When I owned a new Ford, I had a generally positive experience with dealer servicing. Any maintenance I needed was taken care of the same day, and I usually just chilled in the dealer’s (admittedly pretty bare) waiting room. That room even had a window into the service area, where I could peek into the bays to watch my car get worked on.
I haven’t been back to a Ford dealer in at least a decade, but it sounds like things have changed drastically. According to CEO Jim Farley, the company has a massive shortage of mechanics and technicians, leaving service bays open and customers waiting weeks for repairs.
In an interview published with Yahoo Finance earlier this week, Farley laid out the problem by the numbers:
This morning, when I woke up, there were 6,000 bays in our dealerships with no technicians.
[Yahoo Finance:] So can’t get my car fixed?
No. Two weeks. Average wait is two weeks. Not because we don’t have the parts, we don’t have the mechanics.
Two weeks is far worse than the national average, at least going by this extract of J.D. Power’s Customer Service Index (CSI) study from 2024, which analyzed customer satisfaction at dealerships when it comes to stuff like maintenance and repairs. According to that data, the average wait for an appointment for mass-market brands, like Ford, was just 5.2 days.
J.D. Power hasn’t released that statistic from its 2025 data to the public, but overall, Ford ranked 11th out of 18 mass-market brands this year for customer satisfaction when it comes to vehicle service this year, just below average, and far behind leaders like Subaru, Mini, and Honda.
That begs the obvious question: Why is there a worker shortage at Ford? When asked, Farley didn’t exactly give the most direct answer:
Well, it’s a complicated problem, but there is, let’s put it that way. There are literally a million openings right now. At Ford, we have probably 6,000 [open positions]—400,000 repair technician shortages across the economy. I think it’s a couple of things. First of all, the productivity has not caught up with the white collar [positions], in fact, it’s gone down over the last 20 years. Number two, the jobs aren’t as glamorous as a white-collar job from college, and I think the permitting and all the regulations has really stunted the growth of these kind of jobs.
By now, you’re probably screaming at your computer, telling Ford they should just offer adequate wages, and the workers will come rushing in. The commenters under Yahoo Finance’s post on Instagram are doing as much. But that might be more of an industry-wide problem than just a Ford problem, at least going by data gathered by job board Indeed. According to the job posting website, the average base salary for an automotive mechanic is $28.40 per hour, just a few cents lower than the average salary for a Ford dealership mechanic. By these numbers, Ford is about on par with the rest of the industry, salary-wise.
If you want to make a great wage at a dealership fixing cars these days, you have to become a technician, differentiating yourself with certifications and brand-specific technical training. And that costs money. Even if you graduate from a trade school, you usually still need extra training to learn how to work on the latest and greatest vehicles. That’s basically what Tom Butman, general manager of Gene Butman Ford in Ypsilanti, Michigan, told the Detroit Free Press earlier this year:
“Technology has exploded with complexity. That’s one of the things that a lot people don’t think about when they think ‘Why do we have a technician shortage?’ ” Butman said. “It’s because technology has complicated the repair process to the point where it’s much more difficult to repair cars.”
Even with a degree from a trade program, Butman said, much of the higher level technical training falls to dealers and automakers. He said some of his best technicians never went to college; rather the dealership invested in training them and getting them certified.
To its credit, Ford has invested in making this process easier. Since 2023, the company has funded the Auto Tech Scholarship program, which, as of 2025, awards $4 million a year to people studying to become service technicians. According to another Free Press article published earlier this week, Farley has even established a task force “to come up with ways to foster the development of more skilled trades people to address the shortage” after meeting with dealers earlier this year.
Whether either of these initiatives will result in shorter wait times and higher customer satisfaction is unclear. In any case, they are steps in the right direction.
[Update: A previous version of this story quoted Farley as saying Ford had 400,000 open technician positions, when in reality, it was 6,000 positions. That’s been corrected. My bad! -BS]
Top photo: Ford
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Can anyone explain a logical reason why warranty work is lower pay for the mechanic?
I get the stupidity of the manufacture paying less to the dealer but that is also stupid the mechanic at the dealership should not be punished for corporate greed. I was laughing at myself for typing that, I know.
