I started out my automotive software career with Ford, and as part of the new college hire training program, I actually got to see the process of how "book rate" is determined. They take a brand new car, straight off the assembly line and give a master mechanic a process sheet (head gasket remove and replace, for instance). He has a tool cart with a computer next to it, about 6 feet away from the vehicle. For each step he starts a timer on the computer for that step, picks up the necessary ratchet and socket or whatever, loosens the next bolt, walks the ratchet and socket back to the tool box, puts it away and then finally stops the timer. He probably practices the procedure a few times before the timed run, but basically this prevents the company from setting the time to do a job super crazy low. He's also not allowed to take any shortcuts from the book procedure, which there frequently are a few available (use a long wobble extension bar and a universal joint and you can get in without taking off all of the stuff above that bolt, whatever). On the other hand, this is the warranty rate (meaning new cars, largely less rust, etc). Independent/non-dealer mechanics will typically charge more time than the warranty time estimate from the manufacturer to account for things like rusty vehicles with harder to remove bolts and such, though this is usually in the rate book they subscribe to from whatever information source they pay for (warranty + 20% or so). The issue is that the estimated time for a job is probably a high estimate for a brand new car and probably a low estimate for a several year old car, and the risk of that is on the dealership. The dealership then pays mechanics an hourly wage ($20+, fairly high for well certified master mechanics) and assumes that the hours listed on the job from the manufacturer are accurate, leaving the mechanic to take the risk if it goes over. Generally, the dealership loses on this proposition too, since they lose out on business/bay/electric/heat/etc for the lost time, so they don't like warranty work. They can upcharge/charge for more time/etc on a job for a customer, not for warranty repair due to contractual obligations to the OEM. This is particularly bad for Ford, since they currently lead the industry in recalls and warranty spend, meaning that their dealership networks are getting a lot more of that kind of work with limited profit and no ability to turn it down.
Wife's cousin is a GM mechanic, and similar to this, he explained how they game recalls/TSBs. When you have a recall/TSB, it's the same process where the manufacturer comes up with the amount that the dealer is paid to resolve. However, if the mechanics individually don't submit common problems, then it doesn't rise to the level of a recall/TSB and the dealership can bill T&M.
The specific example was a leak that was the shorting out of electric window motors due to rainwater leaking through the window. It was better for him to fix it by cutting up a plastic container and attaching it over the motor & getting hourly for it than it was for GM to tell the dealership "Here's the part, you get $8 to install it when the customer is subject to the TSB"
>This is particularly bad for Ford, since they currently lead the industry in recalls and warranty spend
Can confirm this. Just Traded in my Escape for a Toyota. I was tired of spending time and money on repairs on a mid range car with less than 65k miles.
I thought the same about Toyota being better quality, but I took delivery of a 2024 Sienna and it has had several visits to the dealership for warranty items. Not mechanical, but I still find them disconcerting since they could indicate a lack of QC. I'm sure you're aware of the major turbo QC problems Toyota has with the 3.4L twin turbo in the Tundra and Sequoia models. I think all automotive mfgrs are racing to the bottom when it comes to quality hoping that the world moves en masse to an AaaS model and stops holding on to them.
> The dealership then pays mechanics an hourly wage ($20+, fairly high for well certified master mechanics) and assumes that the hours listed on the job from the manufacturer are accurate, leaving the mechanic to take the risk if it goes over.
What's the mechanic's risk? Are they only paid on the pre-estimated labor time?
It's not an hourly rate as in if you work 5 hours you are paid for 5 hours of labor. You are paid $20+ an hour based on the expected time to complete the job, with a price floor of minimum wage. If a job should take 3 hours and you take one, congrats, you made money. If the job should take 3 hours and it takes a full day, sucks to be you, you get paid for 3 hours. If the job should take 3 hours and you wait 2 hours for a part, you get paid 3 horus.
It's almost like a hairdresser as well, as they usually need to buy many of their own tools.
Well, if mechanic is present on the workplace all day, they must get paid at least a minimum wage per day, regardless of any estimates or even if there's any work at all.
It's employer's problem, employer never wants to pay workers less than minumum wage per hour, and loading them with work is manager's job.
But I doubt mechanics want minumum wage, especially since it's not keeping up with inflation.
Just make sure you understand that minimum wage is only for W2s. Shops likely dont only us employee labor and likely treat their mechanics and contractors often enough.
Then autoshops are exposed to the risk that mechanics report/sue them for "employee misclassification" and unpaid wages.
Employers are better always pay at least minimum wage, even for 1099s, otherwise more incentive for workers to report them.
Of course many are ok being exposed to that risk, depends on the jobs. Also there's tips that help employers avoiding the unpaid wages. However, worker must report the tips received, and if they received less tips to cover the minimum wage, then employer must pay employee the difference (so the total pay would be at least min wage).
I saw that restaurant owners pay at least min wage even to illegal workers who don't even have SSNs. I assumed that unpaid wages is more serious than hiring illegally.
Mechanics don't have to work for the dealership. If the dealership isn't paying them well, they can go work for an independent shop, which is exactly what's happening.
Getting paid the book rate is an advantage to the mechanic because then they still get the full rate if they're more efficient at their job, which is an advantage to everybody. As long as the book rate is reasonable. And if it isn't then they don't take the job, which isn't a problem for the mechanics, it's a problem for Ford.
For years, it was difficult to hire licensed mechanics at Hyundai dealerships due to the massive recall of the 2.4L engine. Since Hyundai had to eat the losses of offering a lifetime warranty to owners of that engine, recalls and product improvements, mechanics bore some of that financial burden when Hyundai provided a low labor rate to them. They would spend days swapping an engine and watch a lube lane mechanic out earn them.
I despise the idea of leasing, but in a world where nothing is built to last any more, there may not be much of a choice for people just trying to get from point A to point B.
This seems like a pretty fair system, they do get to do it on unrealistic practically new vehicles, but they also can’t take any practical shortcuts whatsoever.
Is there any proposal for some alternate way determining it?
If the article is to be believed Ford has changed how book time is calculated considering they're paying 36 minutes for a job that requires removing the cab.
HYou think it might be the CEO? No, couldn't be, surely someone paid 100s of times their employees would be honest about something he has no real experience doing.
The impression I got from seeing the demonstration was that this was the result of years of negotiating and arguing to get to something fair. Ford doesn't love it, dealers don't love it, but no one can really come up with a major improvement.
I say something like this to my kids when I'm tired of mediating and I want them to solve their own disagreements. "My definition of success is that you are both crying after I've made my decision."
(for the record, I did not have this policy when they were toddlers, only as tweens; I'm not a monster)
A fair system? This is nothing more than theater, necessary to get cheap labor. What about giving mechanics an hourly rate, just like the rest of the world?
> The dealership then pays mechanics an hourly wage ($20+, fairly high for well certified master mechanics)
Maybe in Ohio.
I'm not sure that your comment is even directionally correct. TFA is clickbait for blue collar pseudo-car-guys. The example given in the article paints the mechanic as the hero, losing money on every job. In reality book time is insanely exaggerated in the median, and the problem is likely more that mechanics don't like earning a dime for every dollar the boss makes.
Many mechanics (seems that is what the article example is) get paid on book time, not hourly. That is what the guy in the article is complaining about. That their book rate is both too aggressive, and far less than the "customer book time" / rate. The reason mechanics are often paid this way is so that they stay efficient. Warranty jobs are especially aggressive on the mechanic book rate, because cars under warranty are newer with few unexpected problems like rusty parts, stripped bolts, age related issues, etc.
Thus the starting out part. Certifications, years of experience, skills in terms of welding exhaust or the like all raise that, but mechanics get screwed on their rate regularly, which is why they're dropping out. See one of the other top level comments about "shortage -> low wages."
>breaking his back and knuckles, and exposed to carcinogens (used motor oil, grease, etc).
They work indoors and don't exactly work in an environment where things get burnt or aerosolized. It's no office job but it's not exactly ditch digging.
Generally true, but not always! There are often very real bottlenecks on education too. We need a ton more electricians but it's nearly impossible to get into schools. Or you need union apprenticeships and their are not enough slots.
Pay is part of it, but for most skilled professions there's big bottlenecks on the training for the skills.
Or look at police officers in places like San Francisco. The pay is actually fantastic but the process of getting hired is hellish and takes a year or something ridiculous.
Or doctors, there's a massive shortage because there aren't enough residency spots, something controlled by the AMA. Pay is amazing (hours suck) and there are people clamoring to do it, but the bottleneck is structural, not because of pay.
I'd argue that the "structural" bottleneck is actually just the same "pay" bottleneck.
This was the whole issue with allowing guilds in the first place... If you only allow a guild to do a job (legally) and the guild also controls how many members they train and accept... The end result is a labor shortage.
Because it's better for the existing members of the guild.
If they train a large number of new members... they spend time and money on training, and they've increased their competition during bidding which drives down rates.
So instead you train the bare minimum for replacements. This keeps your members' rates high and competition low.
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Any time the "pay is great" but the "process to get it sucks!"... you're seeing this in action. It's not that the process really needs to suck, it's that the process roadblocks are there to maintain high pay for the existing trained members.
If there's one thing monopolies don't like... it's competition. And legally enforced certifications are wonderful monopoly creators if you don't manage them carefully.
"Neoliberalism" became a dirty word for lots of reasons (mainly because it caused a ton of people in developed nations to lose their jobs, as manufacturing capacity shifted to developing nations and developed nations leaned into the information economy), but there was a time when the word wasn't tainted and the pro-market Democrats of the Clinton era absolutely self-identified as Neoliberals.
They liked competition and markets, delivered strong economic growth, and brought the deficit down, but they fucked up by not funneling some of those efficiency gains into education and training, and toward building a robust social safety net to help the economically displaced.
Its not that there is not enough education, its that there is too many regulatory barriers preventing licensing. It should be more like the DMV where anyone can take a test and get licensed if they pass. Forced experience and education requirements are touted as essential but are truly nothing more than regulatory moat building.
Maybe a test should be sufficient, but that test should be comprehensive, i.e., passing it should mean you had to do the education (formally or informally).
(Would you want someone performing surgery on you who "passed a test" but didn't have any formal education or training experience?)
I'm using the term "structural" here without any clear definition, to be honest. By it I mean that it's about the structure of society, the relationships that are in place, the difficulty of setting up a new school, the resistance of the AMA to open up more residency spots, etc. Points in the process where there's high friction for changing the system to a better "structure", whether or not the change requires financial incentives.
But I don't know if that meaning is shared by anyone else in the world! Thanks for asking for clarification, I'm interested in how you'd communicate that idea.
> Or look at police officers in places like San Francisco. The pay is actually fantastic but the process of getting hired is hellish and takes a year or something ridiculous.
As it should be. I’m tired of dumb roughnecks attending a 6-week course and then getting the ability to legally beat people up. It should be difficult to become a police officer, we should hold them to a high standard, especially if we’re gonna pay them so much.
While I agree that police should be held to a high standard and trained well, is this the actual case in SF? Or is it bureaucratic hoops leading to long wait times and/or duplication of effort?
> We need a ton more electricians but it's nearly impossible to get into schools. Or you need union apprenticeships and their are not enough slots.
This got solved in tech 20 years ago. You don't look at credentials and instead design a very arduous interviewing process that selects for both high IQ and people who are willing to study/work at it.
Then you provide lots of training. 20 years ago at Google (or Apple etc) there were tons of well educated non CS hires who were given good training and became exceptional software engineers.
While that's true, there is some market clearing price in which the activity just ceases to exist.
For instance, take something with a small marginal benefit like a dedicated person at a supermarket to bag groceries. It's a nice to have but the value to the employer is probably less than a $15 minimum wage. So you could say there is a shortage of grocery baggers since there is no one willing to do it at a market clearing price.
Doesn't mean we should do anything about it. There will always be some extra activity that would take place at a lower price, but it's worth while to notice that.
While reading the article, the now-less-common business of vacuum and TV repair came to mind. I imagine it's easier than ever to repair vacuums, with improved tools and free internet repositories of schematics. But I only know of one store still doing this within 5 miles of my house. I haven't asked former vacuum repairmen, but my guess as to the reasons:
1) Labor costs go up with inflation
2) Rent goes up
3) New vacuum prices go down
At some point in the past, the downward line of vacuum price crossed over the upward line of repair cost. That's when this profession cratered.
Cars may have a while until that price point hits. But the quoted mechanic's suggestion that engineers optimize for simpler repairs instead of simpler production may be something similar. If simpler production makes the price of a new car $X cheaper, but increases the labor cost of repairs over the car's lifetime by $Y, there could be a time when X > Y.
I remember reading an article about the last TV repair shop in Chicago many years ago in the Chicago Reader.
This would have been in the early 2010s.
The reporter asked the owner why TV repair was dying: were TVs getting too complicated? Help too hard to find or too expensive? Nope, the owner said it was 100% parts availability. The vast majority of business coming through the door he'd have to turn away because manufacturers didn't want him repairing their equipment.
There may sometimes be a tradeoff for manufacturability vs repairability but even when there is not -- holding everything else equal -- manufacturers will choose the less repairable option because they perceive it to be in their interest to do so.
