you know, and it's the, one of my threads, somebody's like,
oh, what, you know, like, all the old days, we used to say that, you know, the big argument was
you crack the bleeder when you push the pistol back or not, you know, and I'm like, it's got
nothing to do anymore with whether you're pushing dirt up into there or not. It's got everything
to do with what's it going to do to the module if you don't take the cap off. You know what I mean?
And we used to laugh at people that said, oh, you got to take the cap off or else you're going to,
no, you're going to take the cap off now or you're are going to cause a problem with the module.
It's just a given. And if you think you're not, you know, it's like a shop, I know he does not
use any of the service steps when I was talking to him to put any of the EBB, EPB in the service
mode. He grabs his power pro, but he goes back there and he's like, listen, it's worked for me
for five years. I've done it on every car. And I go until it doesn't until it doesn't, that scares
the hell out of me, you know, I'll do it on the on the Euro like I was going to say,
I'll do it on everything but the Euro stuff. I just about had a reaction.
No, I think there's a, you know, I mean, you get away with it till you don't. It's like anything
else. You know, I have a power probe. I use it very sparingly. I have other ways to test that
don't require it, but you know, all it takes is one press in the wrong place. I think I've
in the past couple of years, I think I've probably replaced 15 modules because a power pro was used
where it shouldn't have been. Yeah. Even just simple screw ups, you know, you're going to check
the ground circuit, you load it up with a light bulb on it and whoops, touch the wrong pin and
let all the magic smoke out. And I can't, I haven't figured out, I'll put it back in yet.
No, it's, you know, I think, no, go ahead. It's something that I think is like,
you know, you would want to teach them how to do it with the safety, with the service information
first and then be able to show them, you know, the, the shortcut or the alternative method,
I guess you could say, right? If somebody was like, Hey, you know, if you want to do this real
quick and you know, you only have one tool and the tool is being used for something and, you
know, you had to get it done. Here's how you could do it, but always with that caveat of, but really
we shouldn't do it that way if we can avoid it, you know, do it the way always, always start
the proper way, always start it does two things. It shows them the correct way to do it. It also
builds the habit of checking service info every time and learning the correct way to do it and
learning what the caveats are. Yeah. You know, filling up brake fluid. I want to fire people
when I see them fill up brake fluid. It's like, you're disabling a safety system right back to
that. Right. Yeah. If the lights on, it's not because the fluid evaporated. There is a problem.
Something's worn out. Something's leaking. Yeah. It used to be every couple days in the quick loop,
the advisor would come back and there'd be the car would be on the quick loop out in the front
next to the advisor's desk, right? There was a drive on quickly Bay and he'd say, I need some
brake fluid to put in this car. The lights on and the customers like here for no change. I'm like,
no, you need to send that to the back. Well, no, they don't have time to do it today.
Oh, my God. Are you having a conversation with the customer? What will this really
means right now? Right? Because you and I know there's more than 50% wear there if the lights
on like it's that's a substantial amount of fluid has now gone, you know, into the outer realm with
a caliper like we probably should have at least something needed itself and it's all over the
road. Right. Yeah. And you know, some customers like the way they drive, my mother could brawl,
blind and I bet you she wouldn't even know because she's so light on the brake. She's a
type Eric, like, you know, when she sees the car way off in the distance slowing down,
she's getting off the gas. You know what I mean? Like she she coasts up most of the time, just
not putting the brake on. Yeah, do you follow NASCAR at all? That's kind of how my mom drives.
That's how I love my mom, but that woman is hard on vehicles. Yeah.
I think every accident I've been involved in I was in the car and she was driving.
Oh, on the bright side, though, I got to say, Mom, I know you're going to watch this.
It wasn't your fault. I promise it wasn't your fault. Yeah.
Yeah, it's, you know, it's little stupid things like that. Those little things that
we were always told were okay. I mean, I was encouraged to fill up every fluid.
Yeah. Yeah. Not, you know, and it never registered that Hey, if the fluid's low,
oil doesn't evaporate, you know, there's a problem there. There's a reason to flow.
What drives me nuts is when I work for some people sometimes and they say like the car's
in for no change and it's got a transmission that doesn't use a dipstick and checking the
fluid levels are rather, you know, involved process, right? And we'll scan to all the
temperature and a test drive and all that kind of stuff. And then the customer will say, well,
what's the transmission fluid like? And I'm like,
yeah, I drove in here, not shifting, you know, funny, like, Oh, did you check it? Nope.
Well, why didn't you check it? Because it doesn't have a dipstick and to check it is about a 30
minute process. Did you want to pay extra for that? And that's just the way I talk and any,
this is the advisor or the, you know, shop owner look at me like I'm crazy. Okay,
we'll go out and check that fluid level. See in an hour. Yeah. And seeing an hour is fine. I
don't mind doing that. But it was like when somebody would say, okay, well, what are we
charging for that? Well, why do we have to charge them? Because it's an actual process
and a procedure and, you know, has a timestamp related to that. Let's show the, you know,
efficiency and production where it's supposed to be. There really goes, I'll just, just,
just do it this time. Like same as just add the brake fluid to it this time. Like,
no, the process, you know, let's do it the right way.
Oh, you look at a 10R or a 6R, you're 190 to 215. You are going to remove all of the hair off your
forearms, getting the dipstick tube out because it's right up against the bank to bank one cat.
Oh, yes. It's, you know, and you've got such an arrow window, the dipstick is 50 50 going to pop
because they're native, you know, some sort of really, we'll call it low quality plastic.
Yeah, I'm sorry. It's a composite. I'm sorry. I misspoke.
Yeah, we can't say.
But yeah, it's, you know, there's such a lack of understanding about so many things. And then
we bring, you know, some shops will bring these kids in and throw them to the wolves and wonder
why they get so disgusted. Yeah. Or that customer waited now an hour and 20 minutes for what we
told them was only going to be half an hour oil change, right? Didn't convey the expectation
of the customer. It's like, sure, we can check that for you. But it now is going to add, you know,
double the time to your, and I know somebody's going to go double the time. We're talking
around numbers here, people like, I know you probably checked seven minutes and you're the
best tech ever, but you know, we're being realistic with the young people here. Like if
there's now a process that takes a mentor to go out, show them, okay, this is what the scan tool
is going to have to read. This is the process. Here's your two pages that we're going to print
out. It's like, you remember Brian's video where he made, where he talked about actually
like servicing the fluid and the CVT and the Nissan. It's a lot more involved than everybody
thinks. Like it's, it's fill it, drain it out, fill it again. That's the right way to do it.
And I remember seeing that from the dealer and it was this, that's the right way to do it. But
Brian's like 95% of the people get that wrong. You know, they do, they do. They don't read the
second half. It's like that. Do you see that Bolton from Ford? It's in somebody, Brian's class.
He talks about when the, when it's got catalyst faults on the trucks. And you know, you've seen
this, you're nodding your head, you're going, yeah, I know. Because you read that Bolton that says,
like, okay, you're thinking, I got to order all these parts and putting cats in it. No,
there's a whole process to that that's supposed to be done. You know, and then you
have to essentially, you know, interrogate the truck to a level to know whether it's going to
come back or not. And then maybe you order parts, you know, like it's, I saw so many shop owners,
it's like you print the TSB off and you show them the Bolton and they go, oh, so I got to order
those parts. No, no, you got to read through the Bolton and understand what the next steps,
this is going to be two, three hour process with this truck. Like, is the customer,
what do they want to do? Oh, they just were wondering if it was going to take the light out.
Well, you know, first step is this, you know, that's your first step in your diagnosis. Well,
it's three hours. Yeah. Yep. It's a lot of driving three hours. Yeah. Yeah. That's the,
that's the frustrating thing for me is we're not, and you know, people talk about Eric like,
it's, it's leadership, leadership, leadership, leadership and culture, right? Those are the
two buzzwords. But it's, it's so much of this is like, how do we become more effective at
communicating? Because I know like you're good at it. I'm not so much good at communicating
with my advisor, right? Like I'm not, I'm not good at it. You're bad. I use AI now. I use AI now.