Most states have laws that require OEMs to reimburse dealerships at “retail rates” for warranty work. So I have no idea why the mechanics would make less.
They bill the labor time at less than it would normally be.
eg Job X lists 4.0 hours book time to complete. Under warranty that same job would only be 3.1 hours while still maintaining the $200 per hour “retail rate”
One I’ve heard is that a dealership tech will likely be more familiar with the vehicles he’s doing warranty work on, therefore more efficient.
I had no idea that techs had to buy their own tools. That is bullshit.
They can take them with them but It keeps people from lesser means from entering the profession.
Tools or student loans potato pahtato
Gotta keep the poor suckling at the teat of the billionaire class some how.
Someone has to pay for trade school which is actually not too inexpensive anymore.I know some enter the job market right out of high school but many go to a trade school before entering the trade.My wife and I just paid $43K for my son to go through a 2 year trade school for electrician course.
Tax payers can pay for trade school
My 9 month certificate mechanics courses at a local adult college cost me $180 for the book and that’s all.
Or keeps them in crippling debt. My family member used to be a dealership mechanic and he knew guys that were tens of thousands of dollars in debt to Snap On.
Honestly these days, if you have some self control and patience, you can assemble a good mechanics set of tools for a lot less than what the name brand tool trucks are hoping to put on a payment plan for you.
Harbor freight has gone from a joke to being competitive against snap on for 1/10th the cost
Snap-on is a scam. The whole program is designed to make buying their wildly overpriced tools on time easy and to keep you in debt, paying interest. That’s where the real money is for them. I would laugh seeing some of guys with their Snap-on tool boxes that cost as much as a car, while i had my cheap harbor freight tool box that did what it was supposed to do. hold tools.
And they guard them with their life (for good reason).
Snap on guy will finance
Given Farley’s effectiveness at fixing their quality problems, I assume a year from now we’ll be talking about how they’re 8000 techs short. 😛
Fuck these corpos whining about regulation. Bitch, normal people have laws stopping idiocy, fake ass (people) companies have laws too.
Maybe if Ford made better cars there wouldn’t be as any problems LOL
Not enough people to do the warranty repairs? Stop making shitty cars that need so many warranty repairs.
Pay the same rate for warranty work, and stop using that stupid flat rate shit.
Came here for this.
The problem isn’t finding new techs.
It’s not burning-out the existing techs because of moronic decisions made by both corporate and at the dealership level. Even basic repair jobs turn into a massive amount of work. That alone is ridiculous enough, but then dealers always seem to under estimate the time that is required to fix things.
In seemingly every other industry DFA and DFM (design for assembly and design for manufacturing) are major priorities. As an engineer, I put a lot of effort in making parts that are as easy to machine and put together as possible. I do not work in the automotive industry and have zero interest in it because I feel there is a massive disconnect between the people designing these parts and the executives who seem to not give a flying fuck about anyone who does manual labor. These executives seem to not give a crap about repairs or assembly times as long as they could save 10 cents on the pre-unit cost. They seem to be so focused on just the assemblies they are in charge of, that they miss the fact that 5 parts have to be removed to get access to that one bolt if a repair ever needs to be made.
Oh you mean I shouldn’t have to pull both 200lb front seats and the floor covering out of an International Lonestar just to remove the doghouse, to RESEAL a VALVE COVER?
The OTHER DFM that doesn’t get enough attention from many companies (not just automakers) is Design For Maintainability. When we put out contracts for new equipment designs, we have a big section specifying things like Mean Time To Repair and that you shouldn’t have to remove other components to get at Line Replaceable Units (circuit cards, surge arrestors, fuses, breakers, etc) to do normal preventative or corrective maintenance.
But I suppose designing something to be maintained over the long haul would contravene the need to replace it every 2-4 years and make the line go up faster.
This is very much an industry-wide issue. We’re having a hard time finding techs for Truck & Coach at $50/hr (CAD). I just got an e-mail from a shop down the road offering me $60/hr to be the lead tech.
The Old Guard is retiring and the young ones are thin on the ground. Both in career choice and literal population decline.
I’ve been pitching for months to our upper management to get City Council on board with sponsoring an apprenticeship program for high school students.