Tv repair made a lot more sense in the days of tubes which wore out quick but were easy to replace. Solid state generally lasts much longer and the parts that fail are not worth repairing.
A quick note to say that at our local repair cafe we do a roaring trade in vacuum repairs for peanuts (not literal peanuts; though some of our repairers do get peckish). If you're in Europe, there's chance you have one nearby. https://repaircafe.org/en
Could you please go in to a bit more detail on how you set that up, how you handle issues, etc? I'm a member of a makerspace, and there's been discussions about doing something similar. There's just not a consensus about how to go about it.
...generally I've seen weekly/monthly "fix-it" workshops as a kindof open-house / membership drive.
Probably best to 1) have people sign safety waivers, especially if they're not members 2) have people sign a "we can offer to help you try, but your widget might end up worse than before" waiver 3) run it as a volunteer outreach event with a focus on getting membership rather than a transactional "fix my ____ for free" outcome
That is because there is not a cost for the disposal of the broken vacuum. Imagine if we paid by the weight of our trash. Some of the right to repair laws are trying to change that by requiring replacement parts be available to purchase. https://www.repair.org/know-your-rights
I really like the idea of adding taxes (or subsidies) to make repairing things more economical than replacing them, when this is not the case already. It seems difficult to fairly decide how to do this, but charging by rubbish weight is at least objective and easily measurable.
It can be argued that all taxes and subsidies are "artificial distortions" of market value, but capitalism strongly encourages externalisation of costs -- "the cost of making X" is often severely underestimated by "the cost of running a machine to dig X out of the ground".
Also, new stuff just isn't designed to be opened up.
I took an old monitor that started failing to a local makerspace (which has a very popular monthly repair cafe), and it took some physical force to crack the case open. Once inside it was relatively easy to get the board out and find the leaking capacitors. Not exactly high-tech parts.
It was fun for me and for the volunteer, but I can't imagine anyone trying to do this for a living -- it would take a lot of time, and charging people for what the labor's worth would probably come close to the price of a new monitor.
TVs and vacuum cleaners are now a lot cheaper AND more reliable then they used to be.
Cars have become more reliable and relatively cheaper then they used to be, but they are a lot more expensive so have a long way to go until that point is reached.
TVs are definitely more reliable, but vacuum cleaners? I had a Dyson a few years ago and it didn't take long before plastic parts started to snap off. Meanwhile my mother in law's Electrolux or whatever is indestructible with occasional maintenance.
> While that's true, there is some market clearing price in which the activity just ceases to exist.
The article cites a mechanic commenting on Ford CEO's remarks on lack of mechanics by referring to how Ford fails to pay rates for warranty repairs that justify the volume of work required to pull them off.
This suggests the root cause is the automaker's refusal to pay for warranty work at a market rate.
The article raises some points on how Ford both designed cars that are too expensive to repair and fails to pay mechanics to make their product line attractive for any maintenance business. This doesn't sound like a market efficiency issue.
It's not clear to me what the difference is between what you're saying and what the parent comment says. Not being willing to pay the wages necessary to hire someone is pretty much exactly what they're saying as well.
The implied criticism in the original comment is that companies should pay more. They ignore that in a lot of cases it doesn't make structural sense for a role to exist above a given price.
> It's not clear to me what the difference is between what you're saying and what the parent comment says.
The key difference is whether rentism plays a role or not.
It's one thing to claim that no one will pay a mechanic if it's too expensive. It's an entirely different thing to claim that some employers are abusing their position to pressure wages to stay low to maximize their profit margin at the expense of their employees.
There's a good litmus test: is there a massive wave of car shop bankruptcies due to lack of business? Or are car shop owners complaining they can't get enough employees to keep up with demand?
The auto repair business is still pretty fragmented in most areas so as a practical matter employers can't really pressure wages. Mechanics change jobs all the time to get a raise. The industry has a relatively high annual employee turnover rate.
They agree that corporations don't do things that aren't profitable, their implied disagreement is whether this is greedy/bad or merely rational/amoral.
In other words, the existence of a minimum wage implies there is also a minimum job, a job which if it were any less valuable to the company they wouldn’t pay anyone to do it.
Demand is a function of price. At any given price there is a quantity demanded. To know the price you also need to know the supply function. There is a demand for socks but if no one is will to supply socks for less a million dollars, the quantity demanded of socks at that price could be 0.
In a free market, commodity-level jobs will only happen at commodity-level wages. But it's not a free market, because of minimum wage laws. If you set the minimum wage too high, the number of baggers may go to zero, not because of supply but because of demand - the price is higher than any grocery store is willing to pay.
You can argue about the need for the minimum wage laws. You can argue about the morality of paying a living wage. But that's a different argument.
In some countries there's something called a "minimum wage" that sets the minimum value of a job that is allowed to exist, and any job that isn't worth that amount ceases to exist, or has fewer people doing it, or has partial or full automation doing it.
There’s a demand, but the price we want to pay for “grocery baggers” is usually less than minimum wage, so the job usually can’t (legally) exist. The cost (wage) is fixed higher than the value added.
Technically true. I think a "shortage" is technically defined in terms of price. But the example of housing is a hint at the limitations of this rule. Sure, we'd like houses to be cheaper, but most buyers don't have the option to just pay more. So what do we actually do about it? Increase supply, yeah, but why is the supply limited? Well, it's various weird, annoying restrictions on housing that you don't see unless you dig past "lol they want it cheap".
People that can't achieve home ownership right now want houses to be cheaper.
People that already got theirs don't. Yeah, supply is a problem but it's more than that. Housing cannot both be an investment and broadly affordable, those two goals are in conflict.
We need to change the way we treat housing so that it cannot be used to both store and generate wealth.
>but most buyers don't have the option to just pay more.
You can argue the same for labor as well. Everything from off-shore competition to strained government budgets are excuses for why employers "don't have the option to just pay more".
Sure, some of those might be worth looking into. But also, we can be a lot more cavalier about saying a company that can't pay its workers should go out of business than we are about saying that a family that can't afford housing should just live on the street. I think the latter case is more worth attacking directly.
The point is, shortages being a price phenomenon is not all that actionable. You can't avoid digging in to the details.
This logic assumes something is always available for sale somewhere at some price. It shouldn't hold when something is actually short to the point of rarity. If someone is unwilling to sell something that you can't buy elsewhere, this reasoning will conclude that its price is infinite.
Honestly, between how soft-science macroeconomcis is, combined with the fact that this planet does not contain a single person willing to argue about it in good faith, makes it simply impossible to have real conversations around it, especially on the internet.
Not really, when you consider both the interests of the buyer or the seller. The buyer of course would rather like goods and services be cheaper. It might be tempting to say that "people" deserve special consideration over "goods", it breaks down when you consider that goods are also made by people. Moreover gatekeeping whether you can use the characterization of "we can't get ... for cheap" depending on whether the seller is sympathetic or not (ie. "people" vs "goods") is a blatant way of smuggling in a conclusion via wording, similar to "terrorists" vs "freedom fighters".
I don't think this is correct. The reasons economists separate capital and labor is that they do have different characteristics. Labor has skill, capital can have technology. Assets exist regardless of utilization, labor cannot be stored up in an inventory since labor is time which flows inexorably onwards.
A shortage of an asset is a reflection of inventory levels. A shortage of labor reflects a lack of skill or time OR a lack of willingness to pay for that skill and time.
>A shortage of an asset is a reflection of inventory levels [...] OR a lack of willingness to pay for that skill and time.
So the housing crisis in just an "inventory" issue? Maybe it's just that people aren't willing to pay enough for a dwelling in desirable coastal cities?
>A shortage of labor reflects a lack of skill or time OR a lack of willingness to pay for that skill and time.
How's this different than for goods? You're just substituting "time" for "production". Moreover
A shortage exists at a point in time, propensity to pay to make the asset may react to the demand for the asset, but there is no guarantee that supply of labor and capital meet at an efficient point. (art is a great example where the overlap between supply and demand may have no overlap at all for certain pieces).
Lack of demand for labor and skill can produce an asset shortage, but in an economy where supply and demand float, the theory is that shortages reflect supply-demand failures, and the degree to which supply of labor is invoked to solve shortages for goods depends on the elasticity of demand and the elasticity of supply.
Also if you sideline too many goods, the goods can't rise up and force a new economy.
Someone here posted that the balance was better in the west in the past because the Soviet Union was sitting there on the sidelines like a boogy many to capitalists waiting if they pushed people too far.
The price will go up as the availability goes down. If you have a shortage of mechanics, each mechanic can raise his/her labor price. So, while you're saying "we can't get <profession> for cheap" this implies a lack of professionals or a structural problem increasing costs in a given industry, or both.
In the case of doctors and electricians, you have structural problems in both, but also a true shortage of individuals in electrician work (could be in the medical field too, but I can't speak to that).
It was a good view into what exactly the car companies are doing, but essentially it was "we're getting underpaid" with extra steps.
The car companies have basically set up a monopsony with cartels, squeezed the mechanics out, and are now complaining that they squeezed them out too much.
Agreed. It kinda worked for software for a bit since it was such a new field, so there could’ve been some truth to it just as a matter of time to get the systems in place to educate people.
Ya, and then people wonder why cars are so expensive to repair these days also. The market is at a breaking point, efficiency has to go along with the higher pay or it just won’t work out.
I recently acquired a new (to me) 2017 vehicle and took it to my independent mechanic who has been working on my cars for years. He is registered with the mfg. and has access to many of their proprietary diagnostics and tools, but warned me that there is very little he can do on the latest models. They are basically 'return to dealer' because of 'software'.
It's always been that way with new stuff though. Between exclusivity agreements and whatnot it takes time for the documentation and supplies to be available outside the dealership service supply chain.
Skilled labor (such as mechanics) require training and apprenticeship pipelines. If those pipelines don’t exist or are starved of people it doesn’t matter how much you’re willing to pay right now. Long term sure you can make that career path more appealing but it can and often is absolutely the case that companies would pay out the nose for employees with particular skills and are unable to find anyone. But sure let’s go with the standard Reddit pablum, why give it more thought than that?
That's what a shortage is, a short-term undersupply. Market forces will eventually correct the problem if allowed to operate normally (e.g. prices spike, incentivizing more supply), but like you said that takes time. If it's a shortage of goods it can take a while to ramp up production. If it's a shortage of skilled labor it can take a while for people to learn those skills. Either way it's fundamentally the same type of problem.
The market alone doesn’t work well with things like training that had feedback loops of several years. In German there is the term “Schweinezyklus”. It goes like this:
* companies complain about lack of trained workers
* more people start training
* after a few years companies complain about too many workers and don’t hire them
* people stop training
* companies complain about lack of trained workers
I was part of this in the 90s in mechanical engineering. When I started studying the job market was great. When I finished there were no jobs. Luckily I could jump to programming.
I think we are seeing the same with CS now. Too many people jumped into it.
Predicting the future is indeed famously difficult, which is why even markets have a hard time with forecasting and responding to demand years into the future. I don't think such over corrections are a market failure, just a lack of omniscience.
The "design for unmaintainability" problem has been around for a while. I remember helping a friend change his plugs on this Ford Ranger in the early 90s. The closest two plugs to the firewall required you to climb into the engine bay and basically hug the engine to get your arm into position to blindly get to the plugs. If you look around on YouTube you'll see some crazy mechanic videos where they show things like bolts located in impossible to loosen locations.
Cars used to be simpler to work on because a) they inherently were simpler and b) the engine bay used to have a lot of room to work in. Both of these things are not coming back.
No, it's because they are designed to be assembled from complete sub-assemblies. Maintenance is not assumed to be done on the sub-assemblies while they are in the final product. Under warranty, workshops are intended to replace entire sub-assemblies with new/rebuilt parts.
It's effectively a deliberate decision from the 80s that enabled faster assembly while warranties were shorter. For cars that are out of warranty, it doesn't matter either way.
The problem in the article occurs when Ford tries to pay someone to repair faults that were not planned to happen during the warranty time. Impossible, because it's completely uneconomical.
For cars that are out of warranty, it is an advantage, as the car will be scrapped sooner, thereby opening up a hole in the market that needs to be filled with a new car.
An advantage to the manufacturer, that is. For the consumer, it leads to never ending car payments for life, or surprise bills that approach the cost of a replacement vehicle.
I've encountered these headaches helping friends with their vehicles, and every time I'm reminded how much I prefer wrenching on my 80s-90s era mazdas.
My old protege even had an access port in the fender well added specifically to remove the crank bolt with an extension. If it were an Audi the FSM would point you to the engine removal process as step 1.
I've seen some video comparisons between American cars and Toyotas, and Toyota seemed to have figured out how to make cars a lot easier to maintain than the American companies. I saw one case where changing a simple fuse required several hours of disassembly in the American car but only 30s in the Toyota. It's about priorities. It's about ethics. American companies don't give a fuck, and it shows. And American companies don't give a fuck, because Americans largely don't give a fuck.
I believe there's a modern (GM?) truck out there that has a belt rated for something like 250K miles...but when you have to replace it, the entire engine needs to be removed.