So our counter is very unique. The ladies we have up there are excellent at what they do,
but they are not tech-minded people. Right. We didn't necessarily want tech-minded people up there.
Yeah. My Jade, she, she is definitely very upfront. If she doesn't understand a write-up,
she's out there asking me about it. And when they come out and ask me about it,
all that tells me I need to do a better job on the write-up. Lucas, in his infinite brilliance,
came out and said, Hey, dude, why don't you try using AI to write that and simplify it? I'm like,
maybe that could work. And it's worked out phenomenally well. Excellent. You've seen my
write-ups. They are heavy meds. I mean, they're valiant. There's much for me. So if something
comes back six months later or I'm wrong, AI can go back and analyze where I screwed up.
I am very willing to rip my estimates to pieces to figure out where I screwed up.
But I know what was done. I know it was tested. I know where to start looking. If I created a
problem and it happens, you stick something in a little too far and you open it up too much,
and now it's not making good contact where you didn't have, where you had, didn't have an issue
before. But being able to communicate that, yeah, absolutely communication is critical.
And it's got to be an open door. It's got to go both ways. But the other big part of
communication, there has to be trust. My writers have to trust that if they come out
and they ask me about something, I'm not going to fly off the handle. If I'm laying over a car
setting a chain on and they're asking me about right up from three days ago, I'm probably going
to look at them chuckle and yeah, when I get there, I'll get there. I'm going to prioritize it,
but I'm not going to stop a critical process to go look at something. But there has to be trust
that they know I'm going to get back to it. I'm going to get them the answers they need or whatever,
whatever it is, there's got to be trust that it's not going to be a pissing contest of
you don't understand it. That's not my problem. And that's having, we joke about
safe spaces and all that. It's got to be real. I mean, it's got to be completely real.
Not in the sense that I'm going to hold your hand through this, but if you have a question,
just ask it. It's cheaper if you ask the question now than you ask it later.
Now, I don't want to get too personal, but Ellen, and kind of for the last year,
like you guys had some obstacles, right? Kind of some changes went through and
did you feel comfortable talking about that? Yeah, of course.
Yeah, so we expanded, we moved into a new shop about two years ago. We've had some expansion,
growing pains, I guess the right way to say it. The biggest thing that, you know,
the biggest thing we've always struggled with, I've been here six years now.
The biggest thing we've always struggled with has been people that fit the culture.
Our culture is, I think, unique as a fair work for it. Not even close, not even close, you know.
So everybody says it's like a family. We legitimately are. Lucas is one of my best
friends on the planet, and it goes both ways. If I need something, he's there. If he needs
something, I'm there. And it's the entire crew. Everybody, we've gone through a lot of struggles
together. We are incredibly close. Finding people that fit that is challenging. Everybody says
they're like a family, but 99% of the shops, they're promising the moon, and they're going to
give you a pile of sand off some shitty radiated beach somewhere. Yeah. So we brought in an
operations manager at the beginning of the year. That was not great. So he came out of a dealer,
and he did not see a reason to do things differently than he had at the dealer.
One of our, I'm not going to call him a tech trainee, because I think that's kind of,
it's not what it is. But he's a younger tech, he's learning, he's growing,
threw a check engine light at him on a beamer or a Benz, and it's like, no, that needs to come to
me. Oh, no, give it to him. He'll figure it out. Yeah. No, I went and grabbed a scan tool,
set it down in front of him. I'm like, why don't you go take a look at it? You'll figure it out.
Well, I don't know how to do that, neither to see it's no different. Yeah. But there was a lot of
a lot of things that weren't being done the way they should be done as far as internal procedures,
procedures of clients, and it really kind of woke us all up to some of the shortcomings that,
not shortcomings, but some of the shortfalls that we made when we moved. We didn't scale very
effectively. And I don't think any of us anticipated some of the challenges. Right.
And it was the same thing when I moved down. Lucas and I talked about a lot of the
differences, a lot of the things that were going to be different coming from New York City down here.
The really important ones we didn't even think about. And it was the same thing when we moved.
We didn't anticipate a lot of the challenges we were going to come up with. And the personnel's
part of it, scaling overall operations, going from two and a half bays to 10 bays is,
well, it changes things. It's a lot more, there's a lot more, obviously a lot more capacity.
There's a lot more balls that have the potential to get dropped. And I'm pretty good at managing,
but I struggled to balance between tracking everything and working on what I have in front
of me. That's probably my single biggest thing that I struggle with that impacts the overall
shop. I am our testing now with some of the personnel changes we've made. We're working
towards it, but right now I do 90% of the testing so that I become a massive bottleneck for the shop.
Yeah. So there's a lot of moving parts, especially once you get to the size we're at.
And going from where we were to what we have become, it's really challenging to scale that and do
it smoothly without really upsetting the balance and everything and managing to keep stuff moving
still. Yeah. And I think you and I talked about a lot behind the scenes. When we started with Lucas,
it was a lot of you both were in a much smaller scale still triage in cars, right? Like you could
go and check out a car, he could go check out a car, you're feeling problems off of each other,
feeling ideas off of each other and you were getting stuff done. With him being removed from
the shop and he talks all the time, he jokes about like, you don't want me to fix some cars,
but really like the guy is very, very, very, very good at fixing cars and diagnosing cars.
And he doesn't, you know, he just kind of sloughs it off. But I mean,
when you remove him from the, completely out of the building most days, and then it falls to
somebody else and we're still trying to run at this increased pace. I joke all the time. I was
like, you couldn't, if I was to come down and put on an L&N shirt, like I'd be doing George's job,
we'd have to promote George. And I'm just going to, I'm going to, I'm going to run the detail
way because like, I don't, I don't think I could step in and hit the ground at the pace that he
would need me to, right? And I just think it's because, not that you guys say yes to everything,
but I mean, you have a high standard of what you're trying to give the customer in terms of an
experience and professionalism and everything else, that the bottleneck is a great way, is a very
polite way to put it. It is a, I picture this like a bag of snow or something hanging right over
your head. And it's like drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip, drip. Any minute you know that that
bag is going to, and have you been to the Hoover Dam? That's what it feels like. And it's not,
you know, I, I said it before, you know, Lucas really invigorated, reinvigorated my interest
in the industry. And it's the approach. Yeah. But yeah, the thoroughness we provide, we definitely
will say no to vehicles. Yeah. In some cases, we probably should be more aggressive with that. But,
you know, it is what it is, their vehicles on the road, we need to provide a safe, reliable,
repaired vehicle at the end of the day. Yeah. But we also with that have that obligation to
tell somebody if they have a vehicle that is not safely repairable, we got to tell them that.
Yeah. You know, and we know that pretty quick. You know, we, we get it up in the lift, if half
of the car is still on the ground, that's a clue. Yeah. Or we put it up and you know,
there's 70 pounds of rust under the car and the lift is hitting bodywork now where it wasn't.
Doesn't happen often, but you know, usually we know pretty quick, it's like, look,
we need to make a phone call. We just make a phone call and tell them, Hey, dude.
Yeah. And because you and I both were familiar with that northern climate kind of car, right? We
see a lot of that. We've seen more of it than Lucas, I think saw before you came down, right?
It's worse here. It's worse here than it was in New York City. They're old down here in New York,
people turn cars over, I guess, three to five years, the roads destroy them. Right. I mean,
we still have people calling us with stuff out of the 90s, but the way they salt the roads down
here, oh my God. I mean, they're curing the roads like a country hand down here. It's insane.
Yeah. Because I mean, like people joke, but up here, like if somebody hands you keys for a 13
equinox and says here, go put it on, like you just kind of laugh because you're like,
the drive on, we don't have a drive on. So like, what am I doing here? Like, you know,
so you're getting really creative with how you're, where you're grabbing because there's no rocker
panel left. You know, my mom drives a 14 equinox, but I mean, we've been undercoding that thing
since it was brand new for her. So I mean, it's been, it's been, it's a different thing, you know,
like, but people just laugh. But then I see like you guys, like Lucas walking through the yard and
I'm seeing like a mid 90s Ford truck and I'm seeing like an early 2000s, you know, 450 and I'm like,
good God, man, like that's up here. Like you wouldn't be able to even open the driver's door on
the Ford because there'd be no floor pan for the door to shut against, right? And I say door pan,
but that's because there were floor pan because the sill was pushed in. Sills pushed in there.