Focus on the lower income areas where kids are unlikely to have college as an option. Offer to pay the tuition fees, with a job and a pension at the other end.
it takes 4 years to make a tech, so they NEED to start NOW.
WELL SAID!!! There are loads of high school kids who would jump at the chance, it is not the schools that are saying “go to college for the humanities” those kids from the low income areas do not see that they would be welcomed or supported in the profession or even how to get into the field.
If you take a kid that had no career outlook and give them a job where they retire at 55 with 37 years of service and a pension that’s paying them 84% of what they made (70% of your 5 best consecutive years of pay, +2% for every year past 30) and they’ll be stoked.
We really need to facilitate high schoolers with robust shop classes again. There was a reason they existed in the first place.
The idea that we could just NAFTA blue collar jobs away and have everyone learn to code was always an ill-thought out fallacy.
I’m heartened that my 11 year old is learning to use a spot welder in a mandatory class in middle school. I think her current aspiration is civil engineer, but still.
Of course, our district also contains a Mack Truck factory.
It was NOT the schools that got rid of shop. it was the helicopter and snow plow parents that did not want their kids in a class not listed on the ivy league college application, the tax payers not wanting to pay for all that stuff, the pressure to not track low performing kids or kids of color out of the academic track and into shop track so they eliminated shop for the other reasons and also there are hardly any colleges putting out licensed shop teachers.
I will continue to blame our government for caving to a group of vocal lunatics time and time again.
Tax dollars for education are a mandatory investment in a civilization’s future based on its needs.
We need to shut down anyone who treats paying taxes like they’re acquiring a controlling interest in company shares.
So well said thank you.
I’ve talked with a friend about it in a local high school. It’s a chicken vs egg scenario.
You need the program to attract the students, but you need student numbers to green light the funding to run the program.
“This is very much an industry-wide issue. We’re having a hard time finding techs for Truck & Coach at $50/hr (CAD).”
“it takes 4 years to make a tech, so they NEED to start NOW.”
I have to ask… how many apprenticeships is your company paying for to help ensure a steady supply of new techs to replace the old guard as they retire?
In my observation, some of the biggest complaining companies are the same ones who are doing diddly squat about investing in education/training for new staff.
I’m employed by municipal government. This would make it taxpayer funded.
Considering we’re trying to keep roads cleared of snow and transit buses running, it’s in the public interest.
Apprenticeships and shop classes in schools so they can learn the basics and figure out if they have the aptitude without having to go into debt.
Any advice for an American mechanic hoping to move to Canada and keep the same career? Red Seal is a bit of a mystery in terms of transferring education/skills/experience from another country
The requirements to get Red Seal will vary by province. In Ontario (where I live), you need to go through Skilled Trades Ontario and get a “Trade equivalency assessment” https://www.skilledtradesontario.ca/experienced-workers/trade-equivalency-assessment/
This is actually the route I took to get licensed as I had 7 years experience and couldn’t afford/didn’t want to go on EI to do trade school. So I plead my case and skipped all 3 levels and went right to licensed. Autodidact FTW.
I cannot confirm, but have been anecdotally told that we hold our techs to a higher standard than US certs.
My recommendation if you’re looking for guaranteed work/good pay is to focus on commercial. Either off road heavy equipment or Truck & Coach.
“Remember, I’m pulling for ya. We’re all in this together.”
-Red Green
Appreciate the advice!
“Keep your stick on the ice”
A couple of things:
1) All automakers are facing the mechanic shortage. The reason that Ford specifically has such longer wait times is because of its plethora of recalls and quality issues. You know, the problem Farley has been talking about for years but has made no measurable progress on.
2) $28/hour isn’t all that much for skilled labor these days, even in low cost of living areas. Also, it’s quite misleading; the dealership mechanic pay structure SUCKS. As I’m sure most of you know, the pay is “flat rate” (you get paid by the job completed, for the designated number of hours it’s “supposed” to take). And sure, the theory is “well, if you work hard and are efficient you’ll make lots of money!” Except it doesn’t exactly work out that way for everyone. First, the hours allocated per job are often woefully inadequate, particularly on warranty work that the automakers cheap out on. Second, the way that work is distributed to mechanics at dealerships isn’t exactly fair.