Don't forget one of the latest automotive mistakes, the "wet timing belt".
This is a rubber timing belt (not a chain) that runs through your engine oil disintegrating and clogging up your oil filters.
If anyone here owns a car with that system I recommend taking it to your trusted mechanic and discussing with them to do additional preventive maintenance on it.
Don't forget one of the latest automotive mistakes, the "wet timing belt". This is a rubber timing belt (not a chain) that runs through your engine oil disintegrating and clogging up your oil filters.
Wow, yeah, it looks like the Duramax engine has a 15-year belt replacement interval that costs $10K at today's rates.
They aren't even trying to hide the whole planned-obsolescence thing at this point. Average age of cars on the road is approaching 13 years now, so someone who buys a Duramax-based vehicle will end up with a metal and plastic brick that costs more to maintain than it's worth, just because of the timing belt alone.
In the 1955 Citroen, standard French family car of the era, the timing chain sits behind a cover about 1/2" from the firewall, the whole engine has to come out to change it.
Sounds like the Colorado. It's a reason they'll pry my S10s, GMT400 and GMT800s from my cold dead hands as they're more reliable, cheaper to service and easier to service.
It's 180k miles. It's the 3.0L Duramax because the oil pump is on the backside of the engine using an oil submersed belt rather than a chain or set of gears. So you have to drop the transmission, exhaust, oil pan, and take the back side of the engine cover to replace a belt that should have been a chain. It _may_ be faster, to simply disconnect everything and pull the motor.
Source: I own one of these engines and I dread having to pay ~3k for this maintenance in 3 years. I like the engine, just not this maintenance ticket item.
It's kind of always been that way to varying degrees. In the 70's/80's, changing the Porsche 911 spark plugs required dropping the engine.
Also, in addition to planned obsolescence and repair hostility is Design for Manufacturing (DfM) that doesn't care about maintainability, safety, comfort, or durability, only lowest cost to shove things together on an assembly line. This is why there are some cars that require removing the wheel well to change the oil filter and other that have things completely out-of-order or require absurd tools to service. My grandfather was a 30 year Chrysler dealer mechanic who had a dozen or so custom tools for very specific purposes.
Source: Dad had an A/C & electrical mechanic shop next to a Porsche specialist shop.
Luckily you don't have go drop the engine to change spark plugs on modern water cooled Porsche 911s, but let me tell you about changing plugs on mid-engined Cayman/Boxster platform. The 4 cylinder cars are easier but 6 cylinder cars require 3-4 different combinations of sockets and extensions and tiny European hands to really get in there.
>Also, in addition to planned obsolescence and repair hostility is Design for Manufacturing (DfM) that doesn't care about maintainability, safety, comfort, or durability, only lowest cost to shove things together on an assembly line.
Exactly. It's basically fight club math. Spend $10 on a click-fit connector that can't be disassembled but that a $60/hr (though they only see a fraction of that) UAW laborer can plug in in half the time can't easily short-insert that can be visually checked.
The fact that it costs $200 the 1/10000 times it fails under warranty doesn't matter with those numbers. And you don't even care about the 100/100 times it fails at 2-3x the warranty period.
Of course, you're burning credibility doing this. But credibility doesn't have an obvious mapping to a number and stonk go up, KPI go up, bonus get paid, nobody cares.
There is ultimately a feedback cycle in that maintenance and reliability problems reduce used car values, and those drive lease rates. When manufacturers have trouble making the numbers work on cheap leases then that eventually hurts sales volume, but it takes many years for that effect to show up.
The red block Volvos would also run for literally millions of miles, and outside of the turbo models were pretty thrifty on gas. We've fallen a long ways.
Volvo may have fallen a long way, but US cars of that time were literal trash that 100,000 miles was about the total useful life of the car before far too much needed replaced. I'm old enough to remember how Japanese cars started taking the US by storm because of it. They sipped gas in comparison and drove forever.
How do dealerships get away with essentially passing on the downside and risk of warranties to mechanics?
Shouldn't it be the business that's shouldering the variability in income due to warranties, since they're the ones that sold the cars with them?
It seems similar to a hypothetical restaurant selling memberships with food, then paying workers less when customers buy food with the membership discount.
Because dealerships sell cars but don't build them. The warranty really should be from the manufacturer, not the dealership.
They get away with passing the risk because they're already apex parasites who have successfully inserted themselves between carmakers and customers, and lobby like crazy everywhere to protect their position.
In every aspect of their operations, dealerships are useless parasitic middlemen who provide no value to customers and exist solely because of protectionist legislation that they pay for with their rent-seeking. Why would you expect repairs and warranty claims to be any different?
"We’re investing in trade schools and scholarships to recruit technicians for vehicle repair as well as our factories."
"But this is a society problem. The one that bothers me the most is cultural. We, as a culture, think that everyone has to go to an Ivy League school to be valuable in our society, yet we all know that our parents and grandparents made our country wonderful because of these kinds of jobs. There’s incredible dignity in emergency services, and people can have wonderful careers. But our society doesn’t celebrate those people like they do the latest AI engineer."
Yeah, why do we as a society want high paying jobs that we're not forced to take 40 minutes of pay for hours of work? Clearly its the celebration that's missing.
That's the cultural issue that's talked about, which also caused the explosion of people trying to get into tech whether they actually liked the work or not.
Because the choice is/was - make $20/hr busting my ass with body breaking work and barely scrape by, or get a CS degree and live comfortably because no other career offers the pay required.
The cultural issue is - why aren't other careers paid as well? (Aka, why don't we value them). Someone risking bodily injury in a trade arguably should be paid more than most desk jobs, but they aren't.
Much like discussion here on HN about how we need an IC promotion path that doesn't lead to management, society needs equal opportunities for high paying careers across a variety of fields, not just white collar or tech work.
This is world-wide, not just in the automotive industry. The US military has the same problem. The Navy has submarines sitting in port unable to go to sea because they don't have enough mechanics to run or repair them. When I was in the Navy, we were being assigned more than 24hrs of work per day. Management knew it wasn't being completed and they were falsifying nuclear engineering maintenance records, sweeping it straight under the rug. In a time when all other jobs lost their bonuses or started force-retiring people, we were being offered near-six-figure bonuses to re-enlist for two more years. If you played it right you could get it tax-free and it would almost double your take-home compensation. And we were all turning them down because the job was so horrible. After I got out of the military I worked in mechanical engineering in several different industries before switching to software. Most of the best mechanics I knew switched to software.
Emperor has no clothes. Instagram is full of videos by mechanics explaining this or that brand/model is stupidly engineered. Known problem. And mechanics do not have a seat at the table where these matters are discussed and decided upon. Unless he plans to change that…
TATA owns Jaguar/Land Rover and they got ransomwared into complete shutdown. the UK Gov't is giving them $1.5 Billion to get back to working, because it is tanking their entire economy.
Really shows how little they care about the needful for the things they own directly, then extrapolate that out to all the consulting they do. Complete shit.
The data for long term maintenance can be found but for example the government could mandate it be published for car models to give consumers more insight and be a lever to incentivize designing cars to be more easily maintainable (e.g. not have to remove a truck's cab to replace an oil filter gasket!) https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-maintenance/the-cos...
Auto mechanics do things to "flat rate" where each task is listed as taking a given amount of time. There seems to be a lot of variation between what the book says, and how long the tasks actually take. How are these flat rates assessed? I wonder if it's assuming a new car with no complications or wear and tear to components, or rust etc.
Book rates are often set by the manufacturer. In theory, they have a mechanic do the job and time it. The real big problem is warranty work is only paid at a fraction of the book rate. So if a job normally takes three hours if you do it under warranty, you only get paid for two hours. It’s a massive disincentive for mechanics to work long-term for a brand-name dealership that sells new cars. They always run the risk of getting shafted by too much warranty work.
What's missing from the discussion is the opposite though. I worked at a dealership (albeit a long time ago) and many mechanics loved warranty work as some would be listed as a 2 hour job but would only take 1.25hr or whatever. So they were often able to put in 12 hours on a 10 hour shift for example.
This probably matters a lot depending on what 'long time ago' means.
Like when you hear old timers say "When I was a kid I bought X for Y" where Y is something like 10th the cost it is now. The push for profits has squeezed every section of the economy and it sounds like (dealer) mechanics are not escaping.
Yeah, that applies to warranty and non-warranty - the mechanics always want to beat the book. And there are definitely some jobs that are well know to be winner, and others that are losers. And nobody wants to take the losers.
There's some similarity here to US medical/dental insurance. Some work obviously needs to be done, but the entity that promised to pay for it won't. The system adapts (or fails).
I'm pretty sure the manufacturer does pay for the warranty repair. But only at the fractional rate. The dealership effectively passes that loss onto its employees. Working for a small, independent shop can have better wage/salary, but often lacks benefits (health care in particular) and comes with all the usual downsides of a small business (one bad owner/manager can ruin the experience).
If they assess that a repair needs three hours, then only pay two hours of work if it's under warranty, I don't see how that doesn't mean that either they know that the book estimate is an overestimate and reimburse the correct amount, or the book estimate is correct and the dealership effectivley assumes 33% of the warranty risk because they only get reimbursed for 66% of the repair cost. (the third alternative is that the book estimate is underestimating, but that's basically the second case, but worse).
Neither of those cases looks like fair business dealings
It's effectively two different book rates, the warranty book assumes a new car. The non-warranty book assumes an older car. Older car = rust, rounded fasteners, and other things that add to the time.
Mechanic gets used to working at non-warranty rates, so any warranty works feels like being cheated.
Does it all balance out in the end? Maybe. But, that's not what mechanics "feel" like happens. And they're paid little enough (generally) that the two books annoys them. And the working conditions are bad enough (both physically, but also "mentally" - many shops are hostile workplaces, or close to it, with poor benefits, long-ish hours, etc). So, they have a lot to bitch about, generally.
Nobody wants to work for dealships. There are plenty of mechanics that that work at their own shops or for independent shops for better pay and conditions. Some places choose to do just the easier services (eg no transmission or internal engine work), no weekends, etc
1. The development and use of "rate books" is de facto price fixing. labor is a cost, and it has a price. Ban them by law.
2. Take the computers away from the engineers. There should be no ability to drag and drop assemblies to reshape them. No ability to make parts that are computed to barely meet requirements.
3. Patent licensing goes to a small flat fee per item per use. How about $1. A modern car can have upwards of 10,000 active patents for all components. All "Design Copyrights" are voided. A good design isnt created, it is recognized.
4. End nearly all "mandatory technologies" and features. Straight from Hayek et al, Incredible Bread Machine on wheels.
My venerable Bronco II was so old, several oil leaks appeared in the engine as the gaskets deteriorated. I spent a year waiting for a shop to have an opening to rebuild or replace the engine. I finally gave up and gave the Bronco to a scrap yard.
The problem is entirely due to the labor and compensation for mechanics. The Mechanics get a shit proposition. If you are smart, you do not do it. Exhibit A, mechanics are paid a fraction of revenue but are 100% responsible for warranty. Imagine if you shipped a bug, you are told to work without pay to fix it. That is what a mechanic does.
Electric cars need a lot fewer mechanical repairs. Sounds like yet more reasons to avoid buying one of these overpriced over complicated petro vehicles.
Sounds like you have no idea how dangerous is to put your hands around electric car batteries and how expensive certified electricians are. Without a mechanic that ALSO has an advanced expert certification for high voltage electronics, the blown BMS or contactor (500$) becomes a whole battery to scrap (20k). Then you add the 6 hours of diagnostics and labor on top of it.
Electric vehicles are not an arduino circuit with a couple of led and an usb cable.
This illustrates why the battery really needs to be decoupled from the car. We do it for other electrical appliances like flashlights. The EV auto mechanic should optimize for removing and installing the battery. Batteries should be taken offsite to a speciality facility where High Voltage experts work on the batteries - repair, recycling, etc.
There are a few basic things you have to not do in order to work on an EV, basically the same rules as for airbag systems but with physically larger components.
No modern car is electrically simple, but they all do a pretty good job telling you where you ought to be looking.
This is flatly false. The HV operating procedures on cars add significant complexity and danger to working on them. In fact, any HV work will automatically add a huge chunk of labor hours to any work and is why anything touching the HV system instantly goes into the thousands of dollars as a baseline. We are talking hundreds of volts above fatal baseline and very high amps on accidental discharge. For comparison, its safer on your biology to stick a fork in 120VAC outlet deliberately than to make a mistake with HVDC.
If only I could find one that isn't a spy platform. That's a problem with all vehicles that are too new, not just EVs. That makes new cars a nonstarter for me, which as a side-effect makes all EVs a nonstarter for me.
I'm hoping we'll see EV kit cars with open software someday. There's conversion kits for a number of cars, and I've thought about turning my old 08 Civic into one just for the freedom from car manufacturers.
This is my backup plan for the day when I can no longer get a good used car that's old enough. Until then, though, I'm not willing to reward auto manufacturers who do this by giving them my money.