They don't need doors. They're optional at that point. No, we've got, we've had, well,
look at the one we did the video on on that super duty that came from the dealer.
Yeah. The, I think I spent probably an hour and a half trying to get those knock sensors out just
to inspect the DPF. Yeah, I was doing pull ups off the wrench. I mean, I am, I'm trimming down,
but I'm not a little guy. I'm short, but I'm wide. Yeah. You know, but it's like, yeah, I spent,
I ended up spending two hours to get that particular matter sensor out and the bung came
out with it. So we're waiting on a bung now. Yeah. But yeah, it's, you know, there's a whole
different scale of things down here. You know, the rust is definitely a thing,
but there's also a lot of I tried it first that I in no way anticipated. Yeah. It's not as bad on
newer stuff, thankfully. Right. But it's, you know, it's an element of the simplicity that
people perceive out of vehicles that that's checked. That's left the chat a long time ago.
So it's, yeah, I mean, there, there, it's definitely, you know, the shortage and what we
need to do to fix it is a multifaceted problem. We could spend the next six weeks talking about it.
Yeah. The shortage is a real thing like up here, especially like people, you know, I say it all
the time, people don't really believe me, but like every shop in the city is trying to hire a
mechanic right now, every shop. And I'm not, it used to be like every dealer was always trying to
hire a tech. Now it's every shop is trying to hire it is ridiculous. And it's, you know, and, and
there's a, I find the young people that, you know, and you and I can relate to this because we both
have dealer backgrounds, right? And I find that when you get some of the young people to come in
and they leave the dealer network and they say they try their hand at the NLN or kind of shop
that I'm at or been at, like they, we immediately come in and they go like, wow, there's such a
culture change in it and reprogramming almost because you know what I mean, right? Like,
oh yeah, you get the guys that have been in the dealer and the pattern failure thing is a real
thing. And it was like, I never knew how much I relied on it until I stepped out of the dealer
world. And then I was like, wow, and it wasn't that I didn't fix the car, but it was like
the dyke that used to take me 10 minutes, it now took me an hour to find a flat to improve it.
Whereas I just knew in 10 minutes of the dealer that yes, it's that again, but I would have to go
and be like an oxen sensor code in a GM. I better actually go and do my due diligence and like,
you know, unpin the PCM. And back in the day with the Chrysler, I never, you know, I didn't,
I didn't unpin it. You know, I went down to it, I did my test there and now
with the way this other stuff fails, you're damn right, I'm unpinning and I'm, you know,
doing my checks properly the way I'm supposed to. I'm pulling out my lab scope and calling Brian to
say, how do I, you know, what does this mean? Like I do all that kind of stuff now because
you have to because the safety net of like, well, isn't there with, with, with, you know,
in the independent side. And that's what I find when the young people come out of the dealer thing
is they go, they're not dumb. They know very common things. You can hand them a car and it can go out
to it and they're going to come in and go, yeah, it's exactly what I thought it would be. Right.
But if you try to get them to slow down, that's when I find I have the really hard problem of
trying to get them to slow down and learn the process. I think you, you guys ran into that too
with some of your people that you've had. Yeah. So, you know, the, you know what,
I'm, you know where I'm going with this, right? Like it's, oh yeah, it really is.
Well, and the, you know, the dealer culture for my experiences with it is all about volume. It's
gives you a huge advantage in line familiarity. You can have 50 different badges on the back of
a car. You know, Ford, Lincoln, Mercury, when I was there, it was all three, you know, you got 50
different name plates, you have 10 different vehicles, if that many, you know, you have three
or four power trains, you might have four different chassis. If you're at VW, you have one chassis of
varying sizes. But you know, you have, there's very little variation between them. So you have,
you know, you can take whether it's a flex or an MKX, you can look at it and say, okay, well,
you know, it's this, you know, you have a database of stuff. It's all under warranty. So you still
have great engineering support. TSBs are still going to apply and not to say they don't apply in
what we do, but software TSBs, those are up there because they exist. But by the time we see it,
they've already been done. Yeah. You know, TSBs rarely, they can give us some headway or some
direction, but they're rarely going to be the be all end all cause of an issue.
Yeah, we're not going to be pulling TSB. Yeah, you're not going to fix a 420 DTC on an eight-year-old
car with a software flash. You know what I mean? Like you and I saw that the car was three months
old and there was an update for 420. They're just changing this, you know, they're changing the
window, right? Of what we look at it. We ignore this temperature, right? Because otherwise it's
going to flag it. You know how it goes. But you would see those cars now eight, nine years later.
I can remember seeing them in the aftermarket and I'm like, well, there's a bulletin.
Crap, that bulletin was written like two years after the thing was built. Like this is now 10
years old. It's probably not going to need that software flash. Like it's, it's good thing to
put down on the work order and say, as per bulletin, blah, blah, blah, would recommend,
but you're still quoting the cat, right? Because it's going to, or not necessarily quoting it. Let
me back up. You're still interrogating the cat like you should be interrogating the cat. We're
back in the day at the dealer, right? We whipped that sucker in here. We did the software update.
We kicked it out the door. We didn't do it. We didn't do QC on that after because we knew it's
under warranty. That's the first step that they would want to be done anyway. But now when that
car is like, you know, nobody's seen that car at a dealership in three years. It's a much different
process. And that's where I struggle with some of these kids that I've seen come out of the dealer
is like trying to get them to slow down to go fast is really tough, you know, and it's, and proper
road tests. Oh my crap. Like I wrote test, I'm saying as you, I spent so much time in the seat
driving cars just to get a familiar with what the data looks like or what the car feels like
or operates because I'm driving everything now. I'm driving Mercedes Volvo, like BMW,
fuck, more Volkswagen I ever wanted to ride in. Is this normal or not? Right? And then it's like,
okay, maybe I got another one so I'll get another one off the lot and drive it. Like back to the
dealer thing, right? Three chassis, you knew what they felt like drove like sounded like held the
road like all of that stuff. You knew all of that by by three months in. Now, if it took that long.
Yeah, now it's like, my God, like, I don't know what's normal. Not they just all ride like that.
Like you get into some of this stuff and you're like, people drive these like it drives like
shit, like bumpy clunky. Oh, yeah, it's like driving a Jeep, you know, like,
Oh, yeah. No, well, last week, it was funny. We, I was going through, you know, so I keep track
of what I work on, like every vehicle I have a spreadsheet that I track just so I can keep
track where I'm at. Right. I had one day I looked, I went from a Jeep Patriot to a BMW X5
to an S something S class Mercedes to an F 450 to an F 150. It's like, damn,
we have just covered the ex just about the expanse of my kid's life in year spread. And it's like,
yeah. And the pubs are straight. Do you know what I mean? That Patriot
way different than the S class and way different again than the 250, you know?
Yeah, or any of them. I mean, but yeah, throwaway vehicles, it, you know, planned obsolescence,
that's something that we get, we hear thrown around a lot. I don't necessarily subscribe to it
wholesale. No, I think there are certainly cases like Nissan CVTs where that's probably a thing
or just stubbornness. I tend to keep the fluid and just replace the transmission easier. But,
you know, you look at what look at the impact that's had on CVTs in general. I've never seen a Ford
500 E to CVT. I've very rarely seen a Subaru CVT fail without help. Yeah. If you're towing a 15 foot
camper behind your outback, your transmission is not going to appreciate it. Yeah. We're in mountains,
but I can remember I'm the same age as you. I could you can remember the first Saturn CVTs,
the first CVTs that went into the low, but you can remember the first ones that went into the
Dodge Calibers and stuff. Like they were problem free for the most part. Like they didn't have
the Subaru's back in the 80s. The Subaru's back in the 80s. The old one was at the Brad or the
Justi. That was the, that was a CVT. Yeah. And they were bulletproof. Yeah. Then Nissan got
involved and screwed it up. Well, and that's the thing. Honda had CVT for years before Nissan's
got their reputation, you know, like everybody's like, I can remember taking them to trade school
and everybody's like, yeah, it's used by a handful of people now. And then when the Nissan thing
came along and every, it didn't matter. As long as it wasn't a frontier or a Titan,
it was going to need a CVT. Let's figure out how to push a rope. Yeah. And then it was all of a
sudden, it was like everybody, the whole industry was like asking, well, does this type of car have
a CVT transmitter? Well, sure it does. Yeah, it does. But I mean, it's a GM and this particular one
is not known for issues. Oh, because, you know, my aunt has a Nissan with a CV and she's had two
transmissions, but it's like, oh, yeah, you know, like, it's a seasonal maintenance item.