I have a family member who started out as a newly graduated tech at a GM dealership; he is a great mechanic on merit. But in the “good old boys” network at the dealership, he always received the shit warranty jobs that never paid enough and the well-connected old timers who were tight with the service writers got all of the gravy customer pay jobs. Some of said old timers also schemed with the service writers to exaggerate or contrive mechanical problems to do unnecessary work and make more money. If you’re an honest guy and the low man on the totem pole, you’ll starve. He was barely making his bills, as a single guy living with a roommate with no debt or car payment. Eventually he got fed up and left to work a well-paying gig directly for an OEM at their technical center. The assholes at the dealership were extremely condescending and made all the typical “No OnE wAnTs To WoRk AnYmOrE” boomer complaints.
3) The benefits also suck. My family member was lucky to be young enough to stay on his parents’ insurance, because the cost to enroll in the dealer’s high deductible plan was at least $400/month… ten years ago. For a single guy. Retirement was similarly lackluster, there was maybe a tiny 401(k) match far below most companies, if anything at all.
So yes, a lot of it IS the pay and working conditions, particularly for young people entering the field who get shafted the most.
#2 is definitely true in my experience. I remember one tech who constantly got the gravy jobs and would pad the job with extra labor whenever he could.
These jobs should be salaried or at least hourly with other ways to make sure jobs get done. Effing piece meal crap is not a way to pay employees in the 21st century. Those same good old boys also claim there is no sexism or racism also.
And a good part of that pay is ultimately lost as the tech wastes time waiting at the parts counter to get them to order the required parts for 12 minutes each time.
I mean, I started in the industry as a technician, and I got out of that role as quickly as possible cause it just sucks and the stress level/physical toll is not at all comparable to the compensation.
HAHAHA, two weeks? My Tesla appointment is out 26 days.
Good news for Tesla owners; I hear they’re making their mechanic jobs worse and worse, so good luck with those appointment times
They’ve created the shortage by making it the worst job in the world.
Well said and the same applies to the teacher shortage.
See also nurses (and probably other healthcare workers).
Married to an ER nurse. WAY hard job. No matter how hard my day is I do not have the blood of shot children on my hands on a regular work day.
My mom was in the ER for 20+ years and then switched to hospice. Apparently knowing everyone is slipping away is (although sad) much easier to deal with than gunshot victims and violent drunks.
I remember my dad telling he once thought he had had a bad day at work, but came home to have my nurse mom tell him that they had two patients that needed a certain piece of equipment that the hospital only had one of, and they had to decide which patient to use it on. He didn’t think he had that bad a day after all.
Although in the industrial/corporate worlds there can be similar bad days when people get hurt on your watch. My dad once told a story about a piece of equipment that exploded and killed three people – because the plant engineers had tried to save some money and didn’t ask central engineering about it; a decade earlier central engineering had paid some MIT engineers to study this seemingly obvious modification and they had determined it dramatically increased the risk of explosion in a manner that was not obvious until you did the in depth study.
One of my worst days at work was when a fellow engineer was killed by some process equipment we were piloting- to this day it is not clear why he was running the equipment by himself (although that likely prevented more damage – the mix he ran through the machine caused the problem) Glad I was not my friend who responded to the wet floor alarm to find the devastation.
Yes my ER nurse keeps me grounded. Yes I have had bad days with abused or homeless kids and stuff at school but not anything like caring for children from mass shootings etc. Her average day is worse than my worst days.
Entry level pay sucks, getting a raise is impossible, the benefits -always- suck, flat rate sucks, warranty pay sucks, parts availability sucks, diagnostic pay sucks.
Ten years wrenching at dealers and I make really good money now, but I had to switch dealers 8 times because you never get a raise staying at one place.
If the best advise for an aspiring mechanic is “go work for the city or a corporate fleet” and avoid the dealer if at all possible, that MIGHT just explain why dealers can’t find enough mechanics.
Get rid of flat rate, offer good benefits and pay more. Or keep making excuses to the shareholders while working from home in your 3rd vacation property
Hell, in the truck & coach world, we’re hourly everywhere. The dealer life is STILL a meat grinder. Even with the hourly. I was at an International dealership for just under 3 years. I saw 33 employees come and go. I think there was max 40 employees in the whole building at any given time.