I'm curious how in-depth you've been looking, especially investigating models where you can do a little bit of work to do things like unplug cell modems. I'm somewhat in need of a new vehicle and have just assumed the whole market is trash based of what I've read online and the new cars I've seen people get. But I'm hoping I've missed some gems of online communities still managing to eek out some freedom (and physical buttons, of course).
Yes but consider that they may need more electronics repairs. A car is a notoriously bad environment for electronics and this is not a solved issue. On top of that most modern cars, especially electric cars are so tightly integrated with all closed components and no real way to repair except beg the manufacturer for a replacement part. On top of that you are pulling a lot of reasonable reliable control and timing related issues into the electronics and software.
Current day electric cars are ripe for abuse from manufacturers (planned obsolescence or generic out of warranty obsolescence) and I would be surprised if any of them are still running for over 25+ years. Even though today you see a lot of cars from the 2000s and before. Especially since the market is very fragmented between models and manufacturers.
Basically any modern day electric car is worse in terms of repair-ability then any Iphone in my opinion.
I haven't seen that in practice. My last ICE car had only about 1/3 of its maintenance costs for components that wouldn't have been present on an EV. And the upfront cost and price for the remaining 2/3 of maintenance were so cheap that it's basically impossible for any EV to ever be cheaper.
This is mostly true, but the cost of maintenance, fuel, and repair doesn't offset the cost insurance, electricity, and battery replacement for me over the course of 10 years, so my next vehicle will still be a petrol engine car unless something changes substantially. The big thing is, for me, an electric vehicle insurance quote for me ranges between 4K and 6K per year.
Yeah nobody is willing to give up the revenue/tax from someone driving a car. In fact, I bet electric vehicles will end up more expensive per mile, mark my words.
Electric car. Horn keeps failing. $15 part, $900 to do the work. Why? Because to get to the horn, the entire front end of the car has to be disassembled, including the hood, bumper, fenders, you name it.
My fuel car’s horn assembly is easily accessed through the engine bay with a single bolt to remove it.
Efficiencies in one area seem to have led to extraordinarily difficult repair abilities elsewhere.
I won’t even go into how the air filters are replaced — but it starts with removing the dashboard…
I won’t even go into how the air filters are replaced — but it starts with removing the dashboard…
That's just bad design having nothing to do with EVs. It takes me about 30 seconds to replace cabin filter in a Hyundai Ioniq 5. The horns aren't quite as easy, but certainly do not require removal of the car's front end.
I smell bullshit. Ford does many things I do not really appreciate, but setting the book time of a pickup cab removal at less than an hour is definitely not one of them.
Government regulations around fuel efficiency per size of vehicle as well as crash test safety as well as materials.
People universally seem to dislike the size increase in vehicles, but this was due largely to magical requirements for fuel efficiency standards. The obvious result was putting smaller engines in larger cars and adding a turbo.
On the complexity side of things, cramming the safety gear into the car while also getting maximal efficiency and keeping costs low meant some rather terrible design choices from a repairability perspective.
All that said, I do love the safety requirements. I got hit by a Ford F150 in a Miata and walked away perfectly fine.
So basically they refuse to pay a reasonable hourly rate. They pay flat fee perfect world rates that cause mechanics to lose money when they encounter real world problems.
As always the worker shortage is a “there’s a shortage of skilled workers who refuse to get screwed on pay”
It is very often like that. Employers like to play capitalism with employees, but when tables turn and employees will start playing capitalism with employers then it is suddenly a big problem and ideally government should be involved to help poor little employer out.
No it's not. People pay market rate salaries to compete with other employers also wanting those people. Everyone's "playing" capitalism, as free agreements are better than people being forced to do what their master / guild / bureaucrat tells them to do.
Disclosure: I work for General Motors (on software, not as a design engineer), this is solely my own opinion and experience.
An automotive assembly line consists of many "footprints" chained together. Each footprint is scheduled to have the same amount of work (in seconds). That work rate is also called the line rate, often expressed in jobs per hour. So 70 jph could also be expressed as 51.4 seconds per footprint.
Working backwards from the time you drive the finished vehicle off the end of the line, a truck assembly plant works like this:
v Engine line -------------
Final Line <-- Chassis (frame) -------------
^ Trim Line (body)--------Paint Shop <------ Body Shop <--- Stamped Metal
Or in mermaid:
graph TD
subgraph Chassis Shop
Fr[Frame Line] -->EM
EM[Engine Marriage] -->C
C[Chassis Line] --> BM
BM[Body Marriage] -->F
F[Final Line]
end
subgraph Engine
E[Engine Line] --> EM
end
subgraph Body Assembly
B[Body Shop] --> P[Paint Shop]
P --> T[Trim Shop]
T --> BM
end
Anyway, each set of tasks in a footprint takes the same amount of time, or they get split up to take the same amount of time.
So setting the engine on the frame must not take longer than 51.4 seconds, and setting the body on the frame also must not take longer than 51.4 seconds. (Along with all of the other ~~1,000 assembly footprints)
As a matter of simple evolution, no design that takes longer will be produced, because it does not survive the first round of selection: Assembly.
Designs that survive Assembly may eventually need Maintenance, but by then the genes have already been passed on.
Now you may say that Engineers are smart enough to fix both problems, but I don't believe in Intelligent Design.
Snark aside - maintenance falls under "residual value", and "residual value" may be a luxury that the automaker cannot afford.
*** To be clear, I am using 51.4 seconds as a stand-in exemplar for many other requirements in the assembly process.
----
Show me the outcome, and I will describe the incentives ~ Inverse Munger
Automotive design engineers have to satisfy MANY criteria, the following items entail LISTs of requirements, not a single req.
- the part must function (includes failure modes)
- the part must be manufacturable (make the part itself)
- the part must be assembl-able (it has to fit with the parts around it)
- ... be lightweight, environmentally friendly, comply with government requirements
-
- then, to actually exist:
- the part will be prototyped in a pre-production environment
- a component plant will be set up to manufacture that part
- the manufactured part will be tested to ensure that it still meets the design criteria
Every part of this process will make your design engineers sad and tired.
Now, once you have all the parts you need to make a vehicle, you can design the vehicle so that all those parts work together.
If you find out that you have to change the design of a part while you are designing the vehicle, this pushes back your project completion date. This makes the spreadsheets upset, and the spreadsheets take it out on your stock price.
----
Ok so "why don't they just" make the design better for the next model year?
Because those engineers have been assigned to another project! Also, design changes incur costs, which pushes out the program pay-off period.
You amortize Research and Design costs over the actual vehicles produced. Those vehicles have to be competitive in the market - price per value.
The Value Proposition for maintain-ability/repair-ability is not readily apparent at time of purchase.
This is why "residual value" is a luxury. No one gets to pick all of their own success criteria.
The other day I listened to The Verge's Decoder episode with the Ford CEO [0] and unlike most other CEOs, he almost felt genuine. There was a noticeable lack of BS. Have I been played?
The lack of mechanics was mentioned and I recall him saying that they're building up apprenticeship programs and the US should take more pride in blue collar work.
No, "learn to code" was the supply-side response of people who saw software engineers get paid shittons of money. This is a demand-side CEO lamenting the fact that he can't get people to fix cars for cheap, so literally the opposite problem.
Does it really matter? If the article is poor quality, then it is poor quality. It doesn't matter if it was written by a person or an LLM. I'm more annoyed how so many articles waste time quoting things people say on social media.
At this point it's like using the urinal when you're directly beside an ocean full of piss. Dealing with it at an individual level has mostly failed as it would take coordination 'before' people click on the link, and enough people to realize it's junk before they submit it to HN. Being that at least 91 people upvoted this it seems like that isn't working.
maybe it isn't working because we haven't yet gotten used to detecting AI articles.
we can still change that if most of us decide to flag such articles, although, instead of a generic flag i'd like an AI flag or tag (similarly to how we tag older articles with the year). then everyone can decide on their own if it is worth their time.
I’m a bit confused, the top comment describes how time is estimated, which sounds very fair to the mechanic, so why the mechanics are not paid enough eventually? Is it because the estimation doesn’t include the “openning up” process, or what am I missing?
Car companies don't want you to be able to work on these cars. They would much rather you either buy a new car or use their 3x the cost parts and services.
You have to remove the cab to change the oil pan gasket==YOU'LL have to pay ME to buy your stupidly-designed truck. But I realize, driving my 25-year-old car, that someday at this rate I won't have a choice. Maybe someone sells simple, underpowered kit cars and I can put that together.
Honestly it feels like we could very well see a microcosm of what happens on big trucks where a certain vintage get sold as "gliders" and get perpetually rebuilt. I don't understand how the market for trucks sustains itself, how many people are there really that want the king doodoo ranch 150k cadillac truck that has engine and transmission problems at 3 years out? I won't be surprised if the government basically bans cars older than 15 years old and totally bans "street rods" and kits meaning we will have no choice but to bend over for an inferior pile of shit truck.
Thanks for posting. Long video, but at about the 12-minute mark he says something about warranty work, relevant to TFA. He says that the hourly rate for any work done under warranty is set artificially low by the manufacturer.
Say a dealership would normally charge a customer $200 an hour for a job, of which the technician will make about $50 an hour. But if the same work is done under warranty, i.e., the manufacturer is paying, the dealership will get only $100 an hour. The dealership, in turn, will reduce the technician's pay to less than $50. Thus, the manufacturer is squeezing the dealership, which is squeezing the tech.
Does every fucking title need to be rewritten? The clickbait witch hunt legacy of Buzzfeed is more annoying today than it ever actually was when it existed.
motor1 is a clickbait farm site that specializes in tactics like "make an article from a social media post". Unfortunate that it got so much traction here, probably because the audience here is not familiar with the subject matter.
I started out my automotive software career with Ford, and as part of the new college hire training program, I actually got to see the process of how "book rate" is determined. They take a brand new car, straight off the assembly line and give a master mechanic a process sheet (head gasket remove and replace, for instance). He has a tool cart with a computer next to it, about 6 feet away from the vehicle. For each step he starts a timer on the computer for that step, picks up the necessary ratchet and socket or whatever, loosens the next bolt, walks the ratchet and socket back to the tool box, puts it away and then finally stops the timer. He probably practices the procedure a few times before the timed run, but basically this prevents the company from setting the time to do a job super crazy low. He's also not allowed to take any shortcuts from the book procedure, which there frequently are a few available (use a long wobble extension bar and a universal joint and you can get in without taking off all of the stuff above that bolt, whatever). On the other hand, this is the warranty rate (meaning new cars, largely less rust, etc). Independent/non-dealer mechanics will typically charge more time than the warranty time estimate from the manufacturer to account for things like rusty vehicles with harder to remove bolts and such, though this is usually in the rate book they subscribe to from whatever information source they pay for (warranty + 20% or so). The issue is that the estimated time for a job is probably a high estimate for a brand new car and probably a low estimate for a several year old car, and the risk of that is on the dealership. The dealership then pays mechanics an hourly wage ($20+, fairly high for well certified master mechanics) and assumes that the hours listed on the job from the manufacturer are accurate, leaving the mechanic to take the risk if it goes over. Generally, the dealership loses on this proposition too, since they lose out on business/bay/electric/heat/etc for the lost time, so they don't like warranty work. They can upcharge/charge for more time/etc on a job for a customer, not for warranty repair due to contractual obligations to the OEM. This is particularly bad for Ford, since they currently lead the industry in recalls and warranty spend, meaning that their dealership networks are getting a lot more of that kind of work with limited profit and no ability to turn it down.
Wife's cousin is a GM mechanic, and similar to this, he explained how they game recalls/TSBs. When you have a recall/TSB, it's the same process where the manufacturer comes up with the amount that the dealer is paid to resolve. However, if the mechanics individually don't submit common problems, then it doesn't rise to the level of a recall/TSB and the dealership can bill T&M.
The specific example was a leak that was the shorting out of electric window motors due to rainwater leaking through the window. It was better for him to fix it by cutting up a plastic container and attaching it over the motor & getting hourly for it than it was for GM to tell the dealership "Here's the part, you get $8 to install it when the customer is subject to the TSB"
>This is particularly bad for Ford, since they currently lead the industry in recalls and warranty spend
Can confirm this. Just Traded in my Escape for a Toyota. I was tired of spending time and money on repairs on a mid range car with less than 65k miles.
I thought the same about Toyota being better quality, but I took delivery of a 2024 Sienna and it has had several visits to the dealership for warranty items. Not mechanical, but I still find them disconcerting since they could indicate a lack of QC. I'm sure you're aware of the major turbo QC problems Toyota has with the 3.4L twin turbo in the Tundra and Sequoia models. I think all automotive mfgrs are racing to the bottom when it comes to quality hoping that the world moves en masse to an AaaS model and stops holding on to them.
> I'm sure you're aware of the major turbo QC problems Toyota has with the 3.4L twin turbo in the Tundra and Sequoia models.
That's why I got a Tacoma with a plain V6 and no turbo's to worry about :)
have driven toyota all my life. Once it went from 90's camry to 2000's prius, there was essentially zero real maintenance require.