Yeah, I mean, now Ford's is PTUs. But you know, it's it's such a spread, but that that hive
mentality, you know, that that's something that I think a lot of the trade schools are not good at.
They'll they'll teach these kids, they're going to come in and they give them horribly
unrealistic expectations, you're going to come into this and you're going to make 150,000 a year
your first year, where? Yeah, it doesn't say Koenigsegg on the side of the building. I don't
know if that's that that's realistic. No, it's not. You know, and and again, they can get all
their certs that they want, you know, and they can get into say, in the, they can learn it really
fast, the dealership right, and they can kind of get in and fall in with the right maybe,
the right team at a dealer and they can make some good money their first year, their first
couple years, they can, you know, tool that completely doesn't really swallow them up.
But man, like if you try to get them into the aftermarket and do the same thing, it's the
they're the idea that they should expect, you know, to make six figures within five years working
in an independent shop is ludicrous to me. It's just like, you're only scratching the surface
now what you need to learn. And I mean, coming up through the dealer, man, I was, we were so lucky
you and I because it was like we could fall on that pattern failure, we could learn, you know,
what was problematic for the cars. And when we were writing our estimates, we knew how to do
the inspection really well, because we knew what to look for. Now, we had the guys that supported
us, you know, we had guys that actually cared. I mean, my team leader at my Ford store, Nick was
awesome. Yeah, I loved working with him because he was willing to take the time and invest the time
in me. You know, ultimately, it helped him, but he was willing to put the time in and there's
so many guys now that refused to, you know, well, I had it took me forever to learn this,
it's going to take you 10 years, we don't have 10 years. No, you know, take the hour or two a week.
That's all it takes. It doesn't take a massive commitment out of the gate. It does mean when
these kids are green, you need them pretty much zip tied to the whole day. Every job just became
a two person job as awkward as that can be at times. But you have to do it. You know, I mean,
these kids today don't it's not that they're not resilient. You know, it's not that they're not
driven at it. It's not that they're not driven. It's not that they're not resilient. It's that
they've had a different upbringing than us. It's not even that it's been easier. It's just different.
You know, we didn't have the resources at our fingertips to be able to look stuff up. We had
to research it. We had to go to the library. We had to use an encyclopedia, whatever it was.
You know, these kids learn differently. But it's so we can't keep applying the old logic to the new
kids coming in because they don't absorb knowledge the same way. They don't process knowledge the
same way. No, they don't have to adapt to it. They don't memorize anything anymore. Like you and I
memorize all kinds of stuff. They don't have to, man, because they just Google or chat GTP, you
know, what's the firing order for a small block? She had 18436572. You and I have that ingrained
in our brains from, you know, when we were pops, but they don't have it anymore because they don't
need to remember it, right? Like chat GTP wears cylinder six on, you know, blah, blah, blah.
Oh, it's the one under the intake. Cool. Like in the time that we would have had to go over and
type that up and look it up or pull our phone out and type it into Google. They're asking Google
and then they're getting the answer right away. So to think that like they have so many more tools
towards them. And yet everybody says, Oh, they're, they're, they're inefficient. They're not inefficient.
We're just trying to push a rope. As like you said, we're essentially trying to do that. We're
trying to like shove them and they don't want to be shoved. They want to be not led, but draw me
the map of what you want this to look like when it's done. And I'll, I'll get there. I'm 100%
convinced most of these young people can do it. I've seen them do it. It's, you know, the same
thing, whether they have it in their hands or not, you can still physically identify that.
But these, it's like, you can tell that their problem solving is going like this and they're
getting there, but they don't necessarily have this in their hands. But that one that can like
see all the gears turning in their head, man, that's an asset to have. That's somebody that,
like in the old days, we would have thrown that kid away. And now, oh, you got to build that because
like that's the kid that's going to go out and triage cars for you and diagnose cars and test
cars. And then somebody else will be putting the parts in, you know what I mean? And the next day,
it's going to be another Eric, where they're, they're looking at three and four more cars and, and,
you know, well, and that's, but that's, you know, we've got to be the ones to adapt.
We, the, us old stubborn bastards in this industry were the ones who have to change and adapt
to, you know, to be able to convey what we need to convey in a way they can digest it.
And we're so resistant to do that. I mean, we're all resistant to change, right? Change is
uncomfortable. Change doesn't feel good, but we have to do it. I mean, we're driving ourselves
into the ground. This industry has spent a century driving it, driving everybody into the ground.
We have got to stop that. We've got to arrest it and start building these kids up and building up
all of it. And you know what? A lot of shops are going to die. Thank God.
Yeah. Yeah. Some of these shops should not be touching vehicles.
That's an unpopular opinion though. Like Brian and I talk about that a lot and it's,
it's the truth though. It really is, you know.
I can think of, there's probably six figures worth of damage that I have, that I have repaired
from other shops and it makes me, it pisses me off, not because they're, I don't think it,
usually I don't think it's malicious. Some of it I think is, but it's just, it's sheer ignorance
and stubbornness. It's unwilling there. There, people are unwilling to evolve and learn and
adapt. Right. And that, that creates so many more problems.
And see, I'm still like, and again, people will say that maybe it's a bad attitude or something
like that, but I believe like a lot of us, like we say, well, it's not malicious,
but at some point somebody has probably told, you know, I go back to the example of, you know,
the shops that still don't have service information or it goes, oh, they don't exist.
Yes, they do. I've talked to several young technicians now and why
doing this little thing that, that they tell me all the time they're working
to shop that doesn't have service information, you know, and it's like, well,
how are you getting through the day? Well, the day for the most part, you know, is like some breaks
or some control arms or, you know, some tie rods and, and some fuel lines and brake lines.
Like they love seeing those Chevy trucks come in and need fuel lines and brake lines. Right.
Because it's just, yeah, it's an eight hour day, right? They get through the job and, and, you
know, you didn't need service information. Like you drew your little diagram on where they go on
the ABS module and you didn't ever lose that and done. But when I keep saying this to the people,
it's like there are shops out there and those are the shops we need to see go away because
at some point somebody has told them and they've been made aware they need it and they choose not
to buy the service information. That to me is now is malicious. That's operating the arena
with the intent of not, I don't want to say play by the rules, but you know what I mean,
like not meeting the minimum, I guess is a better way to put it than meeting.
It's racing, racing to the bottom. Yeah. It is racing to the bottom. I can do it cheaper
because I don't have to pay for this. I don't have to pay for this. I wish the US would implement
something like the, what is it, the Red Seal program you guys have up there?
Yeah. Yeah, I'm looking at it right now. It's hangs on my wall. Yeah.
We need that down here. I hate to say it and I know that gets, that's a really unpopular thing
to hear, but we need it. You know, if you screw, I mean, we had a vehicle not too long ago, some
dude put Amazon LEDs in. It raised holy hell with the car. It had ADOS faults. It had ABS
faults because of light bulbs. Yeah. Because it was backfeeding through the stoplight switch
and it was giving the ABS all kinds of bad information. Like it was, I have never seen
something like that and I have a feeling that's not the last time I'm going to see that.
No. And you know, the apprenticeship thing is great because it, I say this,
when they come out of it, they can't sit down in the interview and say that I've never been exposed
to this level of technology. I've never been exposed to these fundamentals because it's,
at that point, it's just a bull face lie. Like if they went through and did the program,
somebody sat them down in the classroom and taught them it. Now, if they chose not to pay
attention and they didn't get it, then they didn't get it and that's on them, right? But it's crazy
to me how immediately when we start to talk about that, this industry could really benefit from that
and everybody immediately puts their hands up and go, I don't want government involvement in this.