$28 grand a year will get you a 1-bedroom apartment with roaches and mice, a twenty year-old beater car, and a whole lot of Extra Value Meals. No wonder there are so many vacancies.
$28.40 per hour x 40 hrs x 52 weeks = $59072 without overtime.
2 bedroom apartment with roaches and mice, a 15 year-old beater, and a few nights a year you take the fam to Golden Corral and go nuts.
You were right to correct him, but no one should be working 40 hours a week 52 weeks a year. 🙁
Eh, nowadays its more like $28.40 per hour x 30 hrs flagged out of 40 hrs on the clock x 52 weeks = $44,304 and commission (flat rate) is generally exempt from overtime laws. Better than some other entry level non degree holder jobs but like other non degree trades, you aren’t going to have a good life.
This is all solvable with money. With publicity, marketing, and money to proper training programs and apprenticeships and proper pay there are LOTS of young people who are willing to become auto service technicians.
Dealers don’t really want to invest in entry level mechanics, they only want to keep them as lube techs and they burn out of the industry
I also wonder what the impact of racism is on the mechanic pipeline. I know a lot of young people of color who would love to get into the business but feel that some suburban dealership may not want to hire them.
The big dealer groups have HR departments and those places keep racists in check.
The “independently owned” dealers will just let racists yell slurs across a shop for laughs
There’s still going to be crazy racist shit on the radio though. I can see why working at Starbucks might be more appealing.
those places TRY TO keep racists in check.
The hard part is they would be trying to paddle against the current from parents, TV, social media, school counselors, etc. pushing everyone into college to get *any* degree they can with no regard to ability or employability.
It’s essentially the same problem the trades have to deal with.
I work with a lot of school counselors, often talk to at least one every day. They are not pushing college, the DO push some kind of post secondary plan and want it to be for employment. This myth that it is high schools pushing kids into degrees with low employment has got to go away.
I can very clearly recall the pro-college rhetoric when I was in HS from the staff. The pressure to prep everyone for the ACT/SAT even if college wasn’t in the cards.
Maybe it has changed in recent years but I can say it was definitely a thing I experienced as an elder millennial and I have heard the same from others in my age group over the years..
Things have changed. Thinking things have not changed in education in the last 15-20+ years is exactly why we have people and politicians crapping on schools.
I was in another type of situation with my high school guidance counselor…I was at a small public school in a rural part of the state, and the guidance counselor simply picked her favorites (mostly the sons and daughters of wealthy and/or prominent folks) and focused all of her attention on them. Kids who seriously needed some guidance were left out in the cold. Out of her six or so ‘favorites’ from my graduating class, only two went on to complete their college degrees.
SO sorry that sucks. That is bad unaccountable school leadership that happens in small schools. That sucks like the big urban school with each guidance counselor having 550+ kids to support.
It depends on the district and counselor, I guess. Here, it’s very much a “go to college or become a loser” mentality. My counselor laughed in my face when I told her I was interested in checking out trade schools.
How long ago was that?
About ten years ago. I hope things have changed, but according to my H.S. senior neighbor, it depends on the counselor.
A lot has changed in the last 10 years and for sure it depends on the counselor.
“The hard part is they would be trying to paddle against the current from parents, TV, social media,”
And why is that? Could it be because the parents/TV/Social Media are saying “why pick a career with lousy work conditions and low pay when you can get a better job with better working conditions?”
You see… Ford and the industry in general can fix the problem by improving work conditions AND offering better pay.
There is no shortage of workers per se. The shortage is just with people willing to work for low pay and with lousy work conditions.
Oh and Trump’s idiotic immigration policy will only make things worse because it’s those “illegal aliens” who are the group willing to put up with the low pay and lousy working conditions because they’re coming from places that are often war zones or worse in some other similar way.
And his idiotic education policies aren’t gonna help either.
Since the white house declared war on Portland we should be getting war torn rather soon.
I went through a Ford technicial internship program (ASSET) in the late ’90 where I was employed as a tech at a dealer part time and then went to school and got my degree in Automotive Technology.
After working at the dealer for a few years it became clear to me that the path for advancement and increased pay would be a slow one. And you have to pay for most of your tools. And over the years it wrecks your body. And it started to kill my desire to wrench on cars for fun. So I decided it wasn’t for me and have had several jobs which eventually led me to being a product manager for an aftermarket parts company, and I am way happier in this role.