> The dealership then pays mechanics an hourly wage ($20+, fairly high for well certified master mechanics) and assumes that the hours listed on the job from the manufacturer are accurate, leaving the mechanic to take the risk if it goes over.
What's the mechanic's risk? Are they only paid on the pre-estimated labor time?
It's not an hourly rate as in if you work 5 hours you are paid for 5 hours of labor. You are paid $20+ an hour based on the expected time to complete the job, with a price floor of minimum wage. If a job should take 3 hours and you take one, congrats, you made money. If the job should take 3 hours and it takes a full day, sucks to be you, you get paid for 3 hours. If the job should take 3 hours and you wait 2 hours for a part, you get paid 3 horus.
It's almost like a hairdresser as well, as they usually need to buy many of their own tools.
Well, if mechanic is present on the workplace all day, they must get paid at least a minimum wage per day, regardless of any estimates or even if there's any work at all.
It's employer's problem, employer never wants to pay workers less than minumum wage per hour, and loading them with work is manager's job.
But I doubt mechanics want minumum wage, especially since it's not keeping up with inflation.
Just make sure you understand that minimum wage is only for W2s. Shops likely dont only us employee labor and likely treat their mechanics and contractors often enough.
Then autoshops are exposed to the risk that mechanics report/sue them for "employee misclassification" and unpaid wages. Employers are better always pay at least minimum wage, even for 1099s, otherwise more incentive for workers to report them.
Of course many are ok being exposed to that risk, depends on the jobs. Also there's tips that help employers avoiding the unpaid wages. However, worker must report the tips received, and if they received less tips to cover the minimum wage, then employer must pay employee the difference (so the total pay would be at least min wage).
I saw that restaurant owners pay at least min wage even to illegal workers who don't even have SSNs. I assumed that unpaid wages is more serious than hiring illegally.
>Are they only paid on the pre-estimated labor time?
That's more or less it.
Maybe they should unionize.
Mechanics don't have to work for the dealership. If the dealership isn't paying them well, they can go work for an independent shop, which is exactly what's happening.
Getting paid the book rate is an advantage to the mechanic because then they still get the full rate if they're more efficient at their job, which is an advantage to everybody. As long as the book rate is reasonable. And if it isn't then they don't take the job, which isn't a problem for the mechanics, it's a problem for Ford.
This, plus they get used to the non-warranty rate, so when they have to warranty work at the lower rate, they feel cheated.
For years, it was difficult to hire licensed mechanics at Hyundai dealerships due to the massive recall of the 2.4L engine. Since Hyundai had to eat the losses of offering a lifetime warranty to owners of that engine, recalls and product improvements, mechanics bore some of that financial burden when Hyundai provided a low labor rate to them. They would spend days swapping an engine and watch a lube lane mechanic out earn them.
I despise the idea of leasing, but in a world where nothing is built to last any more, there may not be much of a choice for people just trying to get from point A to point B.
This seems like a pretty fair system, they do get to do it on unrealistic practically new vehicles, but they also can’t take any practical shortcuts whatsoever.
Is there any proposal for some alternate way determining it?
If the article is to be believed Ford has changed how book time is calculated considering they're paying 36 minutes for a job that requires removing the cab.
> If the article is to be believed
I don't. Someone is lying.
I'm also skeptical. I suspect that book time for this varies wildly depending on drivetrain config.
HYou think it might be the CEO? No, couldn't be, surely someone paid 100s of times their employees would be honest about something he has no real experience doing.
The impression I got from seeing the demonstration was that this was the result of years of negotiating and arguing to get to something fair. Ford doesn't love it, dealers don't love it, but no one can really come up with a major improvement.
Calvin and Hobbes: "A good compromise leaves everybody mad."
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9cGKql0Wk1A/TrAJTrDoxxI/AAAAAAAAA...
I say something like this to my kids when I'm tired of mediating and I want them to solve their own disagreements. "My definition of success is that you are both crying after I've made my decision."
(for the record, I did not have this policy when they were toddlers, only as tweens; I'm not a monster)
A fair system? This is nothing more than theater, necessary to get cheap labor. What about giving mechanics an hourly rate, just like the rest of the world?
A person achieved that time to do the work. What is theatre about that?
An hourly rate punishes mechanics who work fast, don't you think?
> The dealership then pays mechanics an hourly wage ($20+, fairly high for well certified master mechanics)
Maybe in Ohio.
I'm not sure that your comment is even directionally correct. TFA is clickbait for blue collar pseudo-car-guys. The example given in the article paints the mechanic as the hero, losing money on every job. In reality book time is insanely exaggerated in the median, and the problem is likely more that mechanics don't like earning a dime for every dollar the boss makes.
Many mechanics (seems that is what the article example is) get paid on book time, not hourly. That is what the guy in the article is complaining about. That their book rate is both too aggressive, and far less than the "customer book time" / rate. The reason mechanics are often paid this way is so that they stay efficient. Warranty jobs are especially aggressive on the mechanic book rate, because cars under warranty are newer with few unexpected problems like rusty parts, stripped bolts, age related issues, etc.
I'm not a professional and I routinely match book times for most jobs working with no particular urgency on rusty garbage.
$20 is starting as I understand, and goes up quite high for master mechanics with certifications. That's how I meant that to be read.
keep in mind a good mechanic is making double time or better.. although I understand that's harder on a FORD than a Japanese car.
$20 is also on the low end for a good tech, you're correct.
That seems absurdly low, I would expect a skilled mechanic to make at least $50 an hour.
$20/hour is starting pay around here at McDonalds, In-N-Out Burger, etc.
Thus the starting out part. Certifications, years of experience, skills in terms of welding exhaust or the like all raise that, but mechanics get screwed on their rate regularly, which is why they're dropping out. See one of the other top level comments about "shortage -> low wages."
A decent mechanic who works 40hr is getting paid more than 40hr.
He's also buying his own tools, breaking his back and knuckles, and exposed to carcinogens (used motor oil, grease, etc).
>He's also buying his own tools
cheaper than a degree
>breaking his back and knuckles, and exposed to carcinogens (used motor oil, grease, etc).
They work indoors and don't exactly work in an environment where things get burnt or aerosolized. It's no office job but it's not exactly ditch digging.
Every single time someone says "there's a shortage of <profession>", you can mentally substitute it for "we can't get <profession> for cheap".
Generally true, but not always! There are often very real bottlenecks on education too. We need a ton more electricians but it's nearly impossible to get into schools. Or you need union apprenticeships and their are not enough slots.
Pay is part of it, but for most skilled professions there's big bottlenecks on the training for the skills.
Or look at police officers in places like San Francisco. The pay is actually fantastic but the process of getting hired is hellish and takes a year or something ridiculous.
Or doctors, there's a massive shortage because there aren't enough residency spots, something controlled by the AMA. Pay is amazing (hours suck) and there are people clamoring to do it, but the bottleneck is structural, not because of pay.
I'd argue that the "structural" bottleneck is actually just the same "pay" bottleneck.
This was the whole issue with allowing guilds in the first place... If you only allow a guild to do a job (legally) and the guild also controls how many members they train and accept... The end result is a labor shortage.
Because it's better for the existing members of the guild.
If they train a large number of new members... they spend time and money on training, and they've increased their competition during bidding which drives down rates.
So instead you train the bare minimum for replacements. This keeps your members' rates high and competition low.
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Any time the "pay is great" but the "process to get it sucks!"... you're seeing this in action. It's not that the process really needs to suck, it's that the process roadblocks are there to maintain high pay for the existing trained members.
If there's one thing monopolies don't like... it's competition. And legally enforced certifications are wonderful monopoly creators if you don't manage them carefully.
Communists don't like competition, capitalists don't like competition either, what does that leave us with?
Where are the free market advocates that aren't just phonies?
"Neoliberalism" became a dirty word for lots of reasons (mainly because it caused a ton of people in developed nations to lose their jobs, as manufacturing capacity shifted to developing nations and developed nations leaned into the information economy), but there was a time when the word wasn't tainted and the pro-market Democrats of the Clinton era absolutely self-identified as Neoliberals.
They liked competition and markets, delivered strong economic growth, and brought the deficit down, but they fucked up by not funneling some of those efficiency gains into education and training, and toward building a robust social safety net to help the economically displaced.
Its not that there is not enough education, its that there is too many regulatory barriers preventing licensing. It should be more like the DMV where anyone can take a test and get licensed if they pass. Forced experience and education requirements are touted as essential but are truly nothing more than regulatory moat building.
Maybe a test should be sufficient, but that test should be comprehensive, i.e., passing it should mean you had to do the education (formally or informally).
(Would you want someone performing surgery on you who "passed a test" but didn't have any formal education or training experience?)
Would you consider the lack of offering apprenticeships to get your trade license or on the job training as more structural or financial?
If there is a shortage of something, I would expect these trade companies to backfill with apprentices who will then grow into their roles.
If there's too high a risk that someone won't be worth the investment, then that seems entirely financial to me.
I'm using the term "structural" here without any clear definition, to be honest. By it I mean that it's about the structure of society, the relationships that are in place, the difficulty of setting up a new school, the resistance of the AMA to open up more residency spots, etc. Points in the process where there's high friction for changing the system to a better "structure", whether or not the change requires financial incentives.
But I don't know if that meaning is shared by anyone else in the world! Thanks for asking for clarification, I'm interested in how you'd communicate that idea.
Police officers in SF make $103k per year.
Making less than $105k per year in SF is considered low income.
The pay is quite a bit higher especially when you count overtime. https://careers.sf.gov/classifications/?classCode=Q002
And they get a kickass pension which is worth a lot
> Or look at police officers in places like San Francisco. The pay is actually fantastic but the process of getting hired is hellish and takes a year or something ridiculous.
As it should be. I’m tired of dumb roughnecks attending a 6-week course and then getting the ability to legally beat people up. It should be difficult to become a police officer, we should hold them to a high standard, especially if we’re gonna pay them so much.
While I agree that police should be held to a high standard and trained well, is this the actual case in SF? Or is it bureaucratic hoops leading to long wait times and/or duplication of effort?
Is their training rigorous or is it just difficult to get hired?
Gatekeepers and rent-seekers are holding everyone else back.
> We need a ton more electricians but it's nearly impossible to get into schools. Or you need union apprenticeships and their are not enough slots.
This got solved in tech 20 years ago. You don't look at credentials and instead design a very arduous interviewing process that selects for both high IQ and people who are willing to study/work at it.
Then you provide lots of training. 20 years ago at Google (or Apple etc) there were tons of well educated non CS hires who were given good training and became exceptional software engineers.
While that's true, there is some market clearing price in which the activity just ceases to exist.
For instance, take something with a small marginal benefit like a dedicated person at a supermarket to bag groceries. It's a nice to have but the value to the employer is probably less than a $15 minimum wage. So you could say there is a shortage of grocery baggers since there is no one willing to do it at a market clearing price.
Doesn't mean we should do anything about it. There will always be some extra activity that would take place at a lower price, but it's worth while to notice that.
While reading the article, the now-less-common business of vacuum and TV repair came to mind. I imagine it's easier than ever to repair vacuums, with improved tools and free internet repositories of schematics. But I only know of one store still doing this within 5 miles of my house. I haven't asked former vacuum repairmen, but my guess as to the reasons:
1) Labor costs go up with inflation
2) Rent goes up
3) New vacuum prices go down
At some point in the past, the downward line of vacuum price crossed over the upward line of repair cost. That's when this profession cratered.
Cars may have a while until that price point hits. But the quoted mechanic's suggestion that engineers optimize for simpler repairs instead of simpler production may be something similar. If simpler production makes the price of a new car $X cheaper, but increases the labor cost of repairs over the car's lifetime by $Y, there could be a time when X > Y.
I remember reading an article about the last TV repair shop in Chicago many years ago in the Chicago Reader.
This would have been in the early 2010s.
The reporter asked the owner why TV repair was dying: were TVs getting too complicated? Help too hard to find or too expensive? Nope, the owner said it was 100% parts availability. The vast majority of business coming through the door he'd have to turn away because manufacturers didn't want him repairing their equipment.
There may sometimes be a tradeoff for manufacturability vs repairability but even when there is not -- holding everything else equal -- manufacturers will choose the less repairable option because they perceive it to be in their interest to do so.
Tv repair made a lot more sense in the days of tubes which wore out quick but were easy to replace. Solid state generally lasts much longer and the parts that fail are not worth repairing.
A quick note to say that at our local repair cafe we do a roaring trade in vacuum repairs for peanuts (not literal peanuts; though some of our repairers do get peckish). If you're in Europe, there's chance you have one nearby. https://repaircafe.org/en
Could you please go in to a bit more detail on how you set that up, how you handle issues, etc? I'm a member of a makerspace, and there's been discussions about doing something similar. There's just not a consensus about how to go about it.
Reach out here: https://dallasmakerspace.org/faq/ (I'm not finding a good link for https://thelab.ms/ - another Dallas makerspace), but I'd suggest reaching out.
...generally I've seen weekly/monthly "fix-it" workshops as a kindof open-house / membership drive.