And I hate to say it, but you know what? It may not be the government that's going to involve it
in the US, but it's going to be, you don't want the other option, which is going to be the insurance
companies that is going to force you to do it. And I think that that's, we're on this very tipping
point right now, whether the industry either needs to come up with something and adopt it
and implement it or the insurance companies are going to do it because like people will not tolerate
cars that are not calibrated properly from an ADAS system and having accidents out there,
it's going to, people are going to go lawsuit crazy and you're going to see it's going to cost
one shop and then another shop and then we've already seen it happen in the industry, right?
Yeah.
Key cases. So the, and it's not necessarily an apprenticeship thing. It's a more of a basic
level of competency that goes above ASEs because right now you can't even talk about ASEs without
people getting offended and pissed off and saying, well, somebody you and I know very well
have a big platform and are doing a wonderful thing for the industry. They don't,
there's aren't valid anymore. They let them expire because they saw no point to keep them.
And that says a lot about the quote unquote benchmark within the industry. If you see some
of the sharpest minds in the industry right now going, I let mine expire because it was just like,
it wasn't the people that came in, didn't even ask about them, didn't know what it meant,
didn't care. We have to because it's still the same thing. If I tell somebody I'm a mechanic in
Canada, they go, oh, you're, you're still a Red Seal mechanic, but they know what that is.
You know what I mean? Like, and I think the States is going to have to get something like
that going eventually because otherwise people are just going to be, they don't ask, oh, you're
ASC certified. Like we in the industry do, but the public has no idea what that means.
Oh, they don't care. Yeah. Yeah. They mean, they don't, they don't care because the value in it
is gone. You know, and it's the same thing with the, oh, you just triggered something.
Wow. And it left.
Um, the, when we're talking about the ADOS and then
Right, right. So, you know, like NASDAF, NASDAF is something that a lot of people hate.
But, you know, the people that are usually not always, there are some cases that I know of
people that should absolutely be able to be credentialed in art. But the vast majority of
people complaining about it, in my opinion, are probably contributing to the reason why we need
it. You know, if you do an alignment, you do a four wheel alignment on something and don't
recalibrate it, you just set that car up for an accident. You know, if you're mixing it and
matching tires, you just set that car up to do something really bad. You know, if you don't
understand these things, and I don't think that's all, you know, sometimes you're in that situation,
you know, the single mother of 17 kids who blew a tire and is trying to get home 300 miles away.
Sometimes, yes, you got to do what you got to do. You have to do the right thing. We're here to
serve people and we have to do that. But we have to do that in a safe, ethical way. You know,
this fleet mentality of, I got a set of brake pads, but only one wheel's grinding. Can you just
put the one pad that's worn out in? Well, and going back to my tire story, so that young lady
had the blowout, the rest of the story is she came into the shop with now her all seasons that are
on the rims, right, ready to put on the car, all four of them. And I'm looking at the advisor going,
like, what's going on here? Like, well, she can't afford a new tire right now.
Okay. So what did we tell her we're going to do?
Oh, we're telling her we're going to put her all seasons back on. I'm like,
we're getting a blizzard today. Like, do you really think that that's the right thing to do? So
what do we do? We end up putting one all season on the left front and the other three snows around
the car. Now, I'm not trying to advocate and say that that's the right thing to do. I'm not defending
it. The end of the day, the customer is in charge, right? Yeah. And unless I want to reach into my
pocket and buy this girl one tire, so that she has four snows on her car, I made the choice that
three snows in an all season is better than four bald all seasons in December in Canada. That's
the choice I made. And, you know, I can so in that sense, I can understand when some people
are getting down my throat about making her buy, you know, tire pressure sensors. And listen,
I'm not making her do anything. At the end of the day, she left with nothing but a tire installed
on the car, right? $40 labor, whatever it was. She left with much more information than when she
came in understanding about how critical that system is to the car. That was my job in having
the conversations to explain whether it would be ABS or airbag, ADAS, lane departure, any of these
systems that somebody would be asking me about, it's my job to inform them of what it means and
what it actually is doing and why it's important. If it wasn't important, it wouldn't have been
put in the damn car in the first place. That's the part that pissed me off was so many people then
put their hands up and admitted to being unprofessional and saying, I'll disable that system
all day long if the customer asked me to. My goodness. So then where is where do we draw the
line? The customer can come in and say, I really don't want an airbag to go off in my face when
I'm in an accident because like I've heard it does really bad damage to the, you know, my teeth
and stuff. So I'd like you to take that relay out, Eric. Well, the steering wheel is going to do more
damage. Right? Yeah, I'm not like, yeah. Oh, no, it's it absolutely. And I think that's
a lot of that comes from the mentality of the clients always right. Yeah, the client is not
always right. No, you know, it we have, like you said, we have an absolute duty to inform them of
what the long term implications are. It's no different than when you have an intermittent
problem, right? You have an intermittent problem, you have a code, but you can't duplicate it.
What do you do? Well, we can right now this is working. This is where we're probably faulting,
I can replace this, or we can wait for it to get worse. What would you like me to do? Yeah.
You know, and here's the consequences if we replace it, and that's not it. We're not doing a freebie
to go over it again. There is going to be a charge involved. Now, if we wait for it to get worse,
there may not be. Because if I can't duplicate it, I can't do my job. That's right. So, you know,
but we've got we have to inform we have to make sure people are aware of what we're playing with.
And if we don't know what we're playing with, we have to figure that out before we can go up
there and say anything. Yeah. Yeah, she doesn't know what she's driving. Like she doesn't understand
the true reality of what, you know, so I'm taking pictures of the sidewall of her tire and see these
tiny little cracks are already in here now. You know, people might have said, Jeff, you're nuts
because she's driving around with now build date 2013 tires on the car, right? That, you know, or
she could have put on, yeah, she could have put on build date 17 all seasons on the, you know,
back on it to drive around and Christmas time. I made the choice to do what I felt was the best
thing for if my daughter is in the shop, I would, and she was to call me and say, dad, what do I do?
This, I would, you know, 100% the same thing as what she did. That's how I treated that
interaction. And that's how we have to, Sherwood said to me the other day,
since what we have to do is do what's right. And that's such a simple, you know, kind of answer
you know, no kidding, Jeff, you got to do what's right, but it's so big. What that really entails
when we say what has to do, what's right, you know, and it's not, we don't get off scot-free
when we say we do it right. Sometimes we just still get it wrong. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh yeah.
But you have to advocate like you got to do what's right, not what pays the best,
not what gets the car out of here fucking faster. We have to do what's right.
No. And that's, you know, at the end of the day, our job is to serve the clients.
At the end of the day, you know, we're the professionals, they don't know, they know
they know what the logo says, they know what the knit model is, maybe,
but we know how it works, we understand how it works, and we understand what the implications of
short-cutting or half-assing or repair is. We know what that means, they don't. We have to inform
them, and we have to give them that service. That's why they're coming to us, we're professionals.
We know better than they do, and we, you know, if they're telling us something that's not right,
then we have to push back on that. Yeah, I don't, I don't love the fact that she can go on a Facebook
marketplace and buy 13-year-old tires. I don't love that. The old used tires should be illegal,
in my opinion. I, you know, there's always that, there's always that caveat situation,
like I said, you know, the single mother of 37 kids who had a blowout and needs to get home,
whatever. If I can do something ethically without putting a 20-year-old tire on the car,
you know, chances are I might have an old tire that's not damaged, it's just worn down.
Yeah. But if I don't, I'm not gonna, you know, I'm not gonna compromise somebody's safety to make
20 or 30 bucks on something. I mean, that's, you know, at that point, go get a tire from
wherever and I will put it on for you. I won't charge you for it. Yeah. Evil words to say,
I'm not gonna charge you. You're in a situation, you're in a bind, you know, you legitimately
can't afford to have me do something, you know what, I'm going to get you safe so you can get to it.