Same here – my company (one of the larger SaaS auto companies) is literally filled with ex technicians who got fed up with the wrenching for a living deal.
I see the mechanics at my local garage working in February (I live near NYC) and pity those poor guys.
A buddy of mine left being a mechanic for Chevy and now works on large paving machines and equipment and is in a union and earning so much he will probably retire in his 40s. (he also works nearly constantly spring/summer/fall and overlands all winter.
One of my former managers left a job as a BMW master tech and went into IT.
People don’t realize that most technicians are on a flat-rate pay scale which means (if you don’t know) that you get paid a certain amount per job no matter how long it takes you. For example lets say an oil change pays a half hour or 0.5 and it take you 15 minutes you just double your pay. But if the parts guys can’t get you a filter or if you got to change out the oil drum now your screwed. Warranty repairs pay the absolute bare minimum, BMW paid 0.2 hours for an oil change when i was there. Thats 12 minutes to get the repair order and keys, find the car, pull it into the shop and put it on the lift, do your check over and mandatory customer video showing them the condition of their car, getting your parts, changing the oil, topping off fluids and tire pressure and doing the mandatory test drive to verify repairs. Also, i work on a guys Expedition that is still under warranty and he would rather PAY me to fix it then go through his dealer that jerks him around and tries to CHARGE him for diagnosis on a car thats under warranty. Things need to change.
Farley’s quote is misconstrued due to his phrasing. He meant Ford has 6,000 technician shortages, the entire country is 400,000.
I rewatched the Yahoo! interview, he says: “At Ford, we have 6,000, probably 400,000 [very unnatural pause] repair technician shortages across the entire economy.”
It’s not more difficult. It’s different. And the old fossils don’t like different. I would *infinitely* rather work on a computerized modern car than ye olde crocke where you need to read tea leaves and sacrifice a goat and look at the entrails to figure out what is intermittently ailing the thing. I had the dash light up on my BMW the other day – got out my ODB-II dongle and the Android Phone I keep for the BMW ProTools app, and in about 30 seconds I knew it was that the left rear wheel speed sensor died.
In contrast, I chased an occasional crank/no-start issue with my Spitfire for two years before it finally got bad enough to figure out the ignition switch was gummed up internally. At least with modern cars, intermittent faults get logged.
A computer is just another tool, no different than a set of sockets. Learn how to use your tools.
Oh man, Mr. Parts Shotgun here telling us how it is!
Do go on.
Hardly. I am quite competent at diagnosing just about anything. But good luck diagnosing a random crank/no start that happens once in a blue moon, and of course never conveniently in the garage only when you have been out driving around for a while. Then wait 5 minutes and the damned thing starts right up like nothing happened. Finally, it happened and didn’t fix itself, and stayed broken when I had the car towed home. And I had it figured out at that point in <5 minutes. And fixed in about 20, by disassembling the switch, cleaning out the gunk that was once grease, regreasing it, and putting it back together and back in the car. I was actually carrying a multimeter with me in the car, but it never stayed broken long enough for me to find somebody to turn the ignition switch while I was probing things with the meter until it failed completely – at which point it was moot.
I will take a modern car reasonably clearly telling me what is going on, as my BMW did, thanks. All it takes is knowing how to use a different set of tools. And I replaced that faulty wheel speed sensor in about 15 minutes this morning. Problem solved. In the not AS olden days – my ’95 Land Rover has ABS with no ability to set codes – you might know you have an issue, suspect that it’s A wheel speed sensor, but then you get to figure out WHICH wheel speed sensor. Or it could be the electronic box that controls the thing, or anything really in that ancient TEVES system.
I’m lazy, I will take “your left side rear wheel sensor is no longer present and accounted for” over that excise in running around a vehicle with a multimeter. And yes, I ohmed out the sensor to make sure it was the sensor and not the upstream wiring before I ordered one – but I only had to do that *once*. Occam’s Razor says it was the sensor though, and if I had one sitting on the shelf I probably wouldn’t have bothered to get out the multimeter unless the new sensor didn’t fix it.
The point is that you’re naive about the industry.