Probably best to 1) have people sign safety waivers, especially if they're not members 2) have people sign a "we can offer to help you try, but your widget might end up worse than before" waiver 3) run it as a volunteer outreach event with a focus on getting membership rather than a transactional "fix my ____ for free" outcome
We have one here in town maybe twice a year; I wish it was a monthly thing.
great idea. I get a "coming soon" type message for my town and search does not say where the next nearest is.
I used the map and found the two nearest I quite far. plenty where I used to live, and a lot in other parts of the UK. Good to see.
That is because there is not a cost for the disposal of the broken vacuum. Imagine if we paid by the weight of our trash. Some of the right to repair laws are trying to change that by requiring replacement parts be available to purchase. https://www.repair.org/know-your-rights
I really like the idea of adding taxes (or subsidies) to make repairing things more economical than replacing them, when this is not the case already. It seems difficult to fairly decide how to do this, but charging by rubbish weight is at least objective and easily measurable.
It can be argued that all taxes and subsidies are "artificial distortions" of market value, but capitalism strongly encourages externalisation of costs -- "the cost of making X" is often severely underestimated by "the cost of running a machine to dig X out of the ground".
Also, new stuff just isn't designed to be opened up.
I took an old monitor that started failing to a local makerspace (which has a very popular monthly repair cafe), and it took some physical force to crack the case open. Once inside it was relatively easy to get the board out and find the leaking capacitors. Not exactly high-tech parts.
It was fun for me and for the volunteer, but I can't imagine anyone trying to do this for a living -- it would take a lot of time, and charging people for what the labor's worth would probably come close to the price of a new monitor.
TVs and vacuum cleaners are now a lot cheaper AND more reliable then they used to be.
Cars have become more reliable and relatively cheaper then they used to be, but they are a lot more expensive so have a long way to go until that point is reached.
TVs are definitely more reliable, but vacuum cleaners? I had a Dyson a few years ago and it didn't take long before plastic parts started to snap off. Meanwhile my mother in law's Electrolux or whatever is indestructible with occasional maintenance.
> While that's true, there is some market clearing price in which the activity just ceases to exist.
The article cites a mechanic commenting on Ford CEO's remarks on lack of mechanics by referring to how Ford fails to pay rates for warranty repairs that justify the volume of work required to pull them off.
This suggests the root cause is the automaker's refusal to pay for warranty work at a market rate.
The article raises some points on how Ford both designed cars that are too expensive to repair and fails to pay mechanics to make their product line attractive for any maintenance business. This doesn't sound like a market efficiency issue.
It's not clear to me what the difference is between what you're saying and what the parent comment says. Not being willing to pay the wages necessary to hire someone is pretty much exactly what they're saying as well.
The implied criticism in the original comment is that companies should pay more. They ignore that in a lot of cases it doesn't make structural sense for a role to exist above a given price.
> It's not clear to me what the difference is between what you're saying and what the parent comment says.
The key difference is whether rentism plays a role or not.
It's one thing to claim that no one will pay a mechanic if it's too expensive. It's an entirely different thing to claim that some employers are abusing their position to pressure wages to stay low to maximize their profit margin at the expense of their employees.
There's a good litmus test: is there a massive wave of car shop bankruptcies due to lack of business? Or are car shop owners complaining they can't get enough employees to keep up with demand?
The auto repair business is still pretty fragmented in most areas so as a practical matter employers can't really pressure wages. Mechanics change jobs all the time to get a raise. The industry has a relatively high annual employee turnover rate.
They agree that corporations don't do things that aren't profitable, their implied disagreement is whether this is greedy/bad or merely rational/amoral.
> since there is no one willing to do it at a market clearing price
In your example there would still be people willing to do it, but the government doesn't allow it?
In other words, the existence of a minimum wage implies there is also a minimum job, a job which if it were any less valuable to the company they wouldn’t pay anyone to do it.
If the demand doesn't reach the minimum wage, is that even a shortage?
I'm not going to pay someone to punch me in the face but I wouldn't call that a shortage.
That doesnt make sense to me.
Seems like theres either a demand for something or there isnt.
And the amount of demand sets the rate of pay.
The invisible hand.
Demand is a function of price. At any given price there is a quantity demanded. To know the price you also need to know the supply function. There is a demand for socks but if no one is will to supply socks for less a million dollars, the quantity demanded of socks at that price could be 0.
In most markets seems like commodity level items and services like baggers and socks would have plenty of supply.
In a free market, commodity-level jobs will only happen at commodity-level wages. But it's not a free market, because of minimum wage laws. If you set the minimum wage too high, the number of baggers may go to zero, not because of supply but because of demand - the price is higher than any grocery store is willing to pay.
You can argue about the need for the minimum wage laws. You can argue about the morality of paying a living wage. But that's a different argument.
The demand curve might not be gradual, there might be demand for e.g. 1 million jobs at $15 but 100 at $16
In some countries there's something called a "minimum wage" that sets the minimum value of a job that is allowed to exist, and any job that isn't worth that amount ceases to exist, or has fewer people doing it, or has partial or full automation doing it.
There’s a demand, but the price we want to pay for “grocery baggers” is usually less than minimum wage, so the job usually can’t (legally) exist. The cost (wage) is fixed higher than the value added.
Every single time someone says "there's a shortage of <goods>", you can mentally substitute it for "we can't get <good> for cheap".
Try this with: housing, nvidia GPUs, toilet paper (when there's a pandemic)
Technically true. I think a "shortage" is technically defined in terms of price. But the example of housing is a hint at the limitations of this rule. Sure, we'd like houses to be cheaper, but most buyers don't have the option to just pay more. So what do we actually do about it? Increase supply, yeah, but why is the supply limited? Well, it's various weird, annoying restrictions on housing that you don't see unless you dig past "lol they want it cheap".
> Sure, we'd like houses to be cheaper
People that can't achieve home ownership right now want houses to be cheaper.
People that already got theirs don't. Yeah, supply is a problem but it's more than that. Housing cannot both be an investment and broadly affordable, those two goals are in conflict.
We need to change the way we treat housing so that it cannot be used to both store and generate wealth.
Yep, that's a good pointer to why those annoying restrictions survive.
>but most buyers don't have the option to just pay more.
You can argue the same for labor as well. Everything from off-shore competition to strained government budgets are excuses for why employers "don't have the option to just pay more".
Sure, some of those might be worth looking into. But also, we can be a lot more cavalier about saying a company that can't pay its workers should go out of business than we are about saying that a family that can't afford housing should just live on the street. I think the latter case is more worth attacking directly.
The point is, shortages being a price phenomenon is not all that actionable. You can't avoid digging in to the details.
This logic assumes something is always available for sale somewhere at some price. It shouldn't hold when something is actually short to the point of rarity. If someone is unwilling to sell something that you can't buy elsewhere, this reasoning will conclude that its price is infinite.
Is there a difference between people and goods?
Of course not. That would ruin their analogy!
Honestly, between how soft-science macroeconomcis is, combined with the fact that this planet does not contain a single person willing to argue about it in good faith, makes it simply impossible to have real conversations around it, especially on the internet.
Not really, when you consider both the interests of the buyer or the seller. The buyer of course would rather like goods and services be cheaper. It might be tempting to say that "people" deserve special consideration over "goods", it breaks down when you consider that goods are also made by people. Moreover gatekeeping whether you can use the characterization of "we can't get ... for cheap" depending on whether the seller is sympathetic or not (ie. "people" vs "goods") is a blatant way of smuggling in a conclusion via wording, similar to "terrorists" vs "freedom fighters".
I don't think this is correct. The reasons economists separate capital and labor is that they do have different characteristics. Labor has skill, capital can have technology. Assets exist regardless of utilization, labor cannot be stored up in an inventory since labor is time which flows inexorably onwards.
A shortage of an asset is a reflection of inventory levels. A shortage of labor reflects a lack of skill or time OR a lack of willingness to pay for that skill and time.
They're different for good reasons.
>A shortage of an asset is a reflection of inventory levels [...] OR a lack of willingness to pay for that skill and time.
So the housing crisis in just an "inventory" issue? Maybe it's just that people aren't willing to pay enough for a dwelling in desirable coastal cities?
>A shortage of labor reflects a lack of skill or time OR a lack of willingness to pay for that skill and time.
How's this different than for goods? You're just substituting "time" for "production". Moreover
A shortage exists at a point in time, propensity to pay to make the asset may react to the demand for the asset, but there is no guarantee that supply of labor and capital meet at an efficient point. (art is a great example where the overlap between supply and demand may have no overlap at all for certain pieces).
Lack of demand for labor and skill can produce an asset shortage, but in an economy where supply and demand float, the theory is that shortages reflect supply-demand failures, and the degree to which supply of labor is invoked to solve shortages for goods depends on the elasticity of demand and the elasticity of supply.
But assets and technology itself is ultimately created by labour.
There might be an exception for natural resources that are exceptionally easy to exploit even without labour, like sunlight or fresh air.
Also if you sideline too many goods, the goods can't rise up and force a new economy.
Someone here posted that the balance was better in the west in the past because the Soviet Union was sitting there on the sidelines like a boogy many to capitalists waiting if they pushed people too far.
The price will go up as the availability goes down. If you have a shortage of mechanics, each mechanic can raise his/her labor price. So, while you're saying "we can't get <profession> for cheap" this implies a lack of professionals or a structural problem increasing costs in a given industry, or both.
In the case of doctors and electricians, you have structural problems in both, but also a true shortage of individuals in electrician work (could be in the medical field too, but I can't speak to that).
OMG yes. So many people miss this, and many companies don't understand this.
You’re right, although the mechanic’s claim here was more complicated and interesting than just “we’re getting underpaid”.
It was a good view into what exactly the car companies are doing, but essentially it was "we're getting underpaid" with extra steps.
The car companies have basically set up a monopsony with cartels, squeezed the mechanics out, and are now complaining that they squeezed them out too much.
I think part of this may be that some of the market is buying EVs now. The amount of car repair necessary per person is decreasing overtime.
> but essentially it was "we're getting underpaid" with extra steps
Oh, yeah, it's definitely them getting underpaid—but in a way that I wasn't expecting and was surprised to learn about.
Agreed. It kinda worked for software for a bit since it was such a new field, so there could’ve been some truth to it just as a matter of time to get the systems in place to educate people.
Ya, and then people wonder why cars are so expensive to repair these days also. The market is at a breaking point, efficiency has to go along with the higher pay or it just won’t work out.
I recently acquired a new (to me) 2017 vehicle and took it to my independent mechanic who has been working on my cars for years. He is registered with the mfg. and has access to many of their proprietary diagnostics and tools, but warned me that there is very little he can do on the latest models. They are basically 'return to dealer' because of 'software'.
It's always been that way with new stuff though. Between exclusivity agreements and whatnot it takes time for the documentation and supplies to be available outside the dealership service supply chain.
Skilled labor (such as mechanics) require training and apprenticeship pipelines. If those pipelines don’t exist or are starved of people it doesn’t matter how much you’re willing to pay right now. Long term sure you can make that career path more appealing but it can and often is absolutely the case that companies would pay out the nose for employees with particular skills and are unable to find anyone. But sure let’s go with the standard Reddit pablum, why give it more thought than that?
That's what a shortage is, a short-term undersupply. Market forces will eventually correct the problem if allowed to operate normally (e.g. prices spike, incentivizing more supply), but like you said that takes time. If it's a shortage of goods it can take a while to ramp up production. If it's a shortage of skilled labor it can take a while for people to learn those skills. Either way it's fundamentally the same type of problem.
The market alone doesn’t work well with things like training that had feedback loops of several years. In German there is the term “Schweinezyklus”. It goes like this:
* companies complain about lack of trained workers
* more people start training
* after a few years companies complain about too many workers and don’t hire them
* people stop training
* companies complain about lack of trained workers
I was part of this in the 90s in mechanical engineering. When I started studying the job market was great. When I finished there were no jobs. Luckily I could jump to programming.
I think we are seeing the same with CS now. Too many people jumped into it.
Predicting the future is indeed famously difficult, which is why even markets have a hard time with forecasting and responding to demand years into the future. I don't think such over corrections are a market failure, just a lack of omniscience.
The reason those pipelines dry up is because pay is too low.
Or we outsourced the juniors to India or replaced them with AI
Trying to move everyone up the value chain leaves a vacuum in the pipeline
The "design for unmaintainability" problem has been around for a while. I remember helping a friend change his plugs on this Ford Ranger in the early 90s. The closest two plugs to the firewall required you to climb into the engine bay and basically hug the engine to get your arm into position to blindly get to the plugs. If you look around on YouTube you'll see some crazy mechanic videos where they show things like bolts located in impossible to loosen locations.
Cars used to be simpler to work on because a) they inherently were simpler and b) the engine bay used to have a lot of room to work in. Both of these things are not coming back.
> Cars used to be simpler to work on because
No, it's because they are designed to be assembled from complete sub-assemblies. Maintenance is not assumed to be done on the sub-assemblies while they are in the final product. Under warranty, workshops are intended to replace entire sub-assemblies with new/rebuilt parts.
It's effectively a deliberate decision from the 80s that enabled faster assembly while warranties were shorter. For cars that are out of warranty, it doesn't matter either way.