It's not fixed, it's not correct, but it is less likely to cause you a problem. It is in better
condition than when it left. And I think that's why this industry's gotten to where it is, because
we've always like what you just said, well, I'm going to go and buy a tire for that customer then,
right? And here's the thing, in this industry, we've never operated effectively enough
where we could do that every time that it needed to be done. So we make the compromise.
Okay, I go get an old tire, but like it's not as bad as what's on there. And I charge you some
money and I put it on. And you feel good because like I saved you some money. And I feel good
because I got some labor, I got some money generated, right? I didn't do this wasn't complete
charity. Charity is a funny thing because like sometimes the right thing to do
is to be charitable and give them the tire because the standards would be anything else
would be a compromise on safety. But at the same time, charity is the big reason that this
industry is is where it's at from a standpoint of, you know, so many people have only bought
themselves a job, you know, they opened up a business and they just bought themselves a job,
they didn't actually get a build a lucrative lucrative is the wrong word, people don't like
that word. They haven't fulfilling, you know, scalable, flourishing, constant growth business,
they'd never built that they bought themselves a job. And I don't know, I'm not smart enough to
know what the right thing to do is but I know I've seen too many things that were compromised on
what was right to make a little bit of labor that to know that it was it's still being done too much.
In cases where it's something dangerous like that, I will happily donate my time
to get somebody safe. I'm on the same roads these people are. You know, if I put a vehicle out there
that's dangerous, now I'm compromising my safety, my family safety. You know, and it's not, I mean,
I don't do that all the time. That's not a frequent thing. You know, extenuating circumstances sometimes
require extenuating reactions to it. And it's not, you know, obviously, like you said, we're in
business to make money. I mean, that is the goal of the business. But I think we, in some cases,
we do have a responsibility to go a little above and beyond that. You know, I mean, if we see something,
say something, or do something about it. You know, I mean, we have a bad reputation globally
as being shady, shitty people. I think that is slowly starting to change.
But it's going to take time to rebuild that. And I definitely don't subscribe to charity.
I mean, I don't like doing free work. Nobody does. But we've got to be able to
justify what we're doing. You know, we need to be charging more. Every shop on this planet
needs to be charging more. I don't think tech should be working for less than 100 a year.
The way, you know, between inflation, just cost of living in general, even before inflation.
I know guys that are still working for 10, 12 bucks an hour, and it makes me want to punch
their boss in the face. You know, I mean, tool bills we've mentioned a couple times.
Beyond basic hand tools, I don't know that I think tech should be buying the tools.
Lucas has worked really hard to convert me on that.
Yeah, it's tough, eh? But I mean, when we see what Benji was able to put together for
his guys at Trogpond, and we've seen some of our friends in the industry, what they've been able to
do, I'd make the challenge that, yeah, like other than maybe bringing in like
the very basics. Yeah, in the extreme world I'd like to see coming forward is that like they
walk in with maybe, you know, a set of wrenches, a half inch electric gun and some sockets,
and you know, a couple pairs of pliers, and I think the rest becomes like the torque wrench,
I think should be a shop tool so that it gets calibrated every three months. And it's, you
know, we know that it's untested. Somebody just talked about, you know, in the groups,
they had an icon torque wrench and the car almost lost a wheel because it was off of calibration,
you know, like that happens. I mean, I'm not, people are like, oh, you know, it's an icon.
Come on, dude. Go look at that icon torque wrench. It looks like the same one the precision
instruments makes for Snap-On and Mac and Mac Co and everybody else. It's the same damn torque
wrench. It's made by precision instruments. Where that got off is obviously, it's probably had a
ton of use already, and at least checked its calibration effort, you know. So those kind of
things, like we need to providing the young people, because it's then just, it takes the stress off
of like, where do I spend my money to make this next purchase? Because we go down a whole rabbit
hole of where I think that like a lot of the predation that happens from tool vendors now
is not a good thing. But when we set these young people up for success with what the
tooling responsibility taking care of, I think they can get back and focus now on actually
learning how to use the tools properly. Of course. And that goes back to, you know, reading the
info and understanding what you're doing. You know, I mean, there's such a, you know,
the other thing that we're taught in the dealer is chasing the symptom. What's the symptom?
I try and teach my guys, okay, you know what the symptom is. Now forget that. What is the system?
What is the entire system doing? Who's in charge? Who's reacting? Who's making decisions? How are
they making decisions? What is the entire system doing now? What can make it do that? What's not
right? Yeah. And that that's something that is not not taught in trade schools. It's not taught in
a lot of places. Everything is chase the symptom. I don't want to discuss my recent experiences
with chasing the symptom because they haven't been good. Well, and Sherwood just shared that
perfect example that was on this video. And I mean, because I talked to him the other day or
before he released the video and he's talking about one of his texts in a, it was a BMW Mercedes
class or something like that. A hundred miles an hour of the car were going to limp and they
chased it down to this module and the module was like, actually it's got a direct short. Okay.
Cool. He does his test, you know, module shorted gets another module. And it ended up being that
there was a pin somehow inside the module back in behind where the connectors were plugged in was,
had worked its way over and was touching another pin. Right. And this is, so this is the replacement
module that they got. This is what happened as soon as they plugged it in the code. Initially,
the complaint came in, but it started having something different happen and everybody's like,
what's going on here? What's going on here? And that's where when we're taught to chase the symptom,
right? We, we, we get blinders on and we get tunnel vision and we're very much like we're
running the test as the, you know, we can see it in the service information. We're not able to
not slow down and think about how does this all just work as one big system? What happens here?
You know, and I think that that is, is just a culture thing. Like, because, and Sherwood's lucky,
like those guys are lucky, they can all go to Sherwood. There's never, oh my God,
I can't believe you don't know how to do this. Oh my God, I can't believe like this customer's
going to be freaking out. Oh my God, like I, my parts, I'm never going to be able to say,
there's none of that ever. It's like, okay, let's slow down and look at what's actually
happening here and why. And it's a different way to somebody check engine Chuck just put a video
up shown and it was so simple. You know, every time the customer would turn the light the wipers on
blow the fuse in the fuse box. And, you know, the guy had been dealing with this issue in
his truck for two years, you know, and somebody and literally what does Chuck do? He just takes
the wires out of the box, you know, puts a new fuse into the box, turns it on and still blows
the fuse. Cool. Dead short and tip them, you know, we tip them. Yeah.
Well, see, we don't sometimes break it down that simple error to just be like, just think
of like, let's do it like that. You know, it's like somebody's going, Oh, now get your meter out
and do this and do that. There's nothing wrong with that method. But like his method was so fast
because like he goes through the process of like, you know, taking the pins out and you and I back
in the day would have been like snip, you know, new fuse, ding tip them done, right? Like we would
have, we wouldn't have unpinned it. You crazy. You know, there's different schools of thought
at work there, you know, I mean, we're coming out of that flat rate environment. It's the quickest
way you can do it. Yeah. You know, if it has a reasonable chance of finding the fault, that's
what you're going to do. Yeah. And then if you screw up and you have to repair it, now that's on
you because you made a bad call. Yeah. And that's the other thing that's got to stop. I mean, guys
have to be allowed to make mistakes. Yes. How do we learn 90% of what we know? I have broken
more shit than I can count. I mean, ask Lucas about me and Mercedes wheel bearings,
or power stroke fuel heater fuses. I don't want to talk about it. Yeah, I remember that.
Yeah, so do I. Yeah, I remember that. Even Prime Pollock tells me about the cars that like
haunt him still. You know, he's got one sitting on the lot. You know what I mean? Like those,
Sherwood and I had that conversation with that Nissan that was in that video that was 17 months
at his shop. 17. The hood latch? Yeah. The hood latch. Yeah. Like there, if you had to put Sherwood
or anyone else on that car in that environment and said, listen, this has got to go by weekend
or day and or whatever, by after lunch, that thing's got to roll. Think about what we're
doing to ourselves when we say that. And I understand what it is. It's because we've
set the expectations that yeah, Mrs Smith, it should be pretty routine thing. And you know,
like we're going to, and you know, should have a call for everybody afternoon or something.
But there are cars, frankly, that just don't friggin want to get fixed. And we need to be
understanding in this industry. And it's not a situation of like, we don't want to fix them.
