I have an excellent Master Technician that all my vehicles get worked on by. The problem is getting him motivated to work on this one...
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Then again he has too many hobbies. Sigh...I really need to put in a few hundred hours on my Willys.
Working in the automotive industry I can tell you there are going to be shops dropping out of business like flies after a malathion dusting. Those shops are not the good shops, but the uneducated.
Even I have had trouble with a couple of dealers when my truck was under warranty. They did work that was unnecessary due to the fact that they were slow and got paid to do it under warranty. It had nothing to do with the problem at hand and never even alerted me to what they were doing. Pissed me off bigtime. The list goes on and on, along with about 40 pictures documenting everything they did wrong.
So where does that leave the average consumer? Well there are tons of great shops out there. You have to find them. The best question is probably how often do you go to school? All the top shops I work with take classes all the time. Those that don't fall behind. There are not many shops out there trying to rip you off. It is probably more of they do not know what is wrong so they start changing parts. Even dealerships do that as most are paid flat rate. Usually a dealership has seen the problem before too, but that doesn't mean they won't charge you for diagnostics.
If you think you can work on your own car great! It takes about $15,000 in diagnostic equipment. At the least a Scanner (tm) is needed for checking why the brake lights or tail lights don't work. The auto industry will prevail in the end when people come to realize you have to be highly trained and skilled in ways few can or will ever be. When an auto tech makes at least $100k a year there will be people signing up for the trade. Right now there are guys making that much and more, but not everyone yet. Our local dealerships charge upwards of $160 an hour. Finally the automotive field is becoming respectable, but still not fast enough.
I could go on and on but why???