The problem in the article occurs when Ford tries to pay someone to repair faults that were not planned to happen during the warranty time. Impossible, because it's completely uneconomical.
For cars that are out of warranty, it is an advantage, as the car will be scrapped sooner, thereby opening up a hole in the market that needs to be filled with a new car.
An advantage to the manufacturer, that is. For the consumer, it leads to never ending car payments for life, or surprise bills that approach the cost of a replacement vehicle.
I've encountered these headaches helping friends with their vehicles, and every time I'm reminded how much I prefer wrenching on my 80s-90s era mazdas.
My old protege even had an access port in the fender well added specifically to remove the crank bolt with an extension. If it were an Audi the FSM would point you to the engine removal process as step 1.
> If it were an Audi the FSM would point you to the engine removal process as step 1.
And once an OEM has committed to that sort of design it spirals.
"chuck the timing chains on the back, who cares, the engine gets pulled for everything regardless".
I've seen some video comparisons between American cars and Toyotas, and Toyota seemed to have figured out how to make cars a lot easier to maintain than the American companies. I saw one case where changing a simple fuse required several hours of disassembly in the American car but only 30s in the Toyota. It's about priorities. It's about ethics. American companies don't give a fuck, and it shows. And American companies don't give a fuck, because Americans largely don't give a fuck.
I believe there's a modern (GM?) truck out there that has a belt rated for something like 250K miles...but when you have to replace it, the entire engine needs to be removed.
Don't forget one of the latest automotive mistakes, the "wet timing belt". This is a rubber timing belt (not a chain) that runs through your engine oil disintegrating and clogging up your oil filters.
If anyone here owns a car with that system I recommend taking it to your trusted mechanic and discussing with them to do additional preventive maintenance on it.
That is the worst idea in the history of ideas
Don't forget one of the latest automotive mistakes, the "wet timing belt". This is a rubber timing belt (not a chain) that runs through your engine oil disintegrating and clogging up your oil filters.
What cars use those?
A lot of 4 cylinders and the Duramax 3.0L engine. The claim is that these belts reduce noise because chains are "loud".
Wow, yeah, it looks like the Duramax engine has a 15-year belt replacement interval that costs $10K at today's rates.
They aren't even trying to hide the whole planned-obsolescence thing at this point. Average age of cars on the road is approaching 13 years now, so someone who buys a Duramax-based vehicle will end up with a metal and plastic brick that costs more to maintain than it's worth, just because of the timing belt alone.
In the 1955 Citroen, standard French family car of the era, the timing chain sits behind a cover about 1/2" from the firewall, the whole engine has to come out to change it.
Sounds like the Colorado. It's a reason they'll pry my S10s, GMT400 and GMT800s from my cold dead hands as they're more reliable, cheaper to service and easier to service.
It's 180k miles. It's the 3.0L Duramax because the oil pump is on the backside of the engine using an oil submersed belt rather than a chain or set of gears. So you have to drop the transmission, exhaust, oil pan, and take the back side of the engine cover to replace a belt that should have been a chain. It _may_ be faster, to simply disconnect everything and pull the motor.
Source: I own one of these engines and I dread having to pay ~3k for this maintenance in 3 years. I like the engine, just not this maintenance ticket item.
It's kind of always been that way to varying degrees. In the 70's/80's, changing the Porsche 911 spark plugs required dropping the engine.
Also, in addition to planned obsolescence and repair hostility is Design for Manufacturing (DfM) that doesn't care about maintainability, safety, comfort, or durability, only lowest cost to shove things together on an assembly line. This is why there are some cars that require removing the wheel well to change the oil filter and other that have things completely out-of-order or require absurd tools to service. My grandfather was a 30 year Chrysler dealer mechanic who had a dozen or so custom tools for very specific purposes.
Source: Dad had an A/C & electrical mechanic shop next to a Porsche specialist shop.
Luckily you don't have go drop the engine to change spark plugs on modern water cooled Porsche 911s, but let me tell you about changing plugs on mid-engined Cayman/Boxster platform. The 4 cylinder cars are easier but 6 cylinder cars require 3-4 different combinations of sockets and extensions and tiny European hands to really get in there.
>Also, in addition to planned obsolescence and repair hostility is Design for Manufacturing (DfM) that doesn't care about maintainability, safety, comfort, or durability, only lowest cost to shove things together on an assembly line.
Exactly. It's basically fight club math. Spend $10 on a click-fit connector that can't be disassembled but that a $60/hr (though they only see a fraction of that) UAW laborer can plug in in half the time can't easily short-insert that can be visually checked.
The fact that it costs $200 the 1/10000 times it fails under warranty doesn't matter with those numbers. And you don't even care about the 100/100 times it fails at 2-3x the warranty period.
Of course, you're burning credibility doing this. But credibility doesn't have an obvious mapping to a number and stonk go up, KPI go up, bonus get paid, nobody cares.
There is ultimately a feedback cycle in that maintenance and reliability problems reduce used car values, and those drive lease rates. When manufacturers have trouble making the numbers work on cheap leases then that eventually hurts sales volume, but it takes many years for that effect to show up.
You can milk the public for like a decade of "shareholder value" between such time as you change things and the public wises up.
In the 70's/80's you could fit a person in the engine bay of a Volvo. So, varying degrees of complexity and difficulty to fix things.
The red block Volvos would also run for literally millions of miles, and outside of the turbo models were pretty thrifty on gas. We've fallen a long ways.
Volvo may have fallen a long way, but US cars of that time were literal trash that 100,000 miles was about the total useful life of the car before far too much needed replaced. I'm old enough to remember how Japanese cars started taking the US by storm because of it. They sipped gas in comparison and drove forever.
How do dealerships get away with essentially passing on the downside and risk of warranties to mechanics?
Shouldn't it be the business that's shouldering the variability in income due to warranties, since they're the ones that sold the cars with them?
It seems similar to a hypothetical restaurant selling memberships with food, then paying workers less when customers buy food with the membership discount.
Because dealerships sell cars but don't build them. The warranty really should be from the manufacturer, not the dealership.
They get away with passing the risk because they're already apex parasites who have successfully inserted themselves between carmakers and customers, and lobby like crazy everywhere to protect their position.
In every aspect of their operations, dealerships are useless parasitic middlemen who provide no value to customers and exist solely because of protectionist legislation that they pay for with their rent-seeking. Why would you expect repairs and warranty claims to be any different?
As usual, low pay + increasing task complexity, YoY.
Nothing there has changed for decades except the world around it.
Standard CEO: "I'll do anything to hire more skilled workers, except pay them a reasonable wage."
That's not really what Farley is saying if you read through the whole interview: https://www.theverge.com/podcast/784875/ford-ceo-jim-farley-...
e.g.
"We’re investing in trade schools and scholarships to recruit technicians for vehicle repair as well as our factories."
"But this is a society problem. The one that bothers me the most is cultural. We, as a culture, think that everyone has to go to an Ivy League school to be valuable in our society, yet we all know that our parents and grandparents made our country wonderful because of these kinds of jobs. There’s incredible dignity in emergency services, and people can have wonderful careers. But our society doesn’t celebrate those people like they do the latest AI engineer."
>But our society doesn’t celebrate those people like they do the latest AI engineer.
He fails to mention that AI engineers probably get 4x the pay with a job that is less physically demanding.
Yeah, why do we as a society want high paying jobs that we're not forced to take 40 minutes of pay for hours of work? Clearly its the celebration that's missing.
That's the cultural issue that's talked about, which also caused the explosion of people trying to get into tech whether they actually liked the work or not.
Because the choice is/was - make $20/hr busting my ass with body breaking work and barely scrape by, or get a CS degree and live comfortably because no other career offers the pay required.
The cultural issue is - why aren't other careers paid as well? (Aka, why don't we value them). Someone risking bodily injury in a trade arguably should be paid more than most desk jobs, but they aren't.
Much like discussion here on HN about how we need an IC promotion path that doesn't lead to management, society needs equal opportunities for high paying careers across a variety of fields, not just white collar or tech work.
This is world-wide, not just in the automotive industry. The US military has the same problem. The Navy has submarines sitting in port unable to go to sea because they don't have enough mechanics to run or repair them. When I was in the Navy, we were being assigned more than 24hrs of work per day. Management knew it wasn't being completed and they were falsifying nuclear engineering maintenance records, sweeping it straight under the rug. In a time when all other jobs lost their bonuses or started force-retiring people, we were being offered near-six-figure bonuses to re-enlist for two more years. If you played it right you could get it tax-free and it would almost double your take-home compensation. And we were all turning them down because the job was so horrible. After I got out of the military I worked in mechanical engineering in several different industries before switching to software. Most of the best mechanics I knew switched to software.
Does the military train you to be a mechanic from scratch?
Emperor has no clothes. Instagram is full of videos by mechanics explaining this or that brand/model is stupidly engineered. Known problem. And mechanics do not have a seat at the table where these matters are discussed and decided upon. Unless he plans to change that…
And a good portion of the people with a seat at the table are consultants working for TATA.
TATA owns Jaguar/Land Rover and they got ransomwared into complete shutdown. the UK Gov't is giving them $1.5 Billion to get back to working, because it is tanking their entire economy.
Really shows how little they care about the needful for the things they own directly, then extrapolate that out to all the consulting they do. Complete shit.
Because manufacturers are using similar Sub-$9/hr engineers that Boeing is using to help them crash their planes
The data for long term maintenance can be found but for example the government could mandate it be published for car models to give consumers more insight and be a lever to incentivize designing cars to be more easily maintainable (e.g. not have to remove a truck's cab to replace an oil filter gasket!) https://www.consumerreports.org/cars/car-maintenance/the-cos...
Auto mechanics do things to "flat rate" where each task is listed as taking a given amount of time. There seems to be a lot of variation between what the book says, and how long the tasks actually take. How are these flat rates assessed? I wonder if it's assuming a new car with no complications or wear and tear to components, or rust etc.
Book rates are often set by the manufacturer. In theory, they have a mechanic do the job and time it. The real big problem is warranty work is only paid at a fraction of the book rate. So if a job normally takes three hours if you do it under warranty, you only get paid for two hours. It’s a massive disincentive for mechanics to work long-term for a brand-name dealership that sells new cars. They always run the risk of getting shafted by too much warranty work.
What's missing from the discussion is the opposite though. I worked at a dealership (albeit a long time ago) and many mechanics loved warranty work as some would be listed as a 2 hour job but would only take 1.25hr or whatever. So they were often able to put in 12 hours on a 10 hour shift for example.
>(albeit a long time ago)
This probably matters a lot depending on what 'long time ago' means.
Like when you hear old timers say "When I was a kid I bought X for Y" where Y is something like 10th the cost it is now. The push for profits has squeezed every section of the economy and it sounds like (dealer) mechanics are not escaping.
Yeah, that applies to warranty and non-warranty - the mechanics always want to beat the book. And there are definitely some jobs that are well know to be winner, and others that are losers. And nobody wants to take the losers.
There's some similarity here to US medical/dental insurance. Some work obviously needs to be done, but the entity that promised to pay for it won't. The system adapts (or fails).
Why do dealerships assume warranty risk instead of the manufacturer?
I'm pretty sure the manufacturer does pay for the warranty repair. But only at the fractional rate. The dealership effectively passes that loss onto its employees. Working for a small, independent shop can have better wage/salary, but often lacks benefits (health care in particular) and comes with all the usual downsides of a small business (one bad owner/manager can ruin the experience).
If they assess that a repair needs three hours, then only pay two hours of work if it's under warranty, I don't see how that doesn't mean that either they know that the book estimate is an overestimate and reimburse the correct amount, or the book estimate is correct and the dealership effectivley assumes 33% of the warranty risk because they only get reimbursed for 66% of the repair cost. (the third alternative is that the book estimate is underestimating, but that's basically the second case, but worse).
Neither of those cases looks like fair business dealings
It's effectively two different book rates, the warranty book assumes a new car. The non-warranty book assumes an older car. Older car = rust, rounded fasteners, and other things that add to the time.
Mechanic gets used to working at non-warranty rates, so any warranty works feels like being cheated.
Does it all balance out in the end? Maybe. But, that's not what mechanics "feel" like happens. And they're paid little enough (generally) that the two books annoys them. And the working conditions are bad enough (both physically, but also "mentally" - many shops are hostile workplaces, or close to it, with poor benefits, long-ish hours, etc). So, they have a lot to bitch about, generally.
To give them an incentive not to just rubber stamp every warranty claim.
My mechanic charges by the hour and does great work. They're not the cheapest option, but the value for money can't be beat.
Nobody wants to work for dealships. There are plenty of mechanics that that work at their own shops or for independent shops for better pay and conditions. Some places choose to do just the easier services (eg no transmission or internal engine work), no weekends, etc
How to fix automotive repair:
1. The development and use of "rate books" is de facto price fixing. labor is a cost, and it has a price. Ban them by law.
2. Take the computers away from the engineers. There should be no ability to drag and drop assemblies to reshape them. No ability to make parts that are computed to barely meet requirements.