We just have to have, we need to become a lot more honest and upfront and better with communicating
to the customer sometimes that it's just like, I just can't make this happen. And you know,
I'm sorry that we wasted your time. I'm glad that we didn't waste any of your money.
Here's your keys and thank you for the opportunity to, you know, have our teeth kicked in on your
junkie vehicle. Look at my mini with the knock sensor.
Dude, right? Yeah. And now that one has water intrusion. So it's now sitting on our lot.
And it's like, I have to drive by it every day. And it's like, yeah.
That was two years of my life in that thing.
And that is it up in the air as to what's going to happen to that car? Or is it like,
is it customers wash his hands of it? So I've got about a half case of 556 and 300 blackout
that I would like to find its way into that car. Yeah. I think he's getting rid of it with water
intrusion. I mean, we've got mold growing inside of it. It stinks inside. So yeah, after we got the
knock sensor fixed, it died. And I was like, you're not responsible for the water intrusion.
That's just a mini BMW Mercedes Benz name any Euro car. That's just a free freebie. It's a side
effect, you know, why couldn't it happen two years earlier? Well, you know, it's a fishbowl
looking for a place to get filled up. Let's say, listen, you get a free aquarium with every European
built car, you know, it's just a matter of time, right? We get them to and it's like, you know,
I get in some stuff and I look up and it's got a headliner, like there's a headliner stain and
a sunroof and I'm like, Nope. And I go out and I tell the, you know, service writer and the sales
people that it's like, Hey, and we can make two choices there, we can take it apart and investigate
further or we can hope that it was fixed under warranty. Yeah. And you know, and then it's like,
because ultimately the customer like we have sold, we sold stuff that doesn't have a working
sunroof. We tell the customer flat out, it doesn't have a working sunroof and they're like, why not?
And they're like, well, when we first got it in here, it was leaking water and we managed to get
it sealed up and it's tight now, but we have disabled the power to it so that you can't open it.
And so, you know, if you're good with that, you're good with that, you get a nice view still,
but you're not getting the aquarium effect that you would, you know, probably. Yeah.
That commerce, how does that conversation with that mini and that customer go like,
is he pretty understanding of what he's got or? He was. I obviously, I was speaking with that
client quite a bit through that process. And you know, we're fortunate, he's a very good
client of the shop, very long-term client, has a lot of vehicles. And he was with us every step
of the way through that punishing lesson in humility and learning how to use this. So,
it was just like, look, we've got water damage in here. This is one of those things that is
very degenerative. We can go after what I have now, we're going to have more problems. This is
not going to stop. We can get all the water out of there. I promise, there is dissolved solid
material somewhere that is going to cause problems. I can think of five or six modules right now,
they're going to fail probably within the next year or two on this because of that.
So, how much further do we want to go with this? You know, when he asked what I thought,
I'm like, honestly, at this point, I hate to say, let's pull the plug because
this car and I were on a first name basis, but I can't feel good telling you to put more money
into this car at this point. And that's, I mean, it's a really hard discussion to have. I mean,
I don't envy those talks, but I'm going to be honest with them. I'm going to be straight up with
them. I mean, I told them a couple of times into the noxentrum thing, like, look, I don't know where
to go from here because we've replaced the entire system. I will go as far as you want me to go
with this. I don't like getting beat and I am not going to get beat by this thing,
but I don't have a realistic timeline on when it's going to be done.
And then finding the water in there, I mean, that was the worst feeling in the world. I got in
the car and I knew as soon as I got into it, I'm like, oh, no, no, no, no. Tell me my feet
stink or something. No. Yeah. Yeah. And then we found the mold back in the back in the back and I'm
like, oh. So yeah, they're a car that when I see them come in, I hate them. Just minis, I just hate
them. You know, they look cute. They're so much fun to drive. That's the worst part. They are so
good to drive when they're working. Yeah, they are. I know I met a young lady that I think I
first date because she had one in the driveway and when I walked in, I said, Oh, is that yours?
Yeah. And then I go to see it with my rant about, you know, why I thought they were terrible and
junking. Oh my God, I can't believe that you can afford that on your salary and all that
foot in mouth. You know what I mean? Like completely take the potential and just stop it to the
ground. The whole story of why she has the car is because when she was a young girl,
her dad had one of the original old minis, as did my father way back in the day. So she had
all these memories of the original minis, you know, and wanted to have one.
And then I felt like a real dick for like, you know, saying all the things like,
because you realize that's not a mini, right? That's a BMW and like, you know,
that's saying about you when you like all the things that I shouldn't have said.
Yeah, I had to have that talk with my mom, my stepfathers from Ireland. And same thing,
grew up, had a mini, had an MGB, which picturing him in that is durable. But he had a mini and he,
my mom called one, and he's like, Yeah, we're thinking about getting a mini. I thought I was
going to have an accident because I was choking on my drink as soon as she said that. I'm like,
well, lease it for less than the warranty. Oh, no, he wants to get one to buy. No, he doesn't.
I promise. No, he doesn't. It's not, it's not, it's not, it's not what it used to be.
That's a different car. It's a Beamer. So that was, it didn't make him happy,
but now they drive Subaru's and they're very happy. So yeah, when, when still getting fun car to
drive, just not, you know, when it has a quirk, it's not a quirk that's like a $10,000 quirk,
you know, it's like a $1,000 quirk, like it's, you know, yeah. And somebody in the family that's
very, you know, likes working on them. Like that's, that's the plus. Yeah, right. You know, when I
met this girl and it was like, Oh, I'm like, Oh shoot, like I just, it was just bad. It was all
the way around. I should have just never knew I was, she knew I was a mechanic and you know,
it's like, Oh, shit. She was planning ahead. Yeah.
Yeah. So I shot my foot and I put my foot right in my mouth with that one. So
what's the goals for 2026 for you and LNN and everything else?
So I think, you know, increasing our productivity, increasing our efficiency,
we're starting to revamp more meaningfully, we're starting to work on some of our processes.
And so Lucas has had to take over a lot more responsibility at the family business.
So Jade has taken over most of the management duties down at the shop and we're trying to,
I guess we're trying to find our rhythm. Jade and I work very well together, which is awesome.
But we're trying to kind of get things structured around achieving our goals in a way that we can
execute it meaningfully. Yeah. We've been doing a lot of kind of strategizing and planning. I want to
get all the guys in the back. I want to get all of them through their ASCs.
At the end of 2026, I want all of them A1 through A8.
I want to personally, I want to get through my L1, L2, L3. Nice.
I know they don't have a lot of value with the client, but I still think it's a good thing to
have. You know, I still think it shows commitment to me. It's like college. You know, half the
degrees you get aren't useful, but it shows you have the commitment and the drive to continue
working towards it. The biggest one for me is I want to build up our training plan and our
methodology for getting the guys trained and get everyone on a regimented training plan that's
going to be beneficial to them, beneficial to the shop, and get everybody going forward.
You've got a strong team, you know, for sure, but you can always tweak things a little bit more,
right? And I mean, and it's only to everybody's benefit. I'm the same way like everybody,
I'm not anti-ASE. I'm just like, because it does say something, right? Like,
now my thing up here with my license is that like, I have to have that to be legal to even
touch a car. That's just what works in Canada. Now, could I get hired without it? Yes,
but it's kind of like if I'm in the shop and somebody from the government was having to walk
in and ask, I have to run out the back door and hide and, you know, because if they catch me doing
it without it, it's a big deal. ASCs are not like that in the States. And that's where I don't
necessarily want an advocate for the US to have to go to that level, but it will come to that level,
I think at some point where if you're, you know, removing a steering wheel, you need to have some
kind of understanding about what you're actually touching before you're allowed to touch it. And
there's too many people right now, you can see them on social media and they're, they're in a
parking lot or a driveway somewhere and they're yanking steering wheel off to do something. And
I'm not saying that they don't or do or whatever qualified or not, but we know that a lot of them
probably aren't and they're not killing anybody right now. They're not killing themselves. But
it's not necessarily, we know that that car is not leaving and running over to someplace to be a
gas calibrated, right? It's the, you know, the clunk and the steering column is fixed now and
they're happy. They're good. They're laughing. Perfect. The car is fixed. It's only what happens
when the guy pulls a bag off and kills himself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I know. Or what happens if,
you know, like they pull on it, they're certain off, man, I had a Ford that fought me getting the
bag off and to the tune of like, we ended up damaging the steering wheel and had to buy the
steering wheel because a little, it wouldn't clip in when we were done. And, you know, like,
and that's something that like we're getting that car ready to be for sale. It's not, it's no
compromise. I can't sign it that way. So yeah, I screwed it up because I'm trying to, we're,
there's a whole long story I'll tell you after, but like it's different when we're doing it that
way in a shop versus somebody somewhere who's saying, Hey, don't worry about this. Yeah, I know
that the airbags kind of moving around a little bit now, but, you know, the clock spring is still
working and, and, you know, the lights not on and so you're good to go. And somebody
It's a claymore. Yeah, you and I know what happens with that, right? Like it's not a good scene,
you know, but what, what's the challenges you see for the rest of the support staff at Ellen and
for 2026 balancing a team, but like, you know, Scotty and George and, and, you know,
you better edit that out.