No old timers worry about shotgunning a sensor because there’s a fault for it. That’s the most braindead repair possible. The real job is what do you do when that parts shotgun didn’t fix it.
What do you do when there’s a car with a shifting concern
And an Apple CarPlay concern
And there’s and noise when going over bumps
And the AC doesn’t blow cold enough
And you’re going to get paid 1/2 the time you spend working on the car if its warranty
And it’s a WAITER
Get a different career. I fully realize that DIY and doing it for a living are two different things. I have more than enough friends who are or were pro mechanics to have a pretty damned good idea of what they go through.
But as a “pro” – how do you diagnose an old crock that f’s up only once in a while and doesn’t give you the slightest clue as to what’s going on – and it won’t EVER do it in the shop? Which is MY point here. Modern cars overall make life easier, IF you invest in the tools and gaining the knowledge to use them.
You really have no clue what you’re talking about and I’m tired of trying to be polite about it.
Everyone working at a dealer knows how to use a code reader and cars storing codes doesn’t make the job easier than when cars had no OBD systems.
Last century mechanics didn’t have to diagnose Bluetooth, ABS, hybrids, automated everything, radars, cameras, etc
From a person who actually knows what he’s talking about because he lived it; the cars are infinitely more complex than ever, and customers like you are more entitled and self absorbed than ever, the job pays less than it did 40 years ago and has significantly more demands.
The topic here is why no one wants to be a dealer mechanic, and people that actually know what they’re talking about are explaining that to you.
Do you not own a test light? Does your dongle/phone/app tell you where a broken wire is?
A test light does you no good when the fault is *intermittent*. Yes, it finally got to the point where it acted up long enough to properly diagnose it. But on a modern car, you would have some codes to give you a clue where to start at least.
What’s wrong with sacrificing goats?
Mmmm…. Goat……
Mmm, Barbacoa. A weekend special at some Mexican restaurants around here.
The goats don’t enjoy it very much.
No animal does.
Shame they are so tasty.
Truly.
I actually heard cows are super into it. Sick bastards.
Obligatory:
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/db/c7/a7/dbc7a718f7106abb63390f66e2704661.jpg
https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/far-side-comic-of-cows-at-barbecue.jpg
Yeah but they’re kinda dicks though, so
Old school carburetors have always seemed like black magic to me – much easier to understand and fix fuel injected cars. I do agree that some of the infotainment type stuff has become a bit of a nightmare.
They really are. With the exception of SUs, which are brilliantly simple.
The problem with modern infotainment is that it’s all software. And lowest bidder shitty software at that as a rule.
I would think that being a technician at a Ford dealer could be quite lucrative. With all of the recalls they have every year, there is a never-ending stream of work.
Warranty/recall work never pays the tech as well as customer pay does.
Big reason why turnover at dealerships is so high. Learn the trade at a dealership, then go work for an indie and make more money.
Also why warranty work tends to be even more slapdash than regular repair work.
Exactly. My son went through the Ford Asset program and then worked there for a little over two years then went independent and never looked back. He did SO many of the Escort Power$hit warranty transmission jobs. First they tried saving the oil soaked clutches by having the tech systematically wash the disc down with brake cleaner (they had a service kit with a half-dozen cans and a few other incidentals) but that didnt last and soon they started replacing transmissions.
By the time he left, they were starting to see the same cars for the third time
And I am sure screwing him on the pay for the work along the way. Fun!
It’s so funny, I had a few Foci rental cars. The first few were fine, they don’t shift like a traditional automatic but there was nothing bad about them. Then I got one that was BAD. Holy God, what was Ford thinking with that thing!
Do you mean Focus or Fiesta? The Escort hasn’t been in the US since 2003. I worked for Ford corporate at the time, and they basically told us they weren’t going to do anything to fix the PowerShit unless it was fixable with a software update. (It wasn’t)
I’ve found a different quote from Farley on the internet about the 400,000 technicians.
In the other quote, he is counting, not just Ford, not just dealerships…but as a profession, there is a shortage of automotive technicians that will grow to 400,000 in three years. THAT one makes sense.
But, but, but – the EV revolution was supposed to make cars so simple and reliable that there would be no mechanics anymore? Right?
Lots of people on here have said that repeatedly.
What % of under warranty Fords are EVs?
More every year.
Around 15%. So not all that many in the scheme of things.
He’s lying, or an idiot. The whole stupid business model of the US automotive industry is that Ford Motor Company is a business that sells vehicles to dealers. I’m sure Ford Motor Company employs a small number of automotive technicians, but Ford isn’t short any techs, Ford dealers are. Typically, if you complain about a dealer to corporate HQ, they’ll tell you that dealers are independent businesses over which they have limited control.
Can’t have it both ways, Jim.
This is a distinction that makes no difference. Whether dealerships are independent businesses or not, they are still the public face of Ford Motor Company. And having a technician shortage resulting in long wait times for service reflects badly on Ford, and is absolutely something the CEO should be concerned about.
Might have more Techs available if they weren’t all working on warranty/recall stuff.
…long time Ford owner.
LOL – true.
But to be fair, we have recalls today for the dumbest little things that NEVER would have been recalls back in the day. I will take “these bolts didn’t get tightened properly on 11 cars built on the 4th of April” to “this car will explode if tapped in the ass”. Few recalls today are really all THAT serious. Some obviously, like the Takata face mines, are.
Look at Just Rolled in the Shop Reddit, and that will give you some insight.
100% this
The YouTube channel is fun too.
It doesn’t matter how many certifications or education you have, if you’re being paid flat-rate, you’re getting screwed most of the time. Pay salary or a regular hourly wage, then watch the problem miraculously disappear. At the absolute minimum, book times for flat-rate need to be revised drastically.
Plus, people don’t realize that we have to buy our own tools. I have $75,000 invested in my toolbox. Granted thats over 20 years in the business but not even that much compared to a lot of techs. Thankfully Harbor Freight has a lot cheaper and very decent options for guys starting out now but thats was not an option as HF tools were absolute junk when i started.
Not to mention the fact the biggest portion of your tool spend will be in the early years when you are making the least money. The senior guys making the most are probably spending the least on tools while giving the new guys shit on why they don’t have a 5 figure Snap-on debt yet.
I left the auto repair industry right as Ford was changing all of their flat rate times from being determined by using hand tools to electric/air. I remember a lot of the techs being pissed about that.
Call me slow, shortsighted, whatever, I generally do not use electric or air-powered tools when I’m wrenching because I I don’t want to break things during removal or break or over-torque them during tightening. Admittedly I only wrench for hobby purposes so taking twice as long to do something is generally no big deal, especially if I do my best to make sure I don’t wind up with a bigger problem than when I started.
That’s the difference between you and a flat-rate tech who has to do a job as quickly as possible otherwise they’re basically being underpaid.
As it goes for many occupations, crap pay on par with industry crap pay is still crap pay.
And generally terrible working conditions, too. You’re not working at a Ferrari dealer here.
Came here to say exactly this. Ford doesn’t need to compete just with other auto shops, but all the other things someone that would make a competent technician could do instead.
Thank you! That bothered me. It’s like saying McDonald’s workers are living the high life because they make $0.50 more an hour than the schmucks at Arby’s.
Most larger companies, of any stripe, like to use this argument to validate their mediocre pay/benefits. Dont understand why people move on after a year.
Far be it from me to question the CEO of Ford, but 400,000 strikes me as a bit high when Ford only has ~2,800 dealerships in the US.
Good point. He never said in the US (at least not in the quote above) but it’s certainly what I assumed.
It would be a proper assumption given the context in which both statements are provided in the article. The numbers don’t add up, however, since the 400k open positions and 6000 open bays would mean about 67 people per bay. That might make them a bit crowded.
Additionally, if Ford’s Auto Tech Scholarship program is $4 million per year, and they’re short staffed….well, $10 per technician isn’t even going to buy them lunch, never mind actual training.
They’re trying the F1 Pit Crew approach to warranty work.
When they venture into the realm of detail, Farley’s public statements are often (charitably) head-scratching. Like recently when he claimed that his daughter’s boyfriend ruined his Ecoboost F-150 with a bad tune. He said the boyfriend put a supercharger on his (again Ecoboost) F-150.
I have some questions about that anecdote and this statement!
But hes such a big car guy!!! /s