3. Patent licensing goes to a small flat fee per item per use. How about $1. A modern car can have upwards of 10,000 active patents for all components. All "Design Copyrights" are voided. A good design isnt created, it is recognized.
4. End nearly all "mandatory technologies" and features. Straight from Hayek et al, Incredible Bread Machine on wheels.
t. a Greasy Dirty Technician
Hard physical labor, increasingly complex work, low pay. That mix will make any job interest dry up.
My venerable Bronco II was so old, several oil leaks appeared in the engine as the gaskets deteriorated. I spent a year waiting for a shop to have an opening to rebuild or replace the engine. I finally gave up and gave the Bronco to a scrap yard.
The problem is entirely due to the labor and compensation for mechanics. The Mechanics get a shit proposition. If you are smart, you do not do it. Exhibit A, mechanics are paid a fraction of revenue but are 100% responsible for warranty. Imagine if you shipped a bug, you are told to work without pay to fix it. That is what a mechanic does.
It’s even worse than that: someone else shipped the bug and you have to work without pay to fix it.
Electric cars need a lot fewer mechanical repairs. Sounds like yet more reasons to avoid buying one of these overpriced over complicated petro vehicles.
Sounds like you have no idea how dangerous is to put your hands around electric car batteries and how expensive certified electricians are. Without a mechanic that ALSO has an advanced expert certification for high voltage electronics, the blown BMS or contactor (500$) becomes a whole battery to scrap (20k). Then you add the 6 hours of diagnostics and labor on top of it. Electric vehicles are not an arduino circuit with a couple of led and an usb cable.
This illustrates why the battery really needs to be decoupled from the car. We do it for other electrical appliances like flashlights. The EV auto mechanic should optimize for removing and installing the battery. Batteries should be taken offsite to a speciality facility where High Voltage experts work on the batteries - repair, recycling, etc.
It sounds like you are the one who has no idea.
There are a few basic things you have to not do in order to work on an EV, basically the same rules as for airbag systems but with physically larger components.
No modern car is electrically simple, but they all do a pretty good job telling you where you ought to be looking.
He is correct. If you have no idea what are you doing with BEV, you can destroy the car and your garage without even realizing what has just happened.
This is flatly false. The HV operating procedures on cars add significant complexity and danger to working on them. In fact, any HV work will automatically add a huge chunk of labor hours to any work and is why anything touching the HV system instantly goes into the thousands of dollars as a baseline. We are talking hundreds of volts above fatal baseline and very high amps on accidental discharge. For comparison, its safer on your biology to stick a fork in 120VAC outlet deliberately than to make a mistake with HVDC.
If only I could find one that isn't a spy platform. That's a problem with all vehicles that are too new, not just EVs. That makes new cars a nonstarter for me, which as a side-effect makes all EVs a nonstarter for me.
I'm hoping we'll see EV kit cars with open software someday. There's conversion kits for a number of cars, and I've thought about turning my old 08 Civic into one just for the freedom from car manufacturers.
Some models you can literally just pull a fuse for the telemetry modem and the car will be offline. Worth considering.
This is my backup plan for the day when I can no longer get a good used car that's old enough. Until then, though, I'm not willing to reward auto manufacturers who do this by giving them my money.
Disconnect the antenna, and optionally connect a dummy load in its place.
I'm curious how in-depth you've been looking, especially investigating models where you can do a little bit of work to do things like unplug cell modems. I'm somewhat in need of a new vehicle and have just assumed the whole market is trash based of what I've read online and the new cars I've seen people get. But I'm hoping I've missed some gems of online communities still managing to eek out some freedom (and physical buttons, of course).
Yes but consider that they may need more electronics repairs. A car is a notoriously bad environment for electronics and this is not a solved issue. On top of that most modern cars, especially electric cars are so tightly integrated with all closed components and no real way to repair except beg the manufacturer for a replacement part. On top of that you are pulling a lot of reasonable reliable control and timing related issues into the electronics and software.
Current day electric cars are ripe for abuse from manufacturers (planned obsolescence or generic out of warranty obsolescence) and I would be surprised if any of them are still running for over 25+ years. Even though today you see a lot of cars from the 2000s and before. Especially since the market is very fragmented between models and manufacturers.
Basically any modern day electric car is worse in terms of repair-ability then any Iphone in my opinion.
I haven't seen that in practice. My last ICE car had only about 1/3 of its maintenance costs for components that wouldn't have been present on an EV. And the upfront cost and price for the remaining 2/3 of maintenance were so cheap that it's basically impossible for any EV to ever be cheaper.
This is mostly true, but the cost of maintenance, fuel, and repair doesn't offset the cost insurance, electricity, and battery replacement for me over the course of 10 years, so my next vehicle will still be a petrol engine car unless something changes substantially. The big thing is, for me, an electric vehicle insurance quote for me ranges between 4K and 6K per year.
Yeah nobody is willing to give up the revenue/tax from someone driving a car. In fact, I bet electric vehicles will end up more expensive per mile, mark my words.
In some cases, sure. My anecdote:
Electric car. Horn keeps failing. $15 part, $900 to do the work. Why? Because to get to the horn, the entire front end of the car has to be disassembled, including the hood, bumper, fenders, you name it.
My fuel car’s horn assembly is easily accessed through the engine bay with a single bolt to remove it.
Efficiencies in one area seem to have led to extraordinarily difficult repair abilities elsewhere.
I won’t even go into how the air filters are replaced — but it starts with removing the dashboard…
I won’t even go into how the air filters are replaced — but it starts with removing the dashboard…
That's just bad design having nothing to do with EVs. It takes me about 30 seconds to replace cabin filter in a Hyundai Ioniq 5. The horns aren't quite as easy, but certainly do not require removal of the car's front end.
That has nothing to do with an electric car. It's the same trend of designing cars to be easily manufactured at the factory, not repaired at a dealer.
I smell bullshit. Ford does many things I do not really appreciate, but setting the book time of a pickup cab removal at less than an hour is definitely not one of them.
Excessive regulation to blame? How so?
Government regulations around fuel efficiency per size of vehicle as well as crash test safety as well as materials.
People universally seem to dislike the size increase in vehicles, but this was due largely to magical requirements for fuel efficiency standards. The obvious result was putting smaller engines in larger cars and adding a turbo.
On the complexity side of things, cramming the safety gear into the car while also getting maximal efficiency and keeping costs low meant some rather terrible design choices from a repairability perspective.
All that said, I do love the safety requirements. I got hit by a Ford F150 in a Miata and walked away perfectly fine.
Heh, they just love blaming regulation. But I don't see anything about that in the article?
So basically they refuse to pay a reasonable hourly rate. They pay flat fee perfect world rates that cause mechanics to lose money when they encounter real world problems.
As always the worker shortage is a “there’s a shortage of skilled workers who refuse to get screwed on pay”
It is very often like that. Employers like to play capitalism with employees, but when tables turn and employees will start playing capitalism with employers then it is suddenly a big problem and ideally government should be involved to help poor little employer out.
No it's not. People pay market rate salaries to compete with other employers also wanting those people. Everyone's "playing" capitalism, as free agreements are better than people being forced to do what their master / guild / bureaucrat tells them to do.
This is a very low quality article rehashing some ones FB/Instagram video
Disclosure: I work for General Motors (on software, not as a design engineer), this is solely my own opinion and experience.
An automotive assembly line consists of many "footprints" chained together. Each footprint is scheduled to have the same amount of work (in seconds). That work rate is also called the line rate, often expressed in jobs per hour. So 70 jph could also be expressed as 51.4 seconds per footprint.
Working backwards from the time you drive the finished vehicle off the end of the line, a truck assembly plant works like this:
Or in mermaid: Anyway, each set of tasks in a footprint takes the same amount of time, or they get split up to take the same amount of time.So setting the engine on the frame must not take longer than 51.4 seconds, and setting the body on the frame also must not take longer than 51.4 seconds. (Along with all of the other ~~1,000 assembly footprints)
As a matter of simple evolution, no design that takes longer will be produced, because it does not survive the first round of selection: Assembly.
Designs that survive Assembly may eventually need Maintenance, but by then the genes have already been passed on.
Now you may say that Engineers are smart enough to fix both problems, but I don't believe in Intelligent Design.
Snark aside - maintenance falls under "residual value", and "residual value" may be a luxury that the automaker cannot afford.
----Show me the outcome, and I will describe the incentives ~ Inverse Munger
Automotive design engineers have to satisfy MANY criteria, the following items entail LISTs of requirements, not a single req.
Every part of this process will make your design engineers sad and tired.Now, once you have all the parts you need to make a vehicle, you can design the vehicle so that all those parts work together.
If you find out that you have to change the design of a part while you are designing the vehicle, this pushes back your project completion date. This makes the spreadsheets upset, and the spreadsheets take it out on your stock price.
----
Ok so "why don't they just" make the design better for the next model year?
Because those engineers have been assigned to another project! Also, design changes incur costs, which pushes out the program pay-off period.
You amortize Research and Design costs over the actual vehicles produced. Those vehicles have to be competitive in the market - price per value.
The Value Proposition for maintain-ability/repair-ability is not readily apparent at time of purchase.
This is why "residual value" is a luxury. No one gets to pick all of their own success criteria.
~~~ Again, this is all just like my opinion.
The other day I listened to The Verge's Decoder episode with the Ford CEO [0] and unlike most other CEOs, he almost felt genuine. There was a noticeable lack of BS. Have I been played?
The lack of mechanics was mentioned and I recall him saying that they're building up apprenticeship programs and the US should take more pride in blue collar work.
0- https://www.theverge.com/podcast/784875/ford-ceo-jim-farley-...
Right, because "pride" can substitute for decent wages, working conditions, and job security. /s
Is this the new "learn to code"
No, "learn to code" was the supply-side response of people who saw software engineers get paid shittons of money. This is a demand-side CEO lamenting the fact that he can't get people to fix cars for cheap, so literally the opposite problem.
The Demand-side marketing got you, LTC was 95% supply-side, +5% parroting.
This article reads as AI generated to me, anyone else see that?
Does it really matter? If the article is poor quality, then it is poor quality. It doesn't matter if it was written by a person or an LLM. I'm more annoyed how so many articles waste time quoting things people say on social media.
I think learning to recognize generated content is an important media literacy skill, and talking about it is one of the best ways to home that skill.
it matters because if we want to reduce AI slop we need to prevent it from becoming profitable.
and if we assume that an AI written article costs a fraction of a regular article, then AI articles will be profitable more easily.
At this point it's like using the urinal when you're directly beside an ocean full of piss. Dealing with it at an individual level has mostly failed as it would take coordination 'before' people click on the link, and enough people to realize it's junk before they submit it to HN. Being that at least 91 people upvoted this it seems like that isn't working.
maybe it isn't working because we haven't yet gotten used to detecting AI articles.
we can still change that if most of us decide to flag such articles, although, instead of a generic flag i'd like an AI flag or tag (similarly to how we tag older articles with the year). then everyone can decide on their own if it is worth their time.
I’m a bit confused, the top comment describes how time is estimated, which sounds very fair to the mechanic, so why the mechanics are not paid enough eventually? Is it because the estimation doesn’t include the “openning up” process, or what am I missing?
Low pay and high effort.
This has been going on for 500+ years since the very dawn of capitalism.
How is this legal?
Car companies don't want you to be able to work on these cars. They would much rather you either buy a new car or use their 3x the cost parts and services.
You have to remove the cab to change the oil pan gasket==YOU'LL have to pay ME to buy your stupidly-designed truck. But I realize, driving my 25-year-old car, that someday at this rate I won't have a choice. Maybe someone sells simple, underpowered kit cars and I can put that together.
Honestly it feels like we could very well see a microcosm of what happens on big trucks where a certain vintage get sold as "gliders" and get perpetually rebuilt. I don't understand how the market for trucks sustains itself, how many people are there really that want the king doodoo ranch 150k cadillac truck that has engine and transmission problems at 3 years out? I won't be surprised if the government basically bans cars older than 15 years old and totally bans "street rods" and kits meaning we will have no choice but to bend over for an inferior pile of shit truck.
leases/business lines of credit/tax benefits. all you gotta do is start an LLC and that f150 is all but yours, baby.
Yes, opining for wage suppression but also here's a mechanic owner/operator explaining the situation:
https://youtu.be/9cfbhxsqW84
Thanks for posting. Long video, but at about the 12-minute mark he says something about warranty work, relevant to TFA. He says that the hourly rate for any work done under warranty is set artificially low by the manufacturer.
Say a dealership would normally charge a customer $200 an hour for a job, of which the technician will make about $50 an hour. But if the same work is done under warranty, i.e., the manufacturer is paying, the dealership will get only $100 an hour. The dealership, in turn, will reduce the technician's pay to less than $50. Thus, the manufacturer is squeezing the dealership, which is squeezing the tech.
Does every fucking title need to be rewritten? The clickbait witch hunt legacy of Buzzfeed is more annoying today than it ever actually was when it existed.
motor1 is a clickbait farm site that specializes in tactics like "make an article from a social media post". Unfortunate that it got so much traction here, probably because the audience here is not familiar with the subject matter.