Yeah. Yeah, he doesn't get the two T's apparently he's not tall enough according to him.
And the Y on the Y on the end, I, yeah, I'll let you handle that one next time you down.
But no, I think, you know, just growing and scaling everything and managing to keep up with
the workflow. You know, we've got to, we've, we've got to increase, we've got to increase what
we're putting through the shop. Yeah. And that's, you know, on George and Scott, both that's, that's
a huge load. So being able to, you know, work together collaboratively to make their jobs easier
and remove as many roadblocks as we can through scaling the processes and scaling our procedures
is going to be huge for everybody. You know, it helps the front counter is the first place it
helps, but we've all got to work together to support each other. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, I think
you guys are above average in being able to do that. That's been, but always the, you know,
the times that I've been in your shop and watched the magic unfold or chaos ensue is that, you know,
for the most part, it's always like you guys are, are, you know, running up the hill together.
You know what I mean? That's what we've seen. And that's what I appreciate because like you and I
have been in some places where it ain't like that, you know, not at all. You've been pushing a car in
and, you know, watching guys stand there, you know, watch you push the car in like we've been in
places like that. Like that's when I sure when I were talking, it was like, when they go to push
the car in at the shop, he says, we have more people out in the parking lot than we need.
Like, and, you know, because it's just everybody is that tight knit kind of culture of everybody
wants to make, you know, all hands make light work. And he says we're sometimes he has to say,
no, go back inside and fix that car. We've got enough people. But he says that's so much easier
to deal with that problem than to deal with the other side of the problem. And that's where
it comes back. We'll close this out on culture. When we, when we pay our people a certain way,
or we value them a certain way, we look at them a certain way, there does come out a compromise
for culture within the shop. If we choose to see it that way. And you can say, well, at the end
of the day, we still get done. And my, you know, my numbers are this, that's cool. Not saying it's
the wrong way. But there are some caveats that come that make the challenges there. You know,
what I mean, you have, we're all just naturally the way we are. I think a lot of us are competitive.
And I'm not necessarily going to stand on my co workers head to keep them down. But I'm not
really going to put my hand out every time either, right? If I'm in that competitive nature,
you know, it's just the way humans are wired, unfortunately. And I think that that's
something we got to go forward to. I think if we could have where all hands, you know,
somebody drops a rifle, immediately, somebody else is picking that rifle up and grabbing them
by the belt and saying, you know, we're just going over that hill there, keep going. When we
have that mindset, that's a much more powerful team than a team that's trying to compete against
one another, you know, what's good for the collective is good for the individual. Yeah,
brother, I want to thank you. Yeah, I want to thank you for being here.
Definitely, man. Thanks for having me. This is awesome.
Yeah, it's always a good time. I enjoy your, I enjoy your weekly rants. I can't wait to hear
them. So, you know, and I mean, we need to do more of this next in the, in the new year. I think
we need to try and get into some kind of, you know, I talked about it like we're once a month
that we talk about like something that kicked our ass or, you know, what we're fighting through.
I think because I think it's, you know, I don't get to go to work with you every day,
but I feel like some days like I'm part of the team. Oh, you absolutely are. And you're absolutely
part of it. Yeah. And, you know, sometimes it's like, it just keeps me connected with you guys
is what I'm so it's going forward. I think we need to do that once a month or once every quarter
or something we sit down and have this kind of conversation because I think it just,
I think that there's some good examples that you guys can share that sometimes maybe don't, you know,
when it comes from Lucas is it, it hits a certain audience and when it comes from you,
it hits a certain audience. And that's what I guess what I'm trying to say is, you know,
you've got a lot to offer the people that are listening. And I think that that's why
I need to continue to have you on a lot more. So thank you. I appreciate that. I mean, it's a lot.
Thank you. I mean, you've been an awesome, you know, you're my brother. I mean,
you've been awesome support for me since since jump with this crazy thing. And
you know, it's like some days I have to pinch myself and go, Holy crap. Like what the hell was
Lucas thinking? You know, I, I asked that I asked myself that every day. Yeah. Yeah. He's
yeah, he's got everybody convinced he knows what he's doing. You and I know he is a savant when
it comes to some of this stuff, the way he does things and the way he approaches things is so
unique and so needed in this industry. I mean, it's, you know, it I'm, I'm here to retirement.
I mean, I'm, I'm here to let her out. Yeah. Yeah. That's the same thing.
Say people like when you're listening, you hear somebody a technician say that.
That's powerful because I've never heard another person say with enthusiasm that I'm here until
I drop. I'm here until I retire. Like they might say like, fuck, this is all I have.
This is my only option. But that's Eric's not saying it that way. So, you know, if you can
think about your business, how to build that, that's the magic sauce. People right there,
you get your people to think that and want to be that way that invested,
then you've got it figured out. So everybody, happy new year to everybody. I don't know you're
going to get this after new year, but it's almost new year. And, you know, enjoy the turkey, enjoy the
New Year's celebrations, don't indulge, don't drink and drive. Don't let your friends drive
European cars. And we'll see everybody in 2026. Take it easy.
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 ASA Group and to the Change in the Industry podcast.
Remember what I always say, 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.
About this episode
Eric Sprague joins Jeff to discuss the critical role of communication in the auto repair industry. They explore the challenges faced by technicians, the importance of proper training, and the need for a supportive shop culture. The conversation dives into the complexities of modern vehicles, the impact of technology, and the necessity for shops to adapt to changing demands. Eric shares insights on mentorship, the significance of certifications, and the importance of maintaining safety standards in repairs. This episode is packed with valuable perspectives for anyone in the automotive field.
Original notes
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In this episode, Jeff welcomes Eric Sprague from L&N Performance Auto Repair. Eric stresses the need for improved shop culture and mentorship to support new technicians entering the field. Jeff and Eric also talk about the importance of thorough communication between support staff and technicians to ensure safe, accurate repairs and customer education.
Timestamps:
00:00 "TPMS and Car Safety Standards"
10:39 TPMS Regulations and Nanny State
16:53 Empty Promises and Abandoned Projects
18:46 "Hybrid Trucks and Northern Infrastructure"
25:11 "Youth, Effort, and Clear Guides"
32:40 "Electronic Parking Brake Discussion"
34:33 "Teaching Safe Methods First"
43:32 "Trust and Prioritization at Work"
48:54 "Challenges of Losing Key Talent"
54:35 "Shifting from Dealership Culture"
55:46 "Accountability and Proper Checks"
01:04:10 "Challenges of Independent Auto Shops"
01:09:28 "Challenges in Automotive Repair Access"
01:12:15 "Industry's Tipping Point on Regulation"
01:17:24 "Importance of Vehicle Safety Systems"
01:25:59 "Tool Standards and Calibration Issues"
01:27:30 "Understanding the Entire System"
01:34:24 "European Cars and Sunroof Issues"
01:42:24 Regulations, Qualifications, and Future Standards
01:45:58 "Teamwork Overcomes Chaos"
01:48:47 "Monthly Collaborative Conversations"
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The Jaded Mechanic Podcast
Jeff Compton
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113:09