What happened to fixing cars?

[Tom Sharples]

I’m a dealer tech at Toyota and over the past 18 months I have stopped fixing cars and getting dirty to help idiots connect phones to their Yaris with Bluetooth or set a destination on their sat nav or make an IPod work. It’s never the device of course, it’s always the car! (Sarcasm see!) A good few hours a week is being taken up by people who don’t read the manual, time I’m loosing money. Why didn’t the sales guy explain the car properly? I missed the memo that read ” any problem at all with anything? Go see your mechanic!” Anyone else have to deal with this?

Topic

[Bruce]

I am not surprised.

I haven’t seen any of that yet, but i have seen them bring cars in saying the dash lights dont work only to find the dimmer turned down, or the AC doesnt work only to find the temp set at 80 degrees. And once a complaint of the car wont crank, I found it was out of gas and they cranked it til the battery died.

[SpawnedX]

Welcome to the death of the automotive repair technician. Soon it will be the same as McDonalds, cheap disposable labor from young kids as they make their way through college for a real career.

[stingray66]

yep I am with you there its SO DEAD

[toyodagreg]

Im at a toyota dealer too. ya we are starting to see alot of the same things. especially now that most new toyotas come with entune and bluetooth for both calling and audio people will just take it to the dealer instead of reading the manual. also the sale people should explain to the customers when they buy the car. i think if the dealership actually started charging the customer to diagnose those things maybe they would actually take the time to set it up. today i had a customer brand new corolla witjlh 15k miles complaining of a vibration over 60 and a whining noise when coming to a stop. sure enough took the car for a drive and nothing was wrong with it other than the customer driving an avalon and switching to a corolla thinking that it will drive like an avalon. spent at least 45 minutes driving around and got 0.00 for it

[EricTheCarGuy]

I got fed up with that and told the service writer that if anything like that came in that didn’t have a work order attached to it would not be worked on. HE ended up doing most of those requests after I showed him how. He was actually a pretty good service writer which is not common at all in my experience. The salesmen were too busy drinking coffee and playing games on the internet to be bothered with customer satisfaction. That’s not entirely true, there were a couple of cool salesmen that worked at my dealership but most were tools. I wish I could offer advice that wouldn’t risk getting you fired. It seems these days it’s easier to fire you and replace you than it is to do things right. You might consider talking to the service manager just to see what kind of response you get. It can’t hurt to try I suppose.

I hate to say it be I do agree with the fact they seem to be marginalizing us out of the business. It’s a disturbing trend.

[Kosta]

Lol we had the same stuff with the for dealership. Our interface is called “ford sync”. I’m agreeing with all you guys all the customer care’s about is having there blue tooth synced up or making sure that there I pod plays. I’ve said this time and time again as all of you have.

The newer technicians usually only last 1-3 years and then go back to school cause they see how there getting underpaid by working longer hours and getting abused by the flat rate system & conditions they work in. As the Baby Boomer retire in massive quantities and non of the new generations want to be technicians the dealership’s will suffer and put there service department out of business. I’m going to be laughing when this happen because when recall’s & warranty work can’t be done because lack of technicians car sales start to go down.

[Author]